Timothy Hughes’ path into travel had nothing to do with a plan.
“I was trying to get a job at Microsoft because they were cool in the year 2000,” the VP of corporate development at Agoda said during his coffee chat at WiT Queenstown.
“I was talking to them and they said, 'We’ve got nothing for you, but we own this travel company called Expedia.' That’s how I accidentally ended up in business development at Expedia.”
It wasn’t entirely random, though—Hughes' stepfather spent more than 40 years at Qantas, rising from a role he started at 15 through to retirement.
“Travel business was the talk of the kitchen table for most of my life,” he said.
The plumbing never got fixed, and content broke apart instead
Asked what he expected to change over two decades in online travel that never quite did, Hughes went straight to the industry’s founding promise.
“The very first slide I saw when I started, in 2000, showed the customer on one side, suppliers on the other and all this messy spaghetti in between them—and the promise was that online travel was going to hack away at that mess. Here we are.”
The plumbing is still messy, if not messier.
What genuinely surprised him was a different kind of fracture. “I expected content to be at the heart of booking. It’s not. We’re in a world where the place you get advice is different from the place you book. The original travel agent gave you the advice and took the booking. Now people get their advice from TikTok, from forums, from AI—and then go book somewhere else entirely.”
That split, he argued, has only deepened as AI enters the picture, and not in the direction anyone hoped. Ask ChatGPT where it sources most of its travel content, and the answer is Reddit.
“Reddit is now the number one source of travel advice being fed into LLMs. Reddit is not good travel advice, for sure—so that’s not the solution either.”
In fact, he believes that “OTAs are the solution to the AI Reddit dilemma”.
His summary of the current state of AI-mediated travel content was blunt: “Garbage in, garbage out. What we haven’t figured out yet is how to get the actually good content in front of these models in the first place.”
A commercial responsibility, not a moral one
Pressed on whether large OTAs—with huge marketing budgets going Google’s way—have some obligation to fix that pipeline, Hughes reframed the stakes deliberately.
“I don’t think we have a moral responsibility. We have a commercial one. If we just leave it, ChatGPT ends up owning the content stream, Reddit becomes the default source and they cut OTAs out of the booking entirely. Our job is to take our content and work with the industry directly.”
He confirmed this is a live, if not yet fully board-level, conversation inside major OTAs: “I’m not senior enough to be in those board conversations, but I can tell you it’s absolutely a live topic at C-suite level—how do we make sure we’re not disintermediated at the customer interface.”
Agoda’s own defensive strategy leans heavily on owned distribution: building an app experience customers genuinely prefer to open directly, rather than routing through Google or an AI assistant in the first place, alongside actively harnessing AI as a differentiator rather than treating it purely as a threat.
Asia's QR-code advantage and the friction it creates for inbound visitors
Turning to payments, Hughes described Southeast Asia’s pandemic-era “digital boot camp” as having produced a genuine structural edge over markets like Australia.
QR-code-based, bank-to-bank transfers have become the region’s default, running at close to zero cost, a sharp contrast to Australia’s fully card-based system, where merchant fees run 2.5%-3.5%.
“In Asia, we’re not doing that. We’re doing QR code, bank-to-bank, basically free. That digitizes payment from the noodle vendor all the way up to booking an airline ticket, on almost zero-cost infrastructure.”
The catch, he was quick to note, hits inbound travelers rather than locals: A foreign visitor staring at a noodle stall’s QR code often can’t interface with it at all, creating what he called “a bit of a roaming problem” the industry still needs to solve—though cross-wallet partnerships are starting to unlock genuinely frictionless intra-Asia travel.
He was candid that he hasn’t seen the same shift take hold between Australia and New Zealand, largely because of how strongly credit card loyalty points still pull consumer behavior.
“There probably needs to be some regulatory or consumer mindset shift away from points and toward cross-payment systems—maybe some merchant-side pushback from people sick of holding points they can’t actually use.”
India’s Unified Payments Interface system came up as the sharper example of what deliberate, government-led leapfrogging looks like: a nationwide rebuild of payment rails enabling phone-to-phone bank transfers at effectively zero cost, processing billions of transactions daily. It’s the kind of infrastructure reset, he argued, that travel itself still badly needs.
