Thorsen: Covid could produce well-funded corporate travel startups to go after long-term opportunity
TRAVEL tech evangelist Johnny Thorsen, who has his own vision of a “Traveltopia”, is watching to see if Covid will give the industry a new generation of well-funded startups “that are able to go after the long term opportunity, and really become a threat to the established environment”.
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Massive opportunity in alternative payments as e-wallets soar in Asia and BNPL gains ground
Multi-currency payments; fraud; how many payment methods should you offer – key headaches addressed
WITH 1.7b unbanked adults in the world, according to Findex Database,
Worldbank, the opportunities to address this market with alternative payment
methods are immense. The potential is biggest i [...]
Travel product chiefs on tech that works, those that didn’t and those that should
IN the last year, tech teams have built platforms that went unused and scrapped projects only to repurpose them later in new incarnations; as Thomas Edison said once upon a time, “Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.”
Tech and product c [...]
Fortified by Tin Men, GlobalTix doubles down on tech roots
Fresh $3m funding is not survival money, it’s to go full force on digitisation mission
THE new funding round of S$3 million raised by GlobalTix from Tin Men Capital and SEEDS Capital is not “survival or rescue money” but fresh capital to build up its arsenal of tech tools and to fortify it [...]
DayAway may be built in Covid times but founder Martha Waslen says it will last long beyond pandemic
“Not just another OTA” as local experiences platform rolls out to help hotels sell ancillaries
IF you haven’t heard of DayAway, you may soon. Within five minutes of meeting Martha Waslen, founder of the Singapore-based local experiences startup, two things are clear. One, that she do [...]
Covid has tested global-local models in travel, says KKday’s Liu
“Curated experiences” marketplace embeds deeper local roots, launches Fine Day for luxury and scales Rezio
WHEN Weichun Liu told her parents she was giving up investment banking to join KKday in 2016, they thought she was joining KKBox, the “Spotify of Taiwan”. “I didn’t want to tell [...]
Lumitics continues relentless push to cut food waste in travel
LOI'S mission gets momentum from Covid-cost pressure and sustainability movement.
When Lumitics’
founder and CEO Raynor Loi hit upon the idea of tackling the issue of food
waste in Singapore as a 22-year-old finance undergraduate, he would not have imagined
having a platform to speak to minist [...]
Flush with new funds, Questo brings its gaming tours to Asia and beyond
City games being developed in Thailand, Japan, and UAE
ROMANIA-BASED startup Questo, that brought gamification to the tours and activities space two years ago, has secured a new round of funding totalling US$1.5 million and is ready to double the size of its footprint and to expand its list of p [...]
How Delegate went from place to Play in the virtual space
WHAT happens when your business is blown up by Covid? Well, you pivot. Here’s the story of how Delegate (DEL) went from an events marketplace to an event tech platform.
For the last six years, co-founders Melissa Lou and Jacqueline Ye had been diligently building up their startup, Delegate, in [...]
Undaunted, LokaLocal forges ahead with virtual tours for activities in Malaysia
EVEN before Malaysia entered its first MCO (Movement Control Order) in March last year, LokaLocal, the travel tech platform founded in 2016 to connect travellers to local experiences hosted by Malaysians, had started seeing a drop in bookings.
It quickly moved to a content
and media play, settin [...]
