PROGRAMME
Travel Zero.O: Back To The Future
To go forwards, we have to go backwards. This is a day where we look back at what happened, what we did, where we are now and where we are headed. The experience begins here.




WiT
Yeoh Siew Hoon is the founder of WIT, launching it in Singapore in 2005 and going on to launch WIT editions across Asia Pacific. In 2016, WIT Europe made its debut in London, days after the Brexit vote.
WIT has won several awards including Most Innovative Marketing Initiative and Trade Conference Of The Year from the Singapore Tourism Board and in 2014, Siew Hoon was recognised Tourism Entrepreneur of The Year. A journalist by profession and passion, she’s also a speaker and facilitator at events around the world.
She’s also a published author of titles such as “Around Asia In One Hour: Tales of Condoms, Chillies & Curries” and children’s books such as “Adventures of Habibie The Turtle” and “The Story of Baitong and Boon”.




WiT
“If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour… you’re gonna see some serious shit.” – Doc, “Back To The Future”
In an internal memo to his team at the beginning of July, Tao Tao wrote, “For many of us, 2020 will feel like a lost year in relationships and career progression. When we went into this crisis as a team, there was a high sense of urgency and adrenaline to keep us going. The crisis gave us clarity. Now we’re on the messy road to recovery.” In this opening session, we look through the eyes of a young leader on what he learnt, the controversial decisions they took during the crisis, and how they’re thinking about the future.




GetYourGuide
Tao Tao is the Chief Operating Officer at GetYourGuide. He leads the company’s business operations.
Tao co-founded GetYourGuide in 2009 while attending the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He has since led several strategic company functions, including Business Development, Supply, and Customer Service.
Under Tao’s leadership, over 30 million tickets have been booked to date via the GetYourGuide website, mobile app, and partnership network. GetYourGuide has raised over $650M from investors such as the SoftBank Vision Fund, Battery Ventures and KKR.
Tao is a native of Beijing, China, and studied economics at Tilburg University and physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.




GetYourGuide
When the proverbial s… hits the fan, it takes nerves of steel as well as ability to raise funds to steady the ship and then, seek out the opportunities to forge a new path forward. In this session, startups share how they have raised funds, among other measures, to stay afloat, and what they see in their future. And for good measure, we throw an investor’s voice into the mix, as to why he would remain interested in travel at this time.




MyRealTrip
Jinmyeong Ju is the Head of Business Planning at MyRealTrip, a travel-tech platform that specializes in Experience products in South Korea. Prior to joining MyRealTrip, Jinmyeong worked as an investment professional at IMM Private Equity, and as a management consultant at Bain & Company.
At MyRealTrip, he led the company’s latest funding round which secured $36 million. Since the pandemic, he is contemplating how the people’s travel patterns will change and what MyRealTrip should prepare to satisfy the needs of future travelers.




MyRealTrip




Mystifly
Rajeev is a eminent visionary with a background rooted in the Technology & Travel Industry. He channelled his entrepreneurial spirit into building a travel technology platform that enables businesses scale newer geographies with ease.
Throughout his 20 years of experience, he has held leadership roles in various capacities across India, UK, Europe and North America. A Computer Science Engineering graduate from Bangalore University, he has consistently demonstrated thought‐leadership and ambitions that propel evolution in the technology and travel landscape. Not one to shy away from collaborative growth, he has supported and shared insights with leading players in the Travel and Hospitality sectors across the globe.
Born from his vision to ease global air travel, Rajeev founded Mystifly in 2009. Since its inception, Mystifly has gone on to win the title of “World’s Leading Airline Consolidator” four times in a row. Under Rajeev’s leadership, the business has scaled across borders with a customer base that is spread across 80+ countries.




Mystifly




Velocity Ventures
Nick is a founder and the Chief Executive Officer of ReadyVentures, a Singapore based early-growth stage investment fund. Nick has invested S$20M in 15 startups across SEA and Australia achieving exits, follow on investments and significant portfolio growth.
Nick started his career in 1985 with Arthur Andersen in Sydney. In 1989 he joined his family Readymix business in Australia and set about expanding to SEA. He has lived and worked in the region since, developing businesses in Australia, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam.
Nick sits on the board of an ASX listed Company, an SGX listed Company and multiple private companies in SEA.




Velocity Ventures




Luxe Nomad
Stephanie Chai, 32, is the founder of The Luxe Nomad, an accommodation booking website that caters to travellers searching for luxury hotels and villas at reduced prices.
Born in New Zealand and having grown up in between Kuching, Sarawak and New Zealand, you would never guess that Stephanie Chai has had a foot in almost every boat imaginable. With a background in modelling and TV hosting, and a Degree in Finance and International Business, she first ventured into the world of entrepreneurship with a startup called WeddingGuideAsia.com, an online wedding portal. A year later in July 2012, Stephanie created The Luxe Nomad to cater to the increasingly sophisticated travel market in Asia.




Luxe Nomad
Covid-19 set in motion a pivot from inbound to domestic. But make no mistake. This Kingdom, which is for the first time ever marketing itself as a travel destination, will influence the shaping of the global travel market in the years ahead, with its infrastructure plans and ambitions. If anything else, this time has given it a golden opportunity to test and prepare for the future.




Seera Group
Muzzammil is an internationally experienced management consulting and operations executive focused on scaling and optimizing operations to enable sustainable growth. Currently, Muzzammil leads Al Tayyar Travel Group’s Online Strategic Business Unit which houses two of the largest OTAs in the region – Almosafer & Tajawal. The Online Strategic Business Unit continues to grow at a significant pace and is focused on serving the needs of travel and tourism customers in the region by providing a seamless end to end experience using technology.




Seera Group
It was one of the early success stories, and its domestic travel was among the first to get back on its feet. Then it had a slight stumble. But make no mistake, this is a market of resilient and resourceful entrepreneurs, as well as young, aspiring travellers. Its population of 98 million makes it one of Asia’s most promising travel markets with high mobile and Internet penetration (expected to rise to 48% in 2023 from 35% in 2017: Statista), and a voracious appetite for social. Let’s get insights into the market




Thien Minh Group (TMG)
Tran Trong Kien is currently CEO and Chairman of the board of TMG, a company which he founded in 1994 and grown it to become one of the largest private travel, hospitality and aviation groups in Vietnam. Kien graduated as a General Practitioner from Hanoi Medical School and he got a MBA from University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Kien is also current chairman of Vietnam Tourism Advisory Board (TAB), Hue Tourism Advisory Board (HTAB), Vietnam Tour Guides Association (VTGA), trustee of Fulbright University Vietnam, Vietnam Tourism Association (VITA), board member of Vietnam Institute of Directors (VIOD), member of the Private Sector Development Research Board (IV Board) of the Advisory Council for Administrative Procedure Reform and ex-member of Asia Commercial Bank (ACB), VP Bank and Vinaland (listed in London AIM).




Thien Minh Group (TMG)
One of Asia’s earliest pioneers in destination experiences goes backwards in time to unpick what happened during the crisis, the weaknesses it exposed and what we have to do to fix it going forwards.




BeMyGuest
Blanca Menchaca is the co-founder and CEO of BeMyGuest, specialists in technology and distribution for Asia’s attractions, tours and activities industry. In her previous role as Chief Operating Officer, Blanca led a highly multicultural Asian operation spread out across Singapore, Philippines, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia.
Prior to BeMyGuest, Blanca was the Global Head of Online Marketing at Wego (www.wego.com), another successful Asian travel company. She helped the company build teams across Singapore, Indonesia, India and the Middle East.
Blanca was born in Mexico but has gained most of her travel and e-commerce experience abroad, with 6 years in Australia and 9 years in Asia so far. She has been referred to by the industry as “the face of a new global travel generation”.




