From opportunity markets to product innovation to new tech, a lot was discussed at the Web In Travel Conference in Singapore.
Here are eight, key takeaways from it:
The next billion users, and they will all be mobile
Most of the major travel brands, from Facebook to Google to Airbnb, are eyeing the next billion users and they will come from emerging markets in Asia, and they will all be middle class, young, mobile and social.
Indonesia and the Philippines factored strongly at WIT, with Henry Hendrawan, chief financial officer for Traveloka, talking of the Indonesia and South East Asia opportunity, which is a key reason for Expedia taking a $350m minority stake in the leading Indonesian online travel agency.
Spending time in the US has prepared him and the three founders for their destiny in building up South East Asia’s first travel unicorn out of this country of 261 million people. “I call South East Asia the world’s best kept secret, and maybe we should keep it that way,” he says. Traveloka will keep its focus on South East Asia for the immediate future.
Michael Szucs, chief executive advisor of Cebu Pacific Air, says the Philippine growth story is middle class, social and mobile. If you are not in social, he says, you don’t have a chance. And beyond marketing, social is big in customer servicing.
The industry could work collectively on gathering and using data to remove friction points at immigration and security.
Ross Veitch
From call centres, his airline now runs command centres where staff monitors social media channels around the clock.
And, of course, let’s not forget China, which will produce a total of 800 million outbound travellers by 2034. The personal story told by Jane Sun, CEO of Ctrip, of her rise from penniless child (her family’s income was $15 a month) to now the boss of a enormous travel company valued at approximately $25 billion, speaks of the phenomenal rise of China.
She says she was lucky to have experienced such growth in her lifetime but imagine what could happen in the lifetime of her two children.
As Chinese brands like Ctrip globalise, the influence of China will be felt not only in Asia but around the world.
Payments is the new frontier
With blockchain and cryptocurrencies being talked about as the new disruption in fintech, travel brands are trying to figure out how they can get into that space with most of them citing payments as the new tech they are watching.
Paytm, India’s mobile wallet, which started out as a service inspired by vegetable vendors in China, is now selling flights, hotels and low cost carriers, and received a payments bank licence this year. Ctrip has its Ctrip wallet. Traveloka has also talked of building a similar service.
It is was perhaps no surprise that the WIT Startup of the Year 2017 prize went to Troovo, a virtual payments processing system, for travel. David Zimmer of Travelport, which sponsored the competition, says: "it is a game changer for the industry if it can truly do what they say."
Software is the new gold
In a presentation, Filip Filipov, vice president for product management at Skyscanner, speaks of how software is changing everything and that most of the software innovation is coming from Asia – from chats to facial recognition, payments and even QR codes (so loved in China), which are coming back in vogue.
In airlines, software is the new alliance. Traditional airline alliances were more at the product and operations level.
Cebu Pacific Air’s Szucs, who’s also chairman of the Value Alliance, the world’s first alliance of right regional low cost airlines in Asia, says software is the new glue – one distribution platform, one payment – and Air Black Box, the new software startup, is powering that alliance.
Data is the pot at the end of the rainbow
Bobby Healy, chief technology officer of CarTrawler, talks of an autonomous future and says investors who are betting on loss-making companies like Uber or Lyft are not investing in the current models but what they could become – giant storehouses of data.
Airlines and hotel companies have to figure out how to monetize their data assets so that they can grow revenues beyond their physical assets or better yield revenues.
Whether that’s in the selling of ancillaries – Peach Aviation CEO, Shinichi Inoue, says the airline manages to sell $300,000 Volkswagen cars as part of in-flight sales – or whether it be in personal pricing or personal productisation, data is at the heart of it.
Richard Hatter, general manager of Hotel ICON in Hong Kong, says his hotel is experimenting with personal pricing by targeting a specific set of young, single women in South Korea with bundled packages.
If personal pricing becomes a reality, then what happens to loyalty we know it?
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Corporate travel is the next segment to be disrupted
Data helped Ctrip contact its customers within less than an hour during the shooting in Las Vegas, says CEO Jane Sun. It was able to contact and locate its customers within the Ctrip app ecosystem.
Duty of care is considered the sacred beast of corporate travel and is the reason why many corporations are reluctant to let their employees book outside their programmes and policies.
Rod Greyber, CEO of Egencia, says consumerization of travel is impacting the $1.3 trillion corporate travel market and would have the biggest impact on the unmanaged business travel segment, forming about half of the total market.
Egencia, with $7 billion in total gross bookings, is expanding into Asia with the possibility of some acquisitions to help.
Greyber says no one should feel satisfied with what they’ve done so far in this space because, as far as he’s concerned, it’s just beginning.
Marketplaces versus specialists
The jury is still out on who will win in the next wave of ecommerce in Asia but perhaps the travel market with so much headroom for growth will have enough room for everyone.
Marketplaces offer choice and price comparison – Wego, Trivago and Skyscanner are obviously in this bucket – while specialists like Booking.com and Agoda serve up recommendations, arguing too much choice is confusing to consumers.
Agoda has been able to shift its customer acquisition through its app strategy (5.5 million users) while Trivago is working on using AI to provide better matches between its hotels and customers, much like a Tinder-model, which is what Japanese e-commerce giant, Rakuten Travel, is doing with its hotel matching service.
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The Rakuten group has 1.1 billion members and, over 20 years, has created a points ecosystem within the group to foster member loyalty.
Grab has signed a partnership with Singapore Airlines, deepening its reach into travel. Through its core transportation service, it provides 3 million rides a day in the region (imagine the data it is collecting) and has launched GrabPay, marking its move into financial services.
New tech to watch – voice, AI and Google Pixel Buds
Amazon Alexa, Google Home and now enter Tmall Genie, Alibaba’s answer to voice. The Chinese ecommerce giant has come late to the party but it has signed an agreement with Marriott to go into 100,000 Marriott hotel rooms in China, the first to bring the voice assistant into hospitality at scale.
While it’s still early days in terms of getting people to book flights via voice, Oliver Heckmann, vice president engineering for travel and shopping at Google, says voice is more natural and it will happen one day.
I call South East Asia the world’s best kept secret, and maybe we should keep it that way.
Henry Hendrawan
He’s clearly very excited about the Google Pixel Buds, which will offer real-time translation in more than 40 languages. To be retailed later this year, this could be the game-changer for travel, bringing down language barriers.
Asked if this would take the mystery out of travel, Heckmann says it would perhaps create more mystery because people would be emboldened to venture further.
Melissa Yang, co-founder of Tujia, peeling back the skin on AI, says if the industry focuses on what AI can do that humans cannot, it will lead to a better world and better travel. AI can tell the levels of crude oil and predict supply and demand patterns and it can aid crime detection, for example.
In travel it can make recommendations based on getting to know your profile. Imagine combining that with a human assistant for the final mile, she argues.
Dare to dream
One question we asked throughout the conference is was what could the industry do together to create "better travel".
John Traas, regional director for South Asia and Pacific for Booking.com, picks the environment and suggests the idea of a sustainable tourism fund, supported by major travel brands.
The industry could work collectively on gathering and using data to remove friction points at immigration and security, says Wego CEO, Ross Veitch.
One conclusion though is that it is clear that as lines are blurred, the walls between online and offline, supplier and vendor, will come down further - Airbnb is building its own home-hotel hybrid property in Florida; Amazon buying Wholefoods; Ikea buying Taskrabbit; AccorHotels buying both hotel companies hotel tech solutions.
* This article was originally published on Web In Travel.