New Zealand's opening
Asked what a small, geographically remote destination like New Zealand can actually do differently given “the tyranny of distance” and current global turbulence, Hughes returned to his content thesis with a specific prediction. Authenticity, he believes, is about to become a genuine currency, precisely because AI-generated media is making it increasingly impossible to trust that any given photo or story is real.
“There’s going to be a role somewhere in travel technology for marked authenticity—a way of saying, this one is real.”
His pitch to the room was that New Zealand doesn’t need to invent this positioning; it already owns it. “100% Pure New Zealand” predates the AI authenticity problem by decades, he noted.
The remaining work, in his opinion, isn’t branding but infrastructure: building the mechanisms that let genuinely authentic New Zealand content get surfaced and verified ahead of Reddit, rather than simply hoping the “100% Pure” halo carries through automatically.
Five different companies, wearing one name
With Agoda and WiT both turning 21 this year, I asked what lessons Agoda could offer on winning in markets—South Korea, Southeast Asia, Japan—that bigger global platforms had long treated as peripheral, against deeply entrenched local incumbents.
Hughes’ answer: repeated self-demolition. “You have to break your own business model before somebody else breaks it for you.”
Across his 14 years at the company, he counted at least five distinct versions of Agoda: the original, an inbound, search engine optimization-driven app built entirely on third-party Southeast Asian supply, evolving through to today’s version—domestic Korea, domestic India, its own payment rails, flights, and tours and activities.
Each transition, Hughes said, involved genuinely uncomfortable internal meetings. “Someone says, 'We’re not doing that anymore, and it’s going to cost us money but we have to do it, or we’re going to get it done to us instead.'”
He was candid that the company arrived late to flights as well as tours and activities. “We probably should have done both earlier. You learn these lessons.”
The next round of self-disruption, he suggested, is now underway.
“AI wants to feed you into being a better optimization machine at whatever you’re already doing. But you’ve got to be a process-breaker, or someone else is going to break your process for you.”
The shift required, he said, means leaning on data-informed instinct to make genuine leaps rather than incremental optimization—an uncomfortable posture for a company built on data. “You’ve got to rely on a bit of a gap. That’s scary for a company that’s all about data.”
What he actually wants to hear from startup pitches
As Agoda’s VP of corporate dvelopment, Hughes fields a steady stream of startup pitches, and his patience for a specific opening move has run out.
“It’s not an exciting thing to say you’re using AI. AI isn’t a thing—it’s the thing you build on top of. Tell me what you’re actually building.”
His second filter: whether a founder is optimizing an existing, broken process or genuinely rebuilding it. “If you’re optimizing something, that thing is still broken. Excite me about how you’re changing the process itself.”
He extended the same impatience to pitch deck clichés more broadly.
“The first two slides always say travel is a big industry, and Asia is exciting. I’ve got it. Learn your audience, tell me the story of how you’re actually going to change things, and drop the phrase ‘AI-based’ entirely.”
What four years of stand-up comedy taught him about business
Closing on a lighter note, Hughes, a stand-up comedian for the past four years alongside his day job, offered a lesson from the stage.
“The biggest thing comedy taught me is you have to give the audience a chance to breathe—literal silence, so they can process the joke and laugh. The business-trained part of me always thought silence was something to barrel through and eliminate. Comedy taught me the opposite: You have to give people time.”
Rapid fire: Bangkok's spice, Singapore's footpaths
Asked to choose Singapore or Bangkok, Hughes refused a clean answer. His ideal city would combine “the spice and craziness of Bangkok with the health and safety of Singapore.”
Sydney or Queenstown drew an even firmer dodge. “You can’t ask me that; I’m a surfer, not a skier.”
His favorite recent Singapore find was a shoutout to a well-regarded speakeasy bar, alongside a much simpler pleasure as a two-dog owner: Singapore’s footpaths.
“Bangkok doesn’t have footpaths. Walking dogs in Singapore is such a joy.”
This story originally appeared on WiT.