BeMyGuest
Visit one of our lounges, meet, chat and learn.
This is a story of contrasts. One had one of South-east Asia’s most prolonged and severe lockdowns, and in the other, life is back to normal and the worry is actually over-domestic tourism. From the Philippines, we get insights into how Covid changed consumer behaviour and e-commerce spending, and how it will impact travel, and from Taiwan, we will learn how they are managing over-crowding and transforming domestic tourism.




Carousell Philippines
Raffy Montemayor leads Carousell’s business growth and development in the Philippines, with a focus on driving revenue and strategic partnerships. He also oversees the growth of key business verticals, cars, property and the general classifieds business.
Bringing a wealth of experience to the table, Raffy has held leadership positions at HSBC Philippines and was the country director for Agoda, one of the largest online travel agencies in the region. Raffy went on to become the General Manager of OLX Philippines, where he was responsible for the improvement in revenue over 2 years, reshaping the business to a more streamlined model.
Following the merger between OLX and Carousell, Raffy continues in his position of General Manager for the newly formed Carousell Philippines entity.
Carousell is one of the world’s largest and fastest growing mobile classifieds marketplace, with over 200 million listings and a presence in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Australia and is backed by leading international venture capitalists and investors such as Sequoia Capital, Rakuten Ventures, 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures, DBS Bank, EDBI and Naspers.




Carousell Philippines




MyTaiwanTour
Gina Tsai is the founder and Vice President of “Creative Tourism and Community Design Association in Taiwan” (CTCAT) which focuses on identifying and promoting local cultural activities and events offered by local communities and indigenous tribes to enhance the cultural capital of participants, planners, local communities and to differentiate and diversify tourism supply.
Gina is the founder and the Governor of Dream Travel Taiwan Association (DTTA), a think tank that partners closely with Taiwan Tourism Bureau to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and international best practices, and provide thought leadership and expertise to the tourism industry in digital transformation and destination marketing. She joins MyTaiwanTour, a top-rated local tour agency creating custom designed tours that connect international travelers to Taiwan, as the Head of Legal and Government Affairs in 2020.
Gina worked for Airbnb for 4 years. In her previous role in Airbnb as Head of Public Policy, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Gina developed and executed policy campaign for legitimizing home-sharing and short-term rental in Hong Kong and Taiwan, including lobbying, drafting position papers, building high-impact partnerships with public and private sectors, and worked closely with PR/communication team to develop media communication plan for improving corporate image in in these two markets.
Before Gina joined Airbnb, she had 15 years experience and legal expertise on all matters related to trademarks, copyrights, patents and trade secrets, including trademark and patent applications, licensing, and IP protection enforcement actions in Asia. She was the Associate Director of Legal & Corporate Affairs in Microsoft Taiwan for 10 years and Senior License Compliance Director, Asia, in PTC for 2 years.
She is a PhD Candidate at College of Law at National Cheng-Chi University in Taiwan. Gina holds two BAs in both Law and Foreign Languages & Literature from National Taiwan University. She got her LLM from the College of Law at National Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan.




MyTaiwanTour
It raised Series C US$70m funding in August 2019 and CEO and founder Amit Saberwal said for the first time, reaching unicorn status was no longer an outlandish claim. He attributed its success to focus and fearlessness, its mascot being Reddy, the badger. Let’s find out how focus and fearlessness held the ship steady during Covid and how it will see this branded budget accommodation startup through.




RedDoorz
RedDoorz, one of Southeast Asia’s leading budget hotel online booking platforms, is the brainchild of Amit Saberwal. The lack of standardisation in budget hotels, guesthouses and a budget brand are the reasons and alongside having amassed over 20 years of experience in the online travel, e-Commerce and hospitality sectors that drove Amit to creating RedDoorz. Headquartered in Singapore, the brand is spread across Indonesia, Singapore and The Philippines. Currently, the brand’s has more than 500 properties across 16 cities in Indonesia.
Prior to founding RedDoorz, he was the Chief Business Officer – Hotel and International Markets at India’s premier travel and airline booking site MakeMyTrip.com. He was instrumental in shaping the company and was also part of the leadership team growing it to IPO in three years and getting it listed on NASDAQ in 2010, with 85,000 properties globally. He was also turnkey in spearheading MakeMyTrip largest acquisition of Thailand-based HotelTravel.com.
Amit has also previously worked as Director Sales and Marketing with The Park Hotels in Bangalore and New Delhi. He is a Hotel Management graduate with a Post Graduate Diploma in Sales & Marketing from National Institute for Sales, New Delhi.
He also spent time at Cornell University honing his professional skills as a hotelier. He spent his childhood in Delhi, India. He lives in Singapore with his banker wife and two children.




RedDoorz
Every penny counts when marketing funds are limited and yet we have to drive results. This presentation will showcase the results generated through digital media, how it can be done, including micro targeting, as well as the rise of direct bookings during Covid and how to still win.




D-EDGE Hospitality Solutions
He began his career with Accor in New York in 2001 where he was instrumental in the creation of the North American Marketing department for the Sofitel and Novotel brands. In 2003, Pierre-Charles joined the New York-based Monaco Government Tourist Office to promote the destination and its luxury hotels to VIP clients and travel agents. An experience that lead him to join Monte-Carlo SBM where he held responsibilities as Sales, Marketing and E-Distribution Manager. He contributed significantly to the SBM’s commercial development, particularly via electronic platforms (Internet and GDS).
Pierre-Charles has a degree in marketing and management from ESSCA (l’Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Commerciales d’Angers).




D-EDGE Hospitality Solutions
In this session, we learn how Hilton navigated Covid in China, how it rethought its marketing given the constraints and circumstances, lessons learnt, what changes in customer behaviour did Covid accelerate, which are the breakout channels, and how Hilton intends to rewrite the future. Yes, we have a lot of questions to ask. Stay tuned.




Hilton
Wendy Huang joined Hilton in December 2016 as Senior Vice President and Commercial Director for Greater China & Mongolia. Ms. Huang is responsible for all commercial functions across Greater China & Mongolia, including sales, marketing, e-commerce, revenue management, and loyalty and partnerships.
Ms. Huang started her career at Embassy Suites Richmond, owned by Thayer Lodging Group, where she served for 8 years as Director of Revenue Management, managing inventory using various yield management techniques & tools to maximize revenue, monitoring and analyzing market conditions & comp set strategies.
Prior to joining Hilton, Ms. Huang worked for 11 years at Starwood Hotels & Resorts, where she last served as the Vice President of Sales & Marketing for the Greater China area. She worked closely with and provided strategic guidance to the Sales & Marketing teams in over 100 operating hotels and over 100 pipeline hotels throughout the region. She witnessed the growth and development of Starwood Hotels & Resorts in Greater China.
Ms. Huang has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Fudan University, a Master of Management degree from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, as well as a Master of Business Administration degree from Virginia Commonwealth University.




Hilton
Masashi Takahashi said goodbye to travel and the tours and activities startup he founded in 2011 on June 30. Voyagin (original name: FindJPN) was absorbed into Rakuten. As he says it, “Voyagin was my adolescence.” This is the story of growing up with all its associated pangs and pains, and joy, and the future that awaits.




Voyagin
Masashi is the CEO of Voyagin, a marketplace for authentic local experiences in Asia, based in Japan and Singapore. Prior to Voyagin, Masashi worked for AT Kearney and Cyta.jp, a startup for private lesson marketplace in Japan, which was acquired by Cookpad in 2013. While he worked at Cyta.jp, he started hosting international guests in his apartment in Tokyo and eventually became the top Airbnb host in the city, hosting several hundred guests in his living room over the course of 3-4 years. Based on his own travel and hosting experiences, he decided to create a travel marketplace for visitors to Japan called FindJPN in January 2011. This eventually evolved into Voyagin in Dec 2012.




Voyagin
In the run-up to “Rewrite” day on October 1, we put the spotlight on the women who are rewriting travel their own way. Anchalika Kijkanakorn left her 10-year career with GE Capital to set up her hotel group in 2003, with her first property, Aleenta Hua Hin-Pranburi. Her philosophy is about “sustainable luxury” and she achieved her plastic-free goal in June last year. In this one-on-one, we find out how she intends to stay the course she’s set into the future.




Akaryn Hotel Group, Thailand
Anchalika Kijkanakorn is the Managing Director and Founder of award-winning Thai hotel group AKARYN Hotel Group (AHG), a recent chairperson of SLH and SLH board member for the last 12 years.
Anchalika spent 10 years with GE Capital before she founded AHG in 2003 with the acclaimed Aleenta resorts in Hua Hin and Phuket. She later launched the akyra brand which now boasts four hotels in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Phuket and three more in the pipeline, including the brand’s first property in Vietnam. All six AHG hotels are proud members of SLH.
In 2006, Anchalika launched the Pure Blue Foundation, which focuses on environmental protection and local community work with schoolchildren – two causes close to her heart. This led to her inclusion in Forbes Asia’s list of the leading 40 philanthropists.
In conjunction with the Pure Blue Foundation, her newest hotel, akyra Sukhumvit Bangkok, recently became the first new hotel in Asia to launch without any single-use plastic, and was featured in The Times, BBC and Forbes. Under Anchalika’s leadership, every AHG property aims to be free of single-use plastics by June 2019.
She has two young sons and is based in Bangkok.




Akaryn Hotel Group, Thailand
No one has been spared in this crisis, big or small. Some may argue though that the scale that once favoured the global giants could be a handicap in a crisis such as this. You’ve got so much more to lose. Find out how this global OTA weathered the storm in Asia Pacific, what it did to get stronger and fitter, and how it sees the future of online travel in the region in this closing conversation of the day.




Booking.com
Angel Llull is the Vice President and Managing Director of Booking.com, Asia Pacific (A Booking Holdings Company). In this role, he’s responsible for growing and running the Asian and Oceania markets for Booking.com. This includes business development, strategic partnerships, marketing, sales, customer service, human resources, finance and all support and product functions in market.
Prior to joining Booking.com, Angel worked at Horwarth International as Senior consultant for merge & acquisitions. Prior to Horwarth, he spent almost 10 years in different management positions in IBB HOTELS, finalising that stage becoming CEO of the hospitality holding and Board Member. Angel earned different master degrees; one in Tourism Management from Pompeu Fabra University, and an Executive MBA from IE in Madrid. He’s also completed executive programs in Business Management from Stanford University.




Booking.com
In this opening conversation of the day, we find out how leading investors from different regions are thinking differently about their portfolio. In this scorched earth, what gems have emerged and what new ones are they betting on?
Moderator:
Fritz Demopoulos
CEO
Queen’s Road Capital
Panel:




Jungle Ventures
Amit is the Founding Partner of Singapore based Jungle Ventures that invests and helps build tech category leaders from Asia. Jungle invests across all early stages of start-ups and has 40+ investments in Singapore, Indonesia, India, Australia and other hotbeds of entrepreneurial activity in Asia.
Amit brings 20 years of experience in go-to-market strategies and corporate development for start-ups and corporations alike. His corporate life gravitated around Asian market development for public listed tech giants such as Progress Software Corp (NASDAQ:PRGS) and startup experience is dotted with founding and working for startups mainly spearheading new business/ product roll-outs in the region. A Kauffman Fellow(Class 18) Amit has also presided as Vice Chair on the Board of Business Angels Network South East Asia (BANSEA) and currently sits on the Advisory Council for Ethics in AI & Data by the Singapore Government.




Jungle Ventures




HV Holtzbrinck Ventures
Christian joined the HV Holtzbrinck Ventures team in 2013 and is managing the fund’s investments into Dreamlines, Cabify, Tourlane and Exporo among others.
Before coming to HV, Christian was CEO and Co-Founder of flight search engine swoodoo where he was responsible for company development, from market entry to market leadership in Germany and the sale of the company to KAYAK. Then, in his role as Managing Director for Europe, Christian managed the European organization at KAYAK. As a member of the KAYAK management team he was also involved in the successful IPO on the NASDAQ and the subsequent sale of the company to Priceline. During his time at KAYAK, Christian was also active as an angel investor, investing very early in GetYourGuide, one of Germany’s most successful travel startups.
Before swoodoo, Christian first worked as an Investment Manager at a venture capital company and then held management positions in two start-up companies in the media sector. Christian began his career in 1998 at an international strategy consultancy company.
Christian holds a doctorate “summa cum laude” in mathematics and also received an MBA with distinction from the London Business School.




HV Holtzbrinck Ventures




Google Greater China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand
Frank is a Principal at Google Corporate Development, leading Goolge’s M&A and investment efforts in Greater China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Before joining Google, he was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company Greater China Office where he focused on advanced industries and digital media practices. Prior to McKinsey, he was the CEO and Co-Founder of Affordable Luxury Network (myALN.com), a leading flash sale online travel company based in Shanghai. Before myALN, Frank was a Principal at Newbury Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based VC firm investing in Internet, mobile, e-commerce, enterprise software and semiconductor companies. Frank has also worked at Panasonic in its corporate venture/incubator and business development group as well as at Goldman Sachs (Hong Kong) and Salomon Smith Barney (New York) in their investment banking division.
Frank enjoys taking last minute getaways with his family while curating luxury hotels around the world (which led to the founding of his startup). In addition to spending time with his wife and two kids during his spare time, he also does yoga, badminton, and jogging. Frank holds an A.B. with honors in Applied Mathematics from Harvard and an MBA from U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business.




Google Greater China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand
How do we market places to go when we can’t go anywhere? And when for most countries in the world, it’s about domestic versus cross-border travel. This presentation sheds light on how destination marketing took a detour on the road to inspiration and the breakout moments in customer engagement.




Expedia Group Media Solutions
As senior director for the EMEA and APAC regions at Expedia Group Media Solutions, Andrew drives business development and sales for the growing display advertising space. His team works closely with agencies, destination marketing organizations, hotel and airline partners in the region.
Prior to joining Expedia, Andrew was the Director of Business Development & Operations at the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions (NBTC). Before this, he also worked at NBTC in the London office as country manager for the UK and Ireland. He started his career at NBTC after his role as an international marketing manager at VisitScotland.




