In his first appearance at a travel conference, the former eBay executive, who joined Planet Earth’s #1 Accommodation Site last October, said travel was just at the beginning of the e-commerce cycle in the region.

He said similar principles from his eBay experience could be applied to Booking.com and his mission is to build the brand and increase its consumer awareness in the region.

This would be helped by Booking.com’s laser focus on accommodation.  “There’s the generalized vs specialized approach and I believe it’s hard to be good at everything,” he said.

And its ambitions as spelled out by Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston to become domestically relevant in major markets such as US, China and Japan will also be played out in Indonesia, the world’s fifth largest domestic travel market. Already, booking.com has white label partnerships with key local players like pegipegi.com, the Recruit joint venture, and BookPanorama, to name a couple.

On the other hand, Expedia will play up its “one-stop travel shop” positioning by offering packages (flights and hotels), said Vikram Malhi (right in picture), general manager, South & South-east Asia.

Within Indonesia, the AirAsia Expedia joint venture is aggressively localizing content for both the Expedia and AirAsia Go brands and going into secondary cities, beyond Jakarta, where domestic demand is booming.

Then enter the meta-search plays such as TripAdvisor, Trivago, Skyscanner and Hotelscombined – to name a few that are active in Indonesia – and it’s interesting that in this space, the globals do not have local competitors – Traveloka, which started out as a meta-play, pivoted to an OTA a few months after launching, which leaves the space open for a local play.

However with the lines blurring between meta and OTA, Fritz Demopoulos, co-founder of Qunar and now with Queen’s Road Capital, said the market may be past the point for a local meta-play.

The big battle now for these globals is to put their brands in front of the 240 million citizens of Indonesia and currently, all are still relying on the “Google drug”, as  Demopoulos called it, to drive traffic but there are signs of change.

Priceline’s Huston’s recent comments to the effect that “Twitter and Facebook ads were not working” were discussed during a panel at WIT Indonesia. Priceline spends US$1.8 billion on online ads a year, 90% of which goes to Google ads – and that amount represents 3% of Google’s annual ad revenues.

Kohei Nakajima (left, above picture), who runs pegipegi.com for Recruit, agreed that search was still the most effective means of customer acquisition but said he wanted to spend more time learning about social and how to use it to build brand, particularly in Indonesia which is Facebook’s fourth largest market.

(Some stats from Facebook’s Simrat Sawhney – more than 65 million people use Facebook a month in Indonesia, that’s 90% of Internet users in the country; there are 33 million daily active users and 56 million mobile active users.)

Malhi said that while he came from the digital school of “Math Men”, he is learning about being a “Mad Men”, calling his boss, the CEO of AirAsia Expedia, Kathleen Tan, a “Mad Woman”, to much laughter from the audience.

Kei Shibata, CEO of Venture Republic (left), which runs Japan’s largest meta sites for flights and hotels, said social was the best thing to have happened to the search world – “now you can create a buzz while you drive performance, what could be better than that?’

He said in today’s age, one had to “calculated Mad Men”.

And while almost everyone said TripAdvisor was the company to watch in terms of how it was executing its meta-search model and effectively becoming an OTA for OTAs, Grant Colquhoun, director of account management Asia Pacific for TripAdvisor, said he was watching the recent move by Google to licence the Room 77 hotel booking software – a move he said could change the way people book hotel rooms. 

Demopoulous meanwhile called out the “Peer to Peer” model as the next thing to watch.

One thing’s for sure, whether you’re into Mad or Math, there’s never a dull moment in online travel.