Simplicity, flexibility, and a human touch help reduce booking anxiety in North Asian travellers
Early top-line results from the exclusive WiT and Phocuswright research into Booking Anxiety show that anxiety is widespread but unique to each market.
When I asked the audience at the WiT Japan event in Tokyo whether they had ever hesitated at the point of booking because of a “what if”, it fe [...]
AI + Omotenashi: Hail, a new partnership in travel
JTB’s Eijiro Yamakita on reading the room, sensing the world, and why the renaissance of travel is already here.
There is a word that does not translate easily. Omotenashi, often rendered as “Japanese hospitality”, is, as Eijiro Yamakita gently reminded the audience at WiT Japan, neither a me [...]
Agoda’s Morgenshtern on leaps of faith, B2B bets, and why optimisers must become leapers
Agoda’s CEO marks 12 years at the helm with a candid reckoning: what got you here won’t get you there and the age of AI demands something harder than data.
Omri Morgenshtern, CEO of Agoda, arrived at his first WiT Japan at what he cheerfully acknowledged was a full cycle – 12 years at Agoda, [...]
What happens when capital enters Musk’s orbit?
Everyone is talking about the eventual SpaceX IPO as though it is preordained to be the largest and most successful public offering in history.
Maybe.
But perhaps we should spend a little more time discussing the risks. Not the risks to SpaceX itself. The risks to everything around it. Perhaps [...]
The Great Destination Redistribution: Moving tourism from where it is to where it should be
Data, mindsets, resident sentiment and the uncomfortable truth about who really wants redistribution
The question of how to spread tourism more evenly across Japan, away from the overcrowded golden triangle of Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka and into the rural towns, regional communities and hidden landscap [...]
Bridging two worlds: Mayumi Nakamura Birt on reinvention, resilience and the art of the imperfect
Veltra’s chief transformation officer returned to Japan six months ago. What she found was a country on the edge of something, if it can tolerate the mess of getting there
Mayumi Nakamura Birt spent more than two decades running a SaaS company in the US. She learned to fail fast, move on, and t [...]
Magnifica Humanitas | A Moment. A Reflection.
There are moments in life when a paper arrives not as instruction, but as interruption.
The recent ecclesiastical letter Magnifica Humanitas from Pope Leo XIV on Artificial Intelligence did not strike me as a policy paper about technology. It struck me as something much less comfortable: an exami [...]
Greg Schulze: 21 years of Expedia, and a New Beginning
I first met Greg Schulze, the outgoing chief commercial officer of Expedia Group, over kaya toast in Singapore.
That detail matters, not because of the toast, though it is, objectively, one of the great breakfast foods of the world, but because it was the beginning of what would become one of m [...]
Winning hearts, minds and wallets: How AI can serve ASEAN’s underserved travellers
In a world where AI is taking care of what and how, possibly the most important question humans can ask is why – why do we do what we do?
That was the first question moderator and WiT founder Yeoh Siew Hoon posed to the three panellists at the Travel Tech Thursdays event in Kuala Lumpur – Ash [...]
From jetlag to shift work, Timeshifter wants to be your personal circadian rhythm advisor
While it started out as a jet lag app, there is a bigger ambition driving the co-founders – to build a circadian technology platform that impacts overall health and well-being.
It’s early morning in New York but Mickey Beyer-Clausen is looking bright and chirpy, and wearing a hoodie that says [...]