Expedia Group Media Solutions
The first round of our annual competition to pick out the entrepreneurs who want to reboot travel. Three will be picked to pitch at the Grand Finals on Oct 1. The winner will have the opportunity to present at the Innovation Summit at The Phocuswright Conference in Phoenix, November 16-19, 2020. You get to vote for The People’s Choice, which will also be announced on Oct 1.
In partnership with
Visit one of our lounges, meet, chat and learn.
Our partners in Seoul ran their own competition to pick three worthy finalists who will compete today for the prize of WiT Seoul 2020 Startup of the Year in this final round.
We catch up with the winners of the two previous years, 2018 and 2019, to find out how they survived the storm, how they rebooted and where they see themselves headed.
Moderator:
Marissa Trew
WiT
Panel:




Split
Dylan is Co-founder & CEO of Split, Web in Travel’s Startup of the Year 2018. Backed by 500 Startups & Entrepreneur First, Split began as a payments solution for the travel industry, but had to soon find new footing as COVID-19 dropped their revenues to 0. In 6 months, Dylan has led the turnaround of Split into a leading buy-now-pay-later solution in Malaysia & Singapore, helping consumer businesses gain incremental revenue while making consumer purchases more budget-friendly.
Before starting Split, Dylan spent his career in the online travel industry, most recently in regional marketing & commercial roles at meta-search giant Skyscanner.




Split




Senior VP, General Manager, Attendee Experience, Groups360
Matthew is the co-Founder & co-CEO of IDEM Hospitality and the proud winner of the WiT Startup 2019 Pitch.
Matthew’s vast experience over the past 20 years leading MNC technology firms within the Asia Pacific region (including Getty Images, The ACTIVE Network & Lanyon) has aided him in challenging the status quo with IDEM Hospitality to simplify group travel.
IDEM Hospitality is now Groups360 thanks to an acquisition deal sealed during the onset of the pandemic earlier this year. Groups360 are an online marketplace for meetings and are focussed on simplifying the ways meetings are booked. Marriott, Hilton, IHG and Accor believe in Groups360’s mission and have invested US$50M to accelerate the development of our GroupSync technology (Press Release).
Matthew is responsible for Groups360’s next-level growth, overseeing all aspects of product management in his role as the Senior Vice President of Attendee Experience.




Senior VP, General Manager, Attendee Experience, Groups360
The second round of our annual competition to pick out the entrepreneurs who want to reboot travel. Three will be picked to pitch at the Grand Finals on Oct 1. The winner will have the opportunity to present at the Innovation Summit at The Phocuswright Conference in Phoenix, November 16-19, 2020. You get to vote for The People’s Choice, which will also be announced on Oct 1.
In partnership with
Continuing our run-up to “Rewrite” day on October 1 where we put the spotlight on the women who are rewriting travel their own way.
These past months, all of us have had to dig deep to search for strength to get us through this period, to reboot ourselves for the long climb ahead. Well, there’s no one better to learn from than this journalist who turned to mountaineering on a quest for personal redemption. Find out how Sophie Cairns overcame her fears and asthma to climb seven volcanoes to save herself.




Everything changed for Sophie Cairns when she was thirty and a party-loving journalist in China. Her father died so suddenly that she arrived at his bedside two hours too late. In her grief, she defied her chronic asthma and climbed the world’s seven highest volcanoes to raise funds for charity in his memory. This is a story of redemption through mountain climbing, from Papua New Guinea to Russia by way of Antarctica.
As an amateur climber the author does not gloss over her limitations and (sometimes hilarious) mistakes. She encounters the snobbery of the professional climbing world. ‘I was smothered in a purple goose down onesie as thick as a duvet. Under the plush expedition suit, I wore two pairs of climbing pants, a soft-shell jacket, a fleece top, a pair of inner gloves, a pair of outer gloves, and plastic boots. Not to mention thermal underwear. My plastic climbing boots barely closed around my ankles, which were adorned with three layers of socks.’ Only to be told by those lounging around in T-shirts and shorts: ‘You don’t need to wear your Antarctica clothes yet. Everyone changes on the plane.’ She suffers altitude sickness – so much more dangerous for an asthmatic – but she makes it. Sophie somehow finally said goodbye to her father in that enormous ring of fire.




Battle scars and all, veteran entrepreneurs will tell you about the day the music died, and how they intend to find new songs to sing.




Travelstart
Stephan Ekbergh married father of 4, lives in Cape Town. Ex professional DJ for 10 years. Entrepreneur in Travel. Started the E-commerce revolution in Scandinavia 1999. Is now doing the same in Africa. Passion for releasing gifts and entrepreneurship with people. Writes and speaks about business, life and taking risks. Investor and active boardmember, also works with and finances non profits organization Thembalitscha foundation.




Travelstart




Cleartrip
Stuart Crighton is a founding member of Cleartrip and is responsible for the vision, performance and overall success of the company. He sets the strategy and direction for Cleartrip and ensures scalability of the business model.
Prior to founding Cleartrip, Stuart worked with Abacus Distribution Systems, Asia’s leading GDS as Head, South and West Asia. He was responsible for all aspects of Abacus’s operation and strategy across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal




Cleartrip
*Stay tuned for news of the three winners of the WiT Startup 2020 Pitch who will go on to pitch at the Grand Finals on Oct 1.
“Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?” Marc Andreessen in his article, “It’s Time To Build”. We put product evangelists in the spotlight to ask how Covid-19 changed their product thinking and what they are building for the future.
Moderator:
Mario Jobbe
CEO
Interval 3
Panel:




Wego
Ross is CEO & Co-Founder at Wego, which is online travel marketplace that provides top ranked mobile apps and websites for users living in the APAC and MENA regions. Wego harnesses powerful technology that simplifies the process of searching, comparing and booking flights and hotels across hundreds of airlines, hotels and online travel agency websites. Wego is has dual-HQs in Singpaore and Dubai and is backed by top-tier investors including Tiger Global, Crescent Group, Square Peg Capital and the MBC Group.
Ross is a veteran of the Asian internet industry having established Yahoo!s Southeast Asian operations in Singapore back in 1998 and leading product development efforts across the region for 6+ years. He is also Singapore Co-Chair of H2, the premier global leadership network for the digital industry. Ross has been an active angel investor in the technology sector for a decade and enjoys working with other passionate entrepreneurs. He has worked in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Kuala Lumpur and is now splits his time between Singapore and Dubai. He travels frequently for business but not nearly enough for leisure.




Wego




Travelstart
Paulina Klotzbucher has spent almost 15 years in various verticals in ecommerce and the last decade in the OTA space with Travelstart. In those years she has worked on the technology front as the CTO and later driving the sales and marketing initiatives as CDO/CMO. She currently spends her time between Cape Town, Dubai and Cairo in the role of Group Chief Commercial Officer heading up the Northern Markets and focusing on all spheres of the business; expanding Travelstarts’ reach into the MENA region which also includes developing incubation markets. She has an undergraduate in finance and accounting from the University of the Witwatersrand and later a postgraduate in marketing and information systems from the University of Cape Town.




Travelstart




GlobalTix
Chee Chong is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of GlobalTix Pte Ltd, a leader in ticketing technology in Southeast Asia’s tourism industry.
As GlobalTix’s lead visionary and architect, Chee Chong drives key relationships and provides the overall strategic direction of the startup-up. He is fully committed to developing a global distribution system (GDS) to enhance the overall experience of travel partners, merchants and end consumers.
Since the inception of GlobalTix in 2014 when the first ticket was sold, Chee Chong and the team have grown the business exponentially. Now, it sells one ticket every 10 seconds and hosts more than 80,000 products in 120 cities on its marketplace. Under his leadership, GlobalTix has won numerous industry accolades, including being named Top Partner in 2017 by Resorts World Sentosa and Wildlife Reserves Singapore. Its roll call of partners include major names such as Singapore Airlines, National Gallery Singapore, TripAdvisor and niche operators such as Boon Teng Kee chicken rice restaurant chain.
Chee Chong holds a Bachelor of Engineering (2nd Upper) degree from the National University of Singapore.




