WiT’s follow-up documentary sits down with travel tech founders, leaders and rising innovators to ask what’s about to change, what never will, and what they’d tell their younger selves.
Every industry has a moment it can’t quite explain until it’s living through one. For online travel in Asia, that moment is now. Online Travel in Asia: The Unwritten Story is WiT’s follow-up to last year’s The Untold Story, and it arrives at a coincidental time. 2026 marks WiT’s 21st year, the same year artificial intelligence has gone from novelty to reasoning partner for an entire industry. 21, as anyone who’s lived through it knows, is the year the keys get handed over. It’s equal parts freedom and a feeling of “wait, now what?” That’s the question this film asks of travel; not whether it will change, but what, exactly, it’s brave enough to change, and what it should refuse to.
Our newly revealed theme, to be kickstarted at WiT Singapore on October 1, is ‘A New Beginning’. And as such, we asked influential travel tech decisionmakers in Asia (and beyond), like Agoda’s Tim Hughes, Booking.com’s Laura Houldsworth, Klook’s Marcus Yong, AirAsia MOVE’s Ben-Jie Lim, Almosafer’s Qais Amori, T2Impact’s Timothy O’Neill-Dunne, Airbnb’s Darrell Chan and Seek Sophie’s Jacinta Lim, to not just look back and reminisce about turning 21, but what this turning point could mean for the future of online travel as a whole.
Where the first film told the origin story – the founders, the failures, the giants built from nothing – this one turns the camera toward the present and the future, structured around four questions put to travel tech’s pioneers, operators and next-generation builders from across Asia Pacific, the Middle East, South Africa and Oceania. What were you doing at 21, and how did it feel? What’s happening now that we should be watching? What are the big questions our industry we as leaders need to be asking? And what would you tell your 21-year-old self?
The reason to watch isn’t nostalgia, though there’s definitely some of that, too. It’s that we wanted this industry documentary to sit in genuine uncertainty rather than sell a forecast. AI is already dissolving how people search, plan and book, that part isn’t up for debate. What’s still unwritten is everything else. What gets automated away, what leaders are responsible for protecting, and whether the traveller, the one constant across twenty-one years of reinvention, stays the point of it all. Anyone building, investing in, or simply trying to keep up with travel right now will recognise the feeling this film is chasing – exciting, a little terrifying, and impossible to look away from.
Watch the full documentary here:
