The Millennial Traveller: To earn customer love, hoteliers have to be modern-day Casanovas
Traditionally, customer loyalty could be gained by a simple reward structure, trading in loyalty points for free nights like a kid trading in his arcade game tokens for the large teddy bear from the kiosk.Now, with digital players like OTAs and meta-searches commoditising hotel rates, hoteliers need [...]
“Safe travels” is the greeting for the new normal
Over dinner in Bangkok, while drooling over the best crab angel hair pasta ever at Il Bolognese, our conversation inevitably moved to travel. The three of us, all working in the travel industry, had flown in from different places, one from Taipei, one from India and myself from Singapore via Hong Ko [...]
Addicted to change, the stuff of startups who can also stuff it up
This is the longest stint I’ve not been travelling since I started WIT 12 years ago. Two solid months on the ground – and it’s been wonderful, I feel like I’ve kinda settled into myself .Travel is not necessarily about movement, it can be mental. And my mind has certainly done a lot of trave [...]
Hoshino’s mission – building ryokans everywhere and championing family businesses
Yoshiharu Hoshino, who owns and runs Hoshino Resorts in Japan, a fourth generation family business, has two dreams. One, to see a day when there’ll be Japanese-style hotels (ryokans) everywhere just as there are sushi bars and two, to write a book about family business management. In this intervie [...]
Stories that go beneath the armour to get under your skin
As someone who tries to exercise regularly, I’ve watched sporting brands come, go and come back, and I’ve watched them expand their space. Today, sports wear is everyday wear.New Balance is an example of a brand that’s made a comeback. Once it made only good running shoes, now it makes shoes t [...]
The Millennial Traveller: Girl Code or the Lack Of
With feminism to the fore this week following International Women’s Day, Expedia held a private screening of Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, a documentary which served to portray how gender issues are evolving as we delve deeper into the world of technology.
Both the film and the panel discussio [...]
My four lessons learnt from watching CODE
Last night, I caught a private screening of CODE: Debugging The Gender Code, at The Projector, a cool new movie space booked by Expedia to mark a week of activities around International Women’s Day. It was hosted by Britta Wilson, vice president global diversity and inclusion.The documentary, made [...]
Women – not just one day but everyday
I’ve been getting lots of reminders that today is International Women’s Day – lots of press releases from companies talking about women and how important the feminine sex is to them. TripAdvisor releasing a study that Asian women take the lead in travel decision making; Accor Hotels issuing a [...]
The Millennial Traveller: Get off my cloud – Are Apple and the FBI our generation’s David and Goliath?
The ‘FBI versus Apple Inc.’ case – wherein US Federal authorities have demanded that Apple create a ‘backdoor’ to unlock a phone tied to the San Bernardino shooting last December – is like something out of a freshman Intro to Philosophy textbook.
It poses as probably the most apt mor [...]
Don’t be a sitting duck, join us in a deep dive into hospitality
In between evening walks, painting and writing, I’ve been preparing the content for our first WIT Hospitality conference in Hong Kong on March 22.It’s our first hospitality-focused event and we really want to do a deep dive into the issues that are holding back hoteliers from fully embracing dig [...]
