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 [...]
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 [...]
The murky world of e-commerce and what happens when credit card fraud strikes you
Last month, I noticed a transaction on my Citibank Visa credit card that I didn’t recall making. It was for an event software solution so it was probable I could have made it, but on checking out the vendor’s website, I knew I hadn’t. I had never heard of it. I then went over my statements mo [...]
Sabre study paints a future of hotel booking that is contextual, intimate and instant
Okay so my survey was not scientific in any way. I merely asked the question on my Facebook status, “If I were to say the words “future of hotel booking”, what words come to mind?”I wanted to get feel of what my network, biased towards frequent travellers, thought about the subject – and w [...]
Here’s grabbing your attention. Are you suffering from LFS? List Fatigue Syndrome
I got into a GrabCar Economy for the first time this week. The driver, a 60-something, is a senior executive working in manufacturing full-time but bought a car for his son and now wants some income to pay off his road tax and insurance.This is the more affordable version of GrabCar, the private car [...]
Letter from Melbourne: Can the city of independents fend off Uberisation?
In a world of bad news – terrorism in Tunisia, terrorism in Charleston, USA, economic disaster in Greece (déjà vu), the MERS scare – I am happy to bring you good news from Melbourne. The spirit of the independent is alive and well in this city which I was told repeatedly will become Australia� [...]
Maggie White: She called Australia home and she is now at home
She was the soul of discretion. You can imagine that’d be annoying to a pesky, nosy journalist wanting to find out news about the organisation she worked for almost her entire career, but Maggie White had a way of keeping that bit at a distance and yet drawing you close to her way of being.As long [...]
When a venue becomes a true partner, your event cannot help but fly – thank you, Nikko
For the last four years, we’ve held our WIT Japan at the Hotel Nikko in Odaiba and over the years, I’ve come to regard it as home. That Rainbow Bridge right outside my hotel window inspired the theme for our inaugural event in 2012 – “Building Bridges”. The staff know us. They know our eve [...]
Letter from Tokyo: So much easier to enjoy, and things are just getting started
Arrived in Tokyo Monday morning on the Japan Airlines red-eye from Singapore. There’s a lot to be said when travelling to a foreign country on their home carrier – it prepares you for the destination.
We spend a lot of time lambasting national carriers and how wasteful and inefficient they ar [...]
Travel disruption alert and who owns the customer journey
With all the talk in the industry about who owns the customer journey, Yeoh Siew Hoon wonders if travelers want to be owned.
Many things were said at Phocuswright Dublin including how as part of Expedia’s test and learn strategy, 1,500 changes were made in 2014 versus the 200 changes made in to [...]
