The desire to travel has never been stronger in Southeast Asia. The problem, according to Nadia Omer, is that the industry hasn’t caught up with the person doing the desiring.
Speaking at Travel Tech Thursdays Kuala Lumpur, themed “AI & The Aspiring Traveler in ASEAN,” the CEO of AirAsia MOVE sat down with WiT founder Yeoh Siew Hoon for a candid conversation about generational shifts, trust gaps, pent-up demand and why the region’s next great travel disruption hasn’t happened yet.
“The desire is there. The product isn’t.”
As Omer sees it, travel is no longer just a leisure category among consumers in the ASEAN region, it’s become a life goal.
“When I was growing up, I wanted to buy a car, buy a house, get some savings,” she said. “For my kids’ generation, the Gen Zs, these are not their life goals. Their life goals are more experience-oriented.”
But desire alone doesn’t drive bookings. What the industry needs, she argued, is a new wave of creative product thinking to convert aspiration into transaction, the same way low-cost carriers once unlocked air travel for millions.
“There was always a desire to fly, but most people could not. The LCC model unlocked that. We need some more disruptions like those, travel products that make travel more accessible, inclusive and affordable for people who desire it but cannot afford it today.”
The conversation surfaced road trips, rail travel and domestic accommodation as the next frontier, with Omer noting that Airbnb-style models haven’t penetrated ASEAN as deeply as they might. The category, she believes, is ripe but the right product solution is still being figured out.
Rooting out green shoots
One of the more surprising insights from AirAsia MOVE’s own data: off-season is becoming on-season for a specific and growing traveler cohort.
“We have a flight-plus-hotel bundle product, and the buying pattern increases during off-peak, rainy seasons, when the rest of our portfolio is going down,” Omer said. “It identifies a traveler who has more flexibility in time but less flexibility in their wallet.”
That profile—value-conscious, schedule-flexible, experience-hungry—is the kind of green shoot Omer thinks the industry should be hunting, rather than piling onto the same premium customer everyone else is chasing.
Artists v builders
The generational divide in how people discover and plan travel, Omer said, is a bigger gap than the cultural differences between ASEAN markets.
“Our minds are more focused, more like form-filling,” she said of older travelers. “We go to the search bar, put in what we need, move on. My kids start their discovery on social and from there they create something more nuanced, something with their own signature.”
The distinction she drew was vivid: older travelers are builders who want to get it right; younger ones are artists who want to leave a mark.
This has real implications for product design. A search bar optimized for efficiency is the wrong interface for a generation that begins their travel journey on TikTok, curating aesthetic mood boards before they’ve even picked a destination.
AI won’t replace organic content—not here, not yet
On the question of artificial intelligence (AI) versus human influence in travel discovery, Omer was direct: In ASEAN, social is sovereign and AI agents can’t touch most of it.
“If you go on TikTok today, AI agents can’t even access the content. These are communities by themselves,” she said. “Gemini picks up from Google and YouTube. Meta picks up from Meta. They’re just sales agents for their own ecosystems.”
Her read is that AI-driven recommendations will follow the same arc as influencer marketing: trusted when the recommendations feel genuine, eroded the moment monetization becomes visible.
“The genuineness of the recommendation and the inclusivity of the check is what drives trust and credibility. If AI does that, great. The moment AI moves away from it, the credibility goes down.”
AirAsia MOVE’s response? Double down on organic content. “We are partnering with a lot of content creators for original, organic travel content,” she said. “These optimizations do not build brands. Organic content is core to it.”
Measuring trust
For AirAsia MOVE, a budget travel platform, closing the trust gap in an AI-influenced world is about building trust at every savings touchpoint, according to Omer.
“It’s not just about getting the best rate in. It’s about making sure they’re saving at every part of the journey—the best price, the best value combo, the best cost of payment. We have to give them suggestions at every point.”
And then the product has to deliver. The plane has to take off. The property has to match expectations. “That’s what leads to repeat,” she said. “Repeat is the biggest vote customers have.”
She was quick to clarify that it’s not purely about price, it’s about savings. A traveler who paid a low price but could have gotten significantly more for slightly more money doesn’t feel like a winner. She said it’s about value optimization, not just the cheapest number.
Cart abandonment amid global conflict
Not everything is bullish. Omer was candid about the impact of global headwinds on ASEAN travel, particularly for Thailand, which she noted is seeing softening across all discretionary spending categories.
The ripple effects are showing up in cart abandonment: travelers are doing all the planning, filling their baskets, and then pausing when the total appears.
“They’re still dreaming of travel. They put everything in. But when the total cost comes together, they think again,” she said, offering a personal example: her daughter’s graduation trip to Phuket and Bali, which was trimmed from five days to four and lost one of its hops to rising fuel costs.
“These are how customers are optimizing,” she said. “We are seeing these shifts happening.”
Bright spots remain: Inbound traffic to ASEAN is picking up as travelers reroute away from previously popular long-haul corridors, and domestic and short-haul travel within the region is proving resilient. “More frequent trips, closer to home” is the emerging pattern.
Super apps beyond travel?
On the increasingly competitive super app landscape, with Grab aggressively adding hotels and experiences, Omer offered a nuanced take rooted in her own experience.
“Super app model was started with chat-based platforms. Chat happens every day. Once you get the community together, you start selling utility on top. But it’s not based on creating desire. It’s functional.”
AirAsia MOVE learned this the hard way during COVID, when the super app model helped maintain a user base during flight shutdowns. But when travel returned, so did the primacy of the travel journey itself.
“Whatever we put in that journey gets picked up. Whatever is outside the flight journey, those utility things, are not getting picked up,” she said.
She doesn’t dismiss Grab’s push, but thinks it works best when the added services are directly tethered to the trip: tours linked to a destination, hotels within the same city. The broader, lifestyle-utility vision of the super app? Less compelling for a category that runs on desire.
The future OTA
If AI agents eventually handle travel booking, will OTAs even matter? Omer's take was both philosophical and optimistic.
“Most OTAs and travel stores will lead a concierge approach versus the way apps are today. That’s the biggest change happening, and it’s the more human approach.”
She painted a picture of a return to an older service model: the skilled salesperson who greets you, reads the room and curates options based on who you are, rather than making you sift through every aisle of a crowded store until fatigue sets in.
“Humans adapted to the machine. I’m so happy that now the machine is adapting to the human.”
This story originally appeared on WiT.