GlobalTix




Ixigo
Rajnish Kumar is CTO & Co-founder at ixigo. Rajnish is a technology enthusiast, who has been spearheading Product and Technology, at ixigo. He masters the art of blending technology with business and thinks much ahead in time to serve innovative travel products on a traveller’s plate.




Ixigo
We showcase the best of the entries we received for our Open Call for Product Innovation of Covid-19. Each product gets 4 minutes to tell us what it does, how does it work and why was it necessary.
If there’s one breakout star of Covid 19 and the great human experience of staying home for prolonged periods, it is food. It kept us alive, cheered us up, opened up our world to new food choices. There was wholesale migration online of those who cook as well as those of us who eat. Let’s find out how the whole space of food is being disrupted.




Dish Cult
Jordan is currently Acting CEO of Dish Cult, a restaurant discovery & booking platform, currently available in New Zealand.
Jordan has worked in product strategy & management roles across media & telecommunications companies in the region for over 17 years. He has developed & launched digital products for organisations including News Corp, Fox Networks , and Network Ten across multiple regions including Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan & The Philippines.




Dish Cult
There are some who believe some parts of corporate travel will never return. Then there are those that believe that things will return to normal once the health and safety issues can be addressed. But then there’s the economic meltdown that Covid has accelerated. How will it all play out in the corporate travel sector? We get a buyer’s perspective on how we can rebuild the road to a new future?




Rio Tinto Group
With over 20 years as a senior Corporate Travel, Expense and Payments leader for some of the world’s largest companies, Mike is recognized as an innovator and visionary strategist. He has been based in San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, London and Singapore during his varied career while working for companies such as American Express, Citigroup, Credit Suisse and since 2013, Rio Tinto.
At Rio, Mike oversees the global category strategy for a multi‐hundreds of million dollar program including commercial air travel, charter aircraft, accommodation, card & payment systems and all related technologies. Along with key supplier partners, Mike drove innovation in the Rio payments program resulting in being awarded Best Card Program by Treasury Today at the Adam Smith Asia industry recognition awards. He is currently at the forefront of driving the “digital traveller” and speaks frequently at industry conferences.
Mike is married to acclaimed hotel designer Paula O’Callaghan and lives in Singapore with his two active children. They (naturally) enjoy exploring other cultures and have travelled to dozens of countries as a family.




Rio Tinto Group
Visit one of our lounges, pop in and meet, chat and learn.
We continue our showcase the best of the entries we received for our Open Call for Product Innovation of Covid-19. Each product gets 4 minutes to tell us what it does, how does it work and why was it necessary.
An entrepreneur at heart, Hugh has spent 30 years leading ventures and building innovation communities around startups and corporations. He co-founded what is arguably the first accelerator in Southeast Asia, JFDI, in 2010, raising a fund of $3m. The idea was to place $25,000 in each startup then get them from idea to investment readiness in 100 days. From 2012-2015, JFDI.Asia backed more than 70 startup companies and the harvest is now coming in, realising 30% IRR. In March, when Hugh contracted Covid-19, he launched a new business in quarantine. Let’s listen to his story.




TrustScan
Hugh is an entrepreneur with 30 years success leading ventures and building innovation communities around startups and corporations. He is currently building Predictive, Preventive, Personalized and Participatory Health Ventures as Cofounder at Re:Mission Health and an Adjunct Associate Professor at National University of Singapore. Since 2012 Hugh has co-founded, mentored or invested in more than 70 startup companies, realising 30% IRR.
Hugh’s Physics degree was sponsored by GEC-Marconi Research, where he worked on digital radar, radio propagation and home automation. This technical background gave him the opportunity to train as a TV producer-director with the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, a live primetime science show watched by up to 8 million viewers each week.
Hugh left the BBC to found Narrateo, an independent TV production company. It received a British Academy Award nomination making over 150 documentaries for Discovery Channel and National Geographic.
Building on his experience managing creative people and IP, in 2001, Hugh co-founded Pembridge Partners. This London-based investment and advisory firm raised over USD50m working with 300+ technology media and marketing firms. Hugh captured the insights he gained in his first book Brainfruit, co-authored with Mark Chong, and published by McGraw-Hill.
In 2009 Hugh and his wife chose to raise their son in Singapore, where Hugh co-founded JFDI.Asia. As the first business accelerator in SE Asia, JFDI proved pivotal in kick-starting Singapore’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, deploying approximately USD3m into a portfolio of 70 international startups. JFDI has also supported thousands of start-up founders through its outreach programs. The second book that Hugh co-edited, Facing Down Failure, captures eight Singapore startup stories.
Outside work, Hugh co-founded UAS, a UK education charity, with Simon Singh MBE. UAS has enabled hundreds of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) undergraduates to explore a career in teaching and it now forms part of more than 25% of UK STEM undergraduate courses.
Born a UK citizen, Hugh is now a Permanent Resident of Singapore.




TrustScan
We showcase the best of the entries we got for our Open Call for Covid-19 Business Pivot stories. Each will have 4 minutes to tell us, what they did, why did they do it, how they did it and the results and metrics achieved. Time to celebrate agility, creativity and resourcefulness.
While the global travel sector continues to withstand the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, some markets have started to show signs of recovery. Changed user behaviour requires a change of business strategy. Google Travel has adjusted by leveraging data and Machine Learning to follow recovery.








He started with small community clean-ups to rid beaches of plastic waste after a holiday on a tropical Thai island turned into a plastic horror movie. But he knew clean-ups would not be enough to address the massive problem, and so he started a social enterprise and put on his finance hat to tackle the problem from a business angle. Here’s how he intends to make plastic and sustainability a viable business.




Seven Clean Seas
Tom Peacock-Nazil graduated in the UK in 2011, having studied International Business. After moving to Singapore in 2013 with his wife Pamela, Tom was always upset with the level of plastic pollution in South East Asia as a whole. After one particularly eye opening trip to Thailand, Tom and Pamela decided to start hosting educational, coastal clean ups in Singapore with the hope of highlighting the issue of ocean plastic pollution to the masses. Tom can best be described as an accidental environmentalist and after quitting the rat race to pursue his passion for plastic free seas is now championing the responsible plastic usage movement full-time at Seven Clean Seas.




Seven Clean Seas
At WiT Singapore last year, travel tech evangelists Timothy O’Neil-Dunne and Johnny Thorsen did predict that the industry would change faster than ever in 2020. But we doubt that even they saw the Covid comet coming. In that talk, they painted a future where user interfaces will disappear, thanks to AI; where we will own our identity (can’t wait for that day); and “space tourism is normal and costs the price of a cruise and sleep on demand technology eases the burden of ultra longhaul flights”. We thought we’d invite them back for a reprisal of the future, see how things have changed in their view.




777 Partners
Timothy O’Neil-Dunne joined 777 Partners in 2018. Prior to joining 777, Mr. O’Neil-Dunne founded and served as head of product at Air Black Box. Previously, he held roles at Expedia and Worldspan.




777 Partners




American Express




American Express
In this debate, two Millennials argue it out over how they see the future of work. Who wins? You decide.
For:
Aurélie Krau
Founder
#MissionNomad
Against:
Alicia Eu
Head of Corporate
WE Communications, Singapore
Adjudicator:



Shyn Yee Ho-Strangas
Director, Product Management (Conversations Platform)
Expedia Group
She’s one of Singapore’s most celebrated and animated food guides and chefs. The Israeli-born entrepreneur went from guiding customers through the streets and stalls of Singapore to zooming them into her home and showing them how to cook through her virtual experiences on Viator and Airbnb. Well, tonight, you get a chance to learn to cook a special Singapore dish and you never know with Karni, she’s bound to throw in a surprise or two. Free for the first 20 delegates who sign up. The rest at S$40 each.




