From prediction to reality: What travel leaders got right (and wrong) about 2025
At the end of 2024, dozens of industry leaders contributed to WiT’s three-part Year in Review series – offering predictions, provocations, and warnings about what 2025 might hold. We revisit their predictions a year later to see who got it right and give our verdicts.
Rob Rosenste [...]
Travel chaos is inevitable. Klook’s CX chief tackles it with data
Travel disruptions are often seen as part of travel's DNA. It's a strange notion, but as resilient as the industry is, its nature is also highly suceptible to disruptions from political instability to tech shutdowns, all the way to natural disasters. So, how does Klook build customer confidence? In [...]
The Experiences Moment has arrived: Expedia announces intent to acquire Tiqets
Mariano Dima: “Experiences is the next thing to crack but it’s far more fragmented and harder to get right”
If anyone needed convincing that the tours and activities sector is the next battleground for online travel, it’s the latest announcement from Expedia Group that it has entered into [...]
Sunrise Airways offer refunds. GSMA cautions Indonesia. Booking’s ‘agentic’ plans. DreamFolks expands via ETT.
Sunrise Airways adds full refund option through Protect Group partnership
Sunrise Airways has introduced a fully refundable ticket option for all passengers through a new partnership with Protect Group. The new feature aims to boost confidence at the time of booking and simplify the customer experi [...]
The art of knowing when to hold, pivot, and exit
At the final Travel Tech Thursdays edition of 2025, held at Wego’s Kuala Lumpur office, three industry veterans sat down for a deeply practical (sometimes comedic) conversation about building, breaking, and rebuilding travel businesses.
Over an hour, Chan Chee Chong (CC), CEO & Co-Founder [...]
Travel Forward 2026: Loyalty-gaming and shift from automation to actual intelligence
Phocuswright has released its latest Travel Forward report, outlining the forces shaping global travel in 2026; from the macro trends steering demand, to the dynamics redefining loyalty, to the continuous accelerating of AI. If there’s one key takeaway from the report, it’s that travel has moved [...]
Who says meta is dead? Batista takes Skyscanner into a packages, multi-modal and beyond-Europe future
Two years into Skyscanner, first as COO, then as CEO, Lisbon-born Bryan Batista is ready to take the 21-year-old metasearch pioneer into a new future in 2026 – one that involves global expansion into new markets such as India and the Middle East, as well as a packages and multi-modal future.
Ca [...]
Australia’s $4 billion incentive engine is fuelled by recovering markets, soft ROI and the $53-for-$1 return
“Our business events visitors to Australia spend 38% a night more than a leisure visitor.”
Global competition for high-value corporate travel is fierce, and Australia's commitment to securing elite business events was on full display at Australia Next 2025, returning to Melbourne for the first [...]
What makes a travel brand matter in 2026? Expedia’s Brandon Ehrhardt on marketing in the age of AI | WiT Studio
In our latest WiT Studio interview, we sat down with Brandon Ehrhardt, VP of Marketing at Expedia Group, to explore some of the biggest forces shaping traveler behaviour today. As AI floods the world with endless content, Brandon posed a simple but sharp reminder: authenticity still wins.
“Just [...]
TourRadar’s full circle moment as it banks on UGC and social commerce
Fifteen years after launching TourRadar from a scrappy flat in London, Travis Pittman is back where he started – chasing the power of user-generated content.
“We actually started as one of the first photo-sharing platforms for travel,” Pittman recalls. “In 2005, we were kind of like Instagr [...]
