Melissa Yang broke in as a developer. After working her way through the ranks at Expedia as a business development director, she guided Escapia as CTO before its acquisition by HomeAway.
Now she is co-founder and CTO at Beijing-based Tujia, China's online vacation rental leader in one of the travel industry's hottest sectors, the sharing economy.
So, just for fun, she stopped by THack @ China for six hours last weekend to hang out with her peeps ... developers.
Melissa was one of three volunteer judges for THack @ China, along with Chris Lai, investment partner at Innovation Works, and Sherri Wu, international business development director at Alibaba Group.
Tnooz and Travel Daily China, co-presenters of THack in Hangzhou, asked Melissa to describe her judging experience during demos by 23 teams representing more than 100 developers.
Can you sum up what you saw from the developers.
Melissa Yang: It was a great experience for me. First of all, the overall quality of products demonstrated exceeded my expectation.
These young guys and girls (yes, about 10 girls participated, quite encouraging) built everything from scratch within 48 hours, and many of them worked overnight.
I saw creative ideas in quite a few products … from cool mobile apps inspiring travel to China to an SMS version of TripIt helping organize trips.
The participants grasped real issues and pain points encountered by Chinese travelers and solved some in innovative ways from varied angles.
What has been your experience with change in the travel industry?
MY: I joined Expedia in 2001 and worked there as a director of development. Over six years, I witnessed it take off and become mainstream by enabling people to come online and book flights and hotels instead of calling travel agents.
At Escapia, our mission was to make booking vacation rental accommodation as easy as booking hotels. acation rentals are non-standard unique products. Searching and booking a vacation rental used to be a long and tedious process for travelers.
With HomeAway and others, it has become much easier.
Now, at Tujia, we have built the largest vacation rental web site in China. Our platform allows homeowners to share their beautiful vacation homes and for Chinese travelers to get a unique home away from home experience. This simply didn’t exist before.
What's different about travel technology development nowadays?
MY: It is a golden time for developers. With all the cloud-based tools, open APIs and access to big data, it has significantly lowered the threshold to enter online travel.
When you were a developer, how likely were you to code in a hackathon?
MY: Very likely. I love travel and that’s the main reason I chose to work for Expedia over Microsoft years ago. I also love technology and am an entrepreneur from my heart. It would be a lot of fun to participate in such an event.
What are the pain points now that developers can address?
MY: The developers were asked to code against searching/booking APIs, which sort of set the boundary. Planning a trip is a big pain point for leisure travel, based on different criteria such as budget, interest, length of stay, etc. I would like to see more innovation in this area.
Given the big data available now which didn’t exist before (pictures, tags, tourist content, etc.), developers can provide more tailored personalized solutions.
What are one or two points you discussed with the other judges after seeing the THack project?
MY: No.1, developers should focus more on solving a specific pain point instead of a general solution.
No. 2, they should think more about the business model of their product. That point was raised by Chris Lai, a VC. I am not sure whether it is one of main purposes of the event. I personally don’t think so and didn’t ask any business model-related questions during the demos.