Wok 'n' Stroll
Karni Tomer is the Founder and Managing Director of Wok ‘n’ Stroll. Born and raised in Israel, she is deeply passionate about food, having been a food writer for the local business newspaper. She has been living in Singapore since 2000 and also obtained a tourist guide licence in 2015.
Incorporated in March 2013, Wok ‘n’ Stroll specialises in culinary tours. Their tours range from visits to wet markets in the various cultural precincts to luxury gourmet experiences in Michelin restaurants. They also run food photography tours, late-night supper tours, Halal and Vegetarian themed tours. Wok ‘n’ Stroll was shortlisted as the finalist for Singapore Tourism Award (STA) – Best Tour Experience category from 2016 to 2018. Karni Tomer was also one of the finalist of Best Customer Experience (Tourist Guiding) in STA 2018. Her tours are made available for bookings on its website, www.woknstroll.com.sg and across major Online Travel Agents (OTAs) including Expedia and TripAdvisor.




Wok 'n' Stroll




WiT
Yeoh Siew Hoon is the founder of WIT, launching it in Singapore in 2005 and going on to launch WIT editions across Asia Pacific. In 2016, WIT Europe made its debut in London, days after the Brexit vote.
WIT has won several awards including Most Innovative Marketing Initiative and Trade Conference Of The Year from the Singapore Tourism Board and in 2014, Siew Hoon was recognised Tourism Entrepreneur of The Year. A journalist by profession and passion, she’s also a speaker and facilitator at events around the world.
She’s also a published author of titles such as “Around Asia In One Hour: Tales of Condoms, Chillies & Curries” and children’s books such as “Adventures of Habibie The Turtle” and “The Story of Baitong and Boon”.




WiT




Singapore Tourism Board
Keith Tan was appointed CEO of the Singapre Tourism Board in October 2018. Prior to that, he was deputy secretary of policy at the Ministry of Defence (Mindef), responsible for defence policy, strategic communications, national education and Total Defence.




Singapore Tourism Board
We go behind the scenes on what it took to create WiT Experience Week, how we went from analogue to digital to today’s hybrid format. To do this, we had to stitch many pieces together to create an collaborative eco-system of like-minded partners who also needed to rebuild for the new world. This is a story of how content came together with tech and venue to build a new kind of event experience, which will be a model for the future.
Moderator:
Yeoh Siew Hoon
Founder
WiT
Panel:




GlobalSign.In
Veemal Gungadin is the CEO of GlobalSign.In Pte Ltd (GSI) and Vice President for Digital & Innovation at SACEOS. Co-founded by Veemal in 2006, GSI today is a leading event technology company with offices in Singapore, Australia, India, Myanmar and the US. Having graduated from the National University of Singapore with a degree in Computer Science, Veemal remains at the forefront of technology and spearheads the software products being crafted at GSI. GSI’s core products are GEVME, an enterprise events management platform, Judgify, an enterprise awards & contests submission and judging platform and Wylcome a visitor management solution. Veemal is also an investor and advisor for several innovative startups.




GlobalSign.In




Mr Ong Wee Min serves as the Vice President of MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conventions & Exhibitions) at Marina Bay Sands.
In this role, he is responsible for the overall management of the Sands Expo & Convention Centre to ensure its continued success as the top business events and MICE venue in the region.
Prior to his promotion, Weemin was the Executive Director of Sales at Marina Bay Sands and is responsible for Marina Bay Sands’ sales and marketing processes and activities for the various market segments in Association Meetings, Tradeshows and Events both locally and internationally.
In this role, he is responsible for bringing in various first-to-Asia trade shows and exhibitions to Marina Bay Sands. These include iconic events such as Maison & Objet Asia, Lions Club International Convention, Tax Free World Association Asia Pacific and Milipol Asia.








Jublia
At Jublia, we enable attendees to discover event content and meet relevant others through our AI Engagement platform. Jublia is well positioned to deliver game changing solutions with our deep partnerships with leading global event organisers in the digital transformation of their businesses.
Yan leads the synergy between the teams within Jublia, striving to make a positive impact on the digital transformation for events globally.




Jublia




Pigeonhole Live




Pigeonhole Live
The future will be rewritten at both the local and global level. In the short-term, you could argue that Covid-19 swung the pendulum back towards local players who were able to dig deeper into their domestic markets while global giants struggled with their scale and breadth. How will the future pan out? We put several themes to the debate in these two panels.
Panel 1:
Christian Suwarna
CMO, Traveloka/
CEO, Traveloka Experience
Aloke Bajpai
CEO & Co-founder
Ixigo
Panel 2:
John Brown
CEO
Agoda
Cyril Ranque
President, Travel Partners
Expedia Group
COVID-19 has brought upon a generational challenge to the travel industry. While we are now seeing pent up demand for travel in APAC, the path forward is likely to be uneven across the region. To shed light on how the APAC travel industry might evolve post-COVID, we draw lessons from China’s experience thus far – we analyze how Chinese consumers have shifted their preferences, how travel businesses have adapted and ascertain how these can be applied to different countries in the region.




Hermione is a leader with 15 years’ experience in sales, marketing, strategy and business development in the technology & travel sector.
Hermione leads the APAC Travel team for Google’s Large Customer Sales business, working with leading online travel agents, airlines & hotel chains to develop digital business strategy & products for Asian consumers. Additionally she oversees the APAC Vertical search team, who help clients adopt our more technical solutions such as Hotel Ads, and work with our Product & Engineering team to build products for our region. Prior to this, Hermione worked in Google’s Sydney office managing major Retail clients.
Before her time at Google, she worked in the TV industry for 4 years, working for 7media West running the Key Accounts team. When she launched her career she started in Creative Advertising working initially for M&C Saatchi and then TBWA in Sydney.
Hermione was educated in Sydney Australia, completing a degree in Economics & Social Sciences from Sydney University and was awarded the Young Citizen of the Year (2009) by the Woollahra Mulinciptilty.
Hermione now lives in Singapore, and has done so for six & a half years. She is a mum to three young children and a Red Kelpie, and is an incredibly passionate traveler.




Covid has sent e-commerce into hyperdrive. South-east Asia will be home to 310m digital consumers by this year end, reaching a number previously forecast for 2025, according to Facebook and Bain & Company’s Riding the Digital Wave: Capturing Southeast Asia’s digital consumer in the Discovery Generation report released August. That means almost 70% of the region’s population 15 years old and older will go digital by end-2020, and the average online spending per person will triple from US$124 in 2019 to US$392 by 2025. We catch up with a veteran in e-commerce in South-east Asia, who’s had experience with Grab and now Carousell, the consumer marketplace for new and second hand items, and his views on the fast tracking of e-commerce and its implications for travel.




Carousell Singapore
As Managing Director of Carousell Singapore, Chee Soon is responsible for managing overall business strategy as well as daily operations for Carousell Singapore. He is accountable for the overall revenue goals across verticals including Advertisements, SMBs/Merchants, Internal Self-Serve, Autos, and Property, as well as future revenue streams. Chee Soon is a seasoned business leader with over 30 years experience managing businesses of varying scale and complexity, from disruptive startups like Grab, to well established large companies, like HP and Compaq, as well as smaller organisations like Sennheiser. In the process of acquiring deep knowledge of the Asia Pacific region, he has built businesses across different geographies and managed staff across diverse cultures, in more than 20 markets in varying degrees of development.
Some of the key management positions that Chee Soon has held includes Chief Operation Officer of 701Search, Regional General Manager of Grab for Business at Grab, President & Managing Director of Sennheiser Asia, Managing Director of Compaq Singapore and Compaq Philippines, Managing Director of Lexmark ASEAN and South Asia and Managing Direct of Supplies Business for Lexmark Asia Pacific.




