Jesper Koll: Scarcity leads to innovation, lessons from Hello Kitty and Astro Boy
Jesper Koll, Senior Advisor, Wisdom Tree Investments, opened his presentation on “Destiny” at WiT Japan with the objection he hears most often: Japan's population is shrinking by nearly 3,000 people every day. How can anyone be bullish?
His counter argument – scarcity is the mother of inven [...]
Tripadvisor to sell TheFork to American Express for $700 million
Transaction highlights the value of Tripadvisor's portfolio and enables greater focus on experiences.
Tripadvisor, Inc. announced it has entered into a put option agreement to sell TheFork, its online restaurant reservation and management platform in Europe, to American Express for $700 million in [...]
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 [...]
Hotels losing to AI. Agents collapsing travel funnel. Video platforms impacting booking.
Trransfer Technologies and LINE GO team up to focus on enterprise travel in Taiwan
Trransfer Technologies, a global B2B ground transportation platform serving corporate travelers across 80+ destinations, has officially launched a partnership with LINE GO, Taiwan's leading MaaS platform, following a [...]
A global OTA view on the next frontier: AI, India and the battle for independent hotels
Booking.com’s Nuno Guerreiro on closing the trust gap, the India boom and how alternative accommodation is now mainstream
The conversation with Nuno Guerreiro, regional director for North and South Asia Pacific at Booking.com, covered three key questions – whether AI will actually change how pe [...]
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 [...]
The demand for travel is there. Affordability is what’s broken.
What does it actually take to get more people across Southeast Asia traveling, and is the industry doing enough to make it happen?
Nadia Omer, CEO of AirAsia Move, spoke to WiT about how AI is reshaping the platform while pointing to data hygiene as an essential part of MOVE's process. "We realized [...]
