Skyscanner’s Williams: “To win, we have to win in Asia”
Gareth Williams, CEO and co-founder of Skyscanner, on what it will take to win big in Asia, his ambitions for the company he co-founded in 2001 and why he won’t give his AI project a girl name.CEO and one of the three co-founders of Skyscanner, Gareth Williams, is spending more time in Singapore t [...]
Letter from Saigon: Big, young, social and mobile, powered by women
One evening in Saigon, after a lovely dinner at a rooftop garden, we stopped on a sidewalk to have a brief chat about where to go next. Ice cream? Beer? Wine? The choices are endless. Suddenly, a bunch of taxis just stopped by us, the drivers looking at us in anticipation for a ride.Simon Christy, f [...]
The Wrap: Hong Kong’s Langham adds hotels to TripAdvisor’s instant booking platform
In the news: It’s all about partnership this week as companies team up to both expand business and travel options to their guests and travellers worldwide. Joining forces are Langham Hospitality Group and TripAdvisor, Klook and Asia Miles, Travelguru and Amadeus, Air China and TravelportHong Kong� [...]
Best of TW Asia Global Wrap: Dash-ing to serve you
Featured stories from TravelWeekly: A working robot at Crowne Plaza San Jose, tighter security at China airports, fines for beach “reservers” at Spanish resort Dash-ing to serve youInterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has hired a delivery robot – Dash – at its Crowne Plaza San Jose-Silicon Va [...]
Letter from Sydney: Loh Lik Peng on the four-year making of the Old Clare Hotel
Loh Lik Peng's latest project, the Old Clare Hotel Sydney, is due to open end of this month. No one is more relieved than he to see the finish line in sight of this four-year restoration project. The day I was at the construction site of the Old Clare Hotel Sydney, workmen were bringing in, to my [...]
Expedia’s De Schepper wants hoteliers to see OTAs in a new light
Mieke De Schepper wants to help hoteliers in APAC see the light, as it were, regarding the true value of distribution via OTAs. The vice president, Market Management, Asia Pacific, Expedia® Lodging Partner Services, who joined Expedia after a long career with Philips, where she was responsible for [...]
How “tough little” Joyce turned Qantas around; next to hit that sweet spot in loyalty, big data
What I like about Australia is how they call a spade a spade and if they could, they’d abbreviate it (and they probably have) and so when Peter Harbison, executive chairman of CAPA (Centre For Aviation) called Alan Joyce a “tough little bugger” on stage, I wasn’t too surprised.In fact, if I [...]
Mom & pops the real fuel behind the Vietnamese boom
As with most of emerging Asia, the smartphone is transforming Vietnam’s travel market. Digital entrepreneur and marketing specialist Simon Christy, founder and CEO, of VEO Media, started Alehap.vn, a social travel platform, back in 2009 and has since the changes since the beginning. He talks to WI [...]
Letter from Penang: Hack of a thing to do on a Saturday night
It wasn’t what I was expecting to do on a Saturday night in Penang, but I ended up listening to three teams of developers presenting their start-up ideas at a very impromptu hackathon.That I was doing this in a pre-war Chinese shophouse in the heart of the Georgetown World Heritage precinct made i [...]
Mobile saturation in China equals rise in m-commerce
The recent release of the Chinese International Travel Monitor (CITM) 2015 from Hotels.com found that online, and in particular mobile, bookings have spiked in the last year. Half of all outbound Chinese travellers used apps on their smartphones to plan and book trips on the site, up from just 17% t [...]