Carousell Singapore
Accelerating public cloud adoption was picked by Morgan Stanley as the number one technology theme of Covid-19 changes in this report in June. One investment firm at the forefront of how the cloud will change the world is Future Now Ventures, which was the first Australian private investment firm to partner with Microsoft Australia to accelerate the pace at which independent software vendors (“ISVs”) can grow and succeed. Future Now Ventures launched its first A$100m fund late last year. Co-founder Chris Lee has a successful track record growing and monetising cloud related businesses across the world, including Cloud Sherpas which was acquired by Accenture for a sum said to be greater than $250m in 2015. In this interview, you will hear from Chris how he sees software and the cloud changing the way we work, live, play – well, everything really – and what are the pitfalls and opportunities along the road to the Promised Land?
Interviewer:
Louise Daley
Deputy CEO, APAC
Accor




Future Now Ventures
Chris is responsible for leading origination, financing, structuring and asset management. Prior to Future Now Ventures, Chris held several senior executive finance and operations roles across various IT sectors, including the regional expansion of Cloud Sherpas, which saw over 10 times revenue growth in 4 years. Prior to Cloud Sherpas, Chris held the role of CFO at Kamco (now part of NTT), who were awarded a $494M contract to be the technology and operating partner for the Victorian Public Transport Ticketing System. Chris is a highly experienced finance and operations professional, specialising in assisting fast-growth global consulting services, technology and network integration companies.




Future Now Ventures
This is a crisis that challenges assumptions on all levels. It stripped us down to essentials, made us think hard about the way we work, live and play, and our business. We ask two leaders with different perspectives to tell us in 5 minutes each what Covid-19 challenged their thinking on, and how it will rewrite the future for travel.




Klook
Eric Gnock Fah is the co-founder of Klook Travel, Asia’s leading platform or travelers to explore and book a curated selection of activities. These amazing experiences are verified and vetted by Klook’s team of travel curators and made easily bookable online and on-the-go at unbeatable prices of up to 50% off.
Prior to founding Klook Travel, Eric worked in hedge fund and Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley, focused on consumer and travel companies in Asia. Originally from Mauritius, an exotic travel destination, Eric grew up speaking 7 languages and is a cultural explorer at heart.




Klook




Travelstart
Stephan Ekbergh married father of 4, lives in Cape Town. Ex professional DJ for 10 years. Entrepreneur in Travel. Started the E-commerce revolution in Scandinavia 1999. Is now doing the same in Africa. Passion for releasing gifts and entrepreneurship with people. Writes and speaks about business, life and taking risks. Investor and active boardmember, also works with and finances non profits organization Thembalitscha foundation.




Travelstart
For travel in Asia to take steps towards recovery, bilateral leisure green lanes have to open safely between borders. After all, intra-Asia travel accounts for the bulk of tourism in the region and domestic tourism cannot be the answer for the future. This panel will discuss the importance of establishing leisure green lanes, what is needed to make it happen and who needs to come together to make it happen.




Expedia Group
Choo Pin ANG is Expedia Group’s Senior Director for Government and Corporate Affairs for Asia. In this role, he spearheads the Group’s Asia governmental affairs and public policy strategy across its portfolio of brands such as Expedia, Hotels.com, and Homeaway. Through the engagement of public and quasi-public stakeholders in the region, Choo Pin helps the Group forge partnerships with governments, advocate on regulatory issues and identify business opportunities. He has also helped shape the debate surrounding travel, tech and e-commerce in Asia. He is the Chair of the Travel and Tourism Committee of the US ASEAN Business Council, and has provided training to senior Southeast Asian government officials on e-commerce under the Singapore-US Third Country Training Program.
Choo Pin has extensive experience in political and economic issues across Asia. He previously headed the China operations of a New-York based investment advisory firm conducting political and reputational risk analysis for a clientele of PE funds and SWFs, before joining Standard Chartered Bank as its Head of Public Affairs. Before that, he served as a diplomat in Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs covering International Organizations, Middle East, and Northeast Asia, where he was Singapore’s Deputy Consul-General to Shanghai. Choo Pin has a BA degree from Tufts University and a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, both obtained through the Government of Singapore’s prestigious Overseas Merit Scholarship. He speaks English, Chinese, German, and Spanish.




Expedia Group




Scoot




Scoot




TrustScan
Hugh is an entrepreneur with 30 years success leading ventures and building innovation communities around startups and corporations. He is currently building Predictive, Preventive, Personalized and Participatory Health Ventures as Cofounder at Re:Mission Health and an Adjunct Associate Professor at National University of Singapore. Since 2012 Hugh has co-founded, mentored or invested in more than 70 startup companies, realising 30% IRR.
Hugh’s Physics degree was sponsored by GEC-Marconi Research, where he worked on digital radar, radio propagation and home automation. This technical background gave him the opportunity to train as a TV producer-director with the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, a live primetime science show watched by up to 8 million viewers each week.
Hugh left the BBC to found Narrateo, an independent TV production company. It received a British Academy Award nomination making over 150 documentaries for Discovery Channel and National Geographic.
Building on his experience managing creative people and IP, in 2001, Hugh co-founded Pembridge Partners. This London-based investment and advisory firm raised over USD50m working with 300+ technology media and marketing firms. Hugh captured the insights he gained in his first book Brainfruit, co-authored with Mark Chong, and published by McGraw-Hill.
In 2009 Hugh and his wife chose to raise their son in Singapore, where Hugh co-founded JFDI.Asia. As the first business accelerator in SE Asia, JFDI proved pivotal in kick-starting Singapore’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, deploying approximately USD3m into a portfolio of 70 international startups. JFDI has also supported thousands of start-up founders through its outreach programs. The second book that Hugh co-edited, Facing Down Failure, captures eight Singapore startup stories.
Outside work, Hugh co-founded UAS, a UK education charity, with Simon Singh MBE. UAS has enabled hundreds of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) undergraduates to explore a career in teaching and it now forms part of more than 25% of UK STEM undergraduate courses.
Born a UK citizen, Hugh is now a Permanent Resident of Singapore.




TrustScan




Wego
Ross is CEO & Co-Founder at Wego, which is online travel marketplace that provides top ranked mobile apps and websites for users living in the APAC and MENA regions. Wego harnesses powerful technology that simplifies the process of searching, comparing and booking flights and hotels across hundreds of airlines, hotels and online travel agency websites. Wego is has dual-HQs in Singpaore and Dubai and is backed by top-tier investors including Tiger Global, Crescent Group, Square Peg Capital and the MBC Group.
Ross is a veteran of the Asian internet industry having established Yahoo!s Southeast Asian operations in Singapore back in 1998 and leading product development efforts across the region for 6+ years. He is also Singapore Co-Chair of H2, the premier global leadership network for the digital industry. Ross has been an active angel investor in the technology sector for a decade and enjoys working with other passionate entrepreneurs. He has worked in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Kuala Lumpur and is now splits his time between Singapore and Dubai. He travels frequently for business but not nearly enough for leisure.




