From bin centre to boardroom: Rayner Loi’s ten-year war on food waste
Lumitics acquired by Winnow to strengthen APAC’s foothold
Ten years ago, Rayner Loi stood in a hotel bin centre in Singapore, staring at 20 to 30 green 120-litre bins waiting for the waste collector. It was his first time in a hotel’s back-of-house. He had no hospitality, no culinary experience [...]
Winnow acquires leading food waste technology player Lumitics, grows APAC footprint
Winnow, the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered food waste measurement company, has announced the acquisition of Lumitics, one of Asia-Pacific’s leading food waste technology companies with deployments across more than 20 countries in the region and Middle East.
The acquisition brings t [...]
APAC consumers are ready for AI agent-led shopping, Accenture research finds
Accenture hosted a media briefing to present findings from its Consumer Pulse Survey 2026 and lay out a framework for how businesses across Asia Pacific should prepare for what it calls "agentic commerce" — a shift in which AI agents research, compare, purchase and manage returns on a consumer's b [...]
Indie travel, rewritten: Four shifts reshaping Asia’s independent traveller
At WiT Indie, Klook, AirAsia MOVE and Booking.com unpack the generational, AI, supply and community forces changing how APAC travellers explore on their own terms
Hot on the heels of WiT’s newly released “The Indie Stack”, which dove into the fast-growing and equally-fast-changing independent [...]
The Icelandic startup connecting the dots for air travellers, Asia next on radar
David Gunnarsson does not waste words. The CEO of Dohop, the Icelandic travel technology company that has spent two decades solving one of aviation’s most stubborn problems – how to connect passengers across airlines that do not talk to each other – speaks the way he thinks: directly, precisel [...]
How OceanAir’s Essam Al Salah built his experiences from the desert
Essam Al Salah remembers the moment it clicked. It started with building a small website to start selling tours. In the early days, like most operators, he worked with the companies already in the market, the ones selling seat-in-coach packages. He booked through them, sold through them, and watched [...]
Turning tourists into conservationists, RealNZ’s one ‘sound of silence’ at a time
“You can't help conservation and help the planet if you're not profitable. You've always got to have that balance.”
Two years into his role as chief executive of RealNZ, Dave Beeche is applying lessons from a career in major sports events to New Zealand's tourism industry. “Our purpose is to [...]
Expedia puts its money where the trail is
$4.3m Trails Fund a sign of sustainability meeting commerce
For Aditi Mohapatra, VP of Global Social Impact and Sustainability at Expedia Group, the launch of the Expedia Trails Fund is a signal that sustainability, often seen as a soft function within corporates, is finding its commercial footing. [...]
Saudi travel’s new shape: Domestic, westward and betting on Itself
The interview with Muzzammil Ahussain, CEO of Almosafer, at WiT Phocuswright Middle East started with a provocation. Saudi Arabia is reportedly projecting a $44 billion deficit for 2026. Construction contract awards fell 72% year-on-year. NEOM wasn’t even mentioned in the national budget. So: is t [...]
APAC hotel distribution sees slower growth, rising regional OTAs, and direct channels under pressure
D-EDGE's 2022–Q1 2026 analysis shows booking growth cooling to 2.7%, Agoda pulling ahead of Booking.com, and wholesalers more than tripling their market share in three years.
According to a new report from hospitality technology provider D-EDGE, Asia-Pacific's hotel distribution landscape is shif [...]
