Expedia’s Michael Dykes says an Asia-to-Asia boom is underway
The ideal the travel industry dreamt about – the global traveller – the passport-holding, visa-free, frictionlessly mobile citizen of the world – is less real today than it’s ever been, said Michael Dykes, Vice President, Market Management APAC, Expedia Group, in his presentation which delved into the “Demographics” story.
The past few years, he argued, have seen the accumulation of barriers growing around the movement of people, capital and goods.
He pointed to the evidence, which is visible everywhere. Airline corridors connecting Asia and Europe have been disrupted by conflict. Visa wait times for the United States stretch to hours. Immigration counters are becoming more intrusive. Thailand has reduced visa duration. Some countries have been cut off from global payment systems. The IMF has warned that barriers to the movement of goods, services, investment and people will weaken global growth and innovation.
Michael Dykes: “Payments are where it gets real. Our (digital) wallets connect us and divide us.”
The result, he said, is not the stoppage of travel but its reorganisation along what Dykes called “paths of least resistance”: corridors increasingly defined by geopolitical comfort, visa openness, payment familiarity and economic alignment. Russian travellers flooding into Vietnam, Thailand and China (5.1 million in 2025). China’s smart visa policy driving 50% year-on-year inbound growth. Canada and Brazil building new flows into APAC.
These are not random, he said, it is travel conforming to the shape of economic and geopolitical blocs. As such, the regional Asia-to-Asia boom is underway.
The digital fragmentation parallel is equally important.
What once looked like one vast global digital world now behaves like the old world of physical currencies – different payment types, different standards, different assumptions about trust.
Forty percent of humanity lives in markets where the operating system of daily life is entirely local and sovereign – TikTok versus Instagram, WeChat versus WhatsApp, Alipay versus Visa. It’s a world where the infrastructure shapes the behavior.
“Payments are where it gets real. Our (digital) wallets connect us and divide us,” he said.
“The travel winners in the next decade will reach across economic blocks to reach travellers wherever they are; act like digital “switzerlands” operating across multiple stacks that make up the Operating System of life around the globe; and target the customers they want with consistency and accuracy across these multiple channels and stacks.”
On demographics, he said that it’s splitting into two in APAC – 715m Gen Alpha on one end; a richer, longer-traveling Silver generation of 722m on the other. “No single traveller profile serves both,” he said, adding, “Which travelers are you building your business behind? Which side are you on?”