Wego
Since 2008, he’s been leading the charge at Accor Asia Pacific, building up the company to 1,200 hotels with 232,500 rooms across 22 countries. The region now accounts for nearly half of Accor’s secured pipeline. He’s overseen the various acquisitions and integrations – Accor purchased Fairmont Raffles in 2016 for US$2.7b, Movenpick Hotels & Resorts in April 2018 for $567m, and the month after, Mantra Group for $1.2b. So if anyone knows APAC like the back of his hand, been through the ups and downs, it’s this Boston-born hotelier. Let’s find out how he sees this biggest of downers, how he keeps up his spirit as a leader of a huge team and what’s his view of hospitality in the future.




Accor
Michael Issenberg is a graduate of Cornell University, USA, and began his full-time hospitality career in 1981 with the Westin St Francis Hotel in San Francisco. In 1986 he moved to Sydney, Australia, where he was Director of Leisure Services for Horwath & Horwath, managing a consultancy practice focused on hotel feasibility, operations and tourism strategy. In a career spanning more than three decades, he has held senior positions across hotel management and property investment including Director of Development for Merlin Properties and CEO of Mirvac Hotels.
He moved to Accor in 1994 as Director of Operations Pacific, and joined the Group’s Executive Committee as CEO Asia-Pacific in 2008.




Accor
Our three semi-finalists picked on September 29 pitch live to our panel of judges. The winner, who will have the opportunity to present at the Innovation Summit at The Phocuswright Conference in Phoenix, November 16 – 19, 2020, will be crowned at the end of day. The People’s Choice, voted by you, will also be announced. Stay tuned.
In partnership with
Visit one of our lounges, pop in and meet, chat and learn.
Offset the impact of the COVID crisis by understanding new travel data insights and trends on recovery globally and for the APAC region in particular with Martin Herbert, Senior Commercial Director – Operators at Travelport. Martin will also cover key results from the newly released Travelport Global Recovery Guide, the technology measures needed to be implemented by the industry to fully restore consumer confidence and the importance of various capabilities to help you build your recovery strategy.




Travelport
Martin is responsible for managing the P&L and growth strategy for key Operator territories including India, Pakistan and Turkey; in addition to leading key commercial projects in the APACMEA region. Martin reports to Travelport’s Global Head of Operators. Operators represent Travelport’s business interests in some 100 markets globally.
In his last role, Martin led the Agency Commerce sales team in Asia in expanding Travelport’s commercial presence across the region (excluding Greater China region, India and Japan), while providing expertise and support to Travelport’s travel agency subscribers and distribution partners.
Martin joined Travelport in 2009 to develop key relationships with airlines in Africa, based in Dubai. He then relocated to Nairobi, Kenya in 2011 as Regional Director. Martin was instrumental in establishing a Travelport Regional Office, and the successful acquisition of Travelport’s Kenya operation and entry into several key countries.
Martin started his career as a software developer working on projects for Thomas Cook and Lastminute.com. He has previously worked for Worldspan, Galileo and Expedia.




Travelport
Fintech and Loyaltech are now as core to travel as Supply and Marketing. COVID has accelerated that process. For many airlines, the only business making money in COVID is the Loyalty unit. For many in hospitality, Fintech cost improvements and credit management are as crucial to survival as reservations. Fortunly predict that in 2020 there will be $4.8trillion spent using digital payments. Travel is changed forever by Fintech and LoyaltyTech. This panel will discuss what you need to do take part in and advantage of this change.
Moderator:
Timothy Hughes
Vice President, Corporate Development
Agoda
Panel:




BIGLIFE
Spencer joined the AirAsia Group in 2006 serving the company in different key roles. In 2015 Spencer became the Commercial Director of AirAsia Malaysia, overseeing multiple portfolios including marketing, S&D, digital, ancillary, revenue management, partnerships and loyalty. In the last 2 years of his service, he grew the commercial revenue by 258% with only 121% capacity increase.
With 13 years of experience with the airline, Spencer was appointed the COO of airasia.com in Aug 2019 to spearhead the digital transformation of airasia.com into a travel tech and lifestyle platform, focusing on non-airline businesses including hotels, experiences, deals and other lifestyle offerings.
Spencer now holds the responsibility to transform BIG Loyalty into a comprehensive lifestyle rewards platform with BIG Points as the universal digital currency. Under his leadership, in the short span of one year, the company’s revenue increased remarkably by almost 60% compared to the year before.




BIGLIFE




Accor
Louise Daley, Deputy CEO of AccorHotels Asia Pacific, has over 29 years’ experience in the Hospitality and Tourism industry in the region. In her current role, Louise is responsible for the financial oversight and management of over 830 hotels with turnover in excess of €4.5b, as well as the non-hotel businesses encompassing vacation ownership, lounge management and subscription loyalty.
Louise is on the Board of the group’s various joint venture businesses including Huazhu Hotels Group, AAK Korea, InterGlobe Hotels in India and Reef Casino in Australia. With responsibility also for Business Intelligence and Analytics, Digital platforms and IT, Louise has a key focus on growing businesses opportunities across Asia Pacific through digital transformation and partnerships.
Her previous roles have included CEO for Accor Plus, Accor’s loyalty subscription program in Asia Pacific; CFO for Accor in the Pacific region; and CFO for Asia. She most recently served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Asia Pacific since June 2015.
Louise completed her Executive MBA at SMU Singapore, has a Diploma in Hospitality and Catering Management, a Bachelor of Business (Accounting) and is a Certified Practicing Accountant (CPA). She has lived and worked in Australia, Thailand, and briefly in Japan, and has been based in Singapore since 2011. She is also a regular speaker and panellist at industry events, and is a member of both the Australian and Singaporean Institute of Company Directors.




Accor




The Monetary Authority of Singapore
Following stints at global insurance companies and payments companies, ran Money20/20s global content program, successfully building their Europe and Asian platforms. Currently leading the International FinTech Office at the Monetary Authority of Singapore. A broad remit, from building the next iteration of the Singapore FinTech Festival to collaborating with a number of national FinTech events, supporting the VC community in Singapore and driving a number of strategic national projects.




The Monetary Authority of Singapore
How will distribution models change in our industry and what is each player doing to survive and move forward? A GDS and an OTA meet up in this session which will ask questions around the present – NDC, the changing dynamics between low cost carriers and full service carriers, living in a domestic only world – and the future. How will the emergence of new demographics influence the model and how must the GDS model and OTA evolve?




Amadeus
She joined Amadeus in January 2019. Mieke is leading a global team to support online travel agencies, travel media companies and travel start-ups grow their businesses and position Amadeus as the partner of choice.
Mieke brings more than 17 years of experience in managing B2C and B2B businesses. Before Amadeus, Mieke worked for Expedia Group, where she held the role of Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer of Egencia, the corporate travel brand of Expedia Group. Earlier, as the Vice President of Expedia Group’s Lodging Partner Solutions, she was responsible for growing and managing the hotel relationships in Asia Pacific.
Prior to Expedia Group, she spent 10 years with Phillips Electronics having held various global, regional and local leadership roles in product, marketing and sales. She started her professional career with McKinsey.
As someone who loves travel and tech, Mieke has her “top three” favorites while on the go
- Her travel is incomplete without her AirPod, Netflix and Spotify!
- Her bucket list includes exploring Bhutan with friends which she believes will up her GNP – Gross National Happiness and traversing the Great Wall of China with her two kids!
- Her mantra is travelling light but with maximum volume – hand carry only!
A Dutch national, Mieke has lived in Singapore for almost 15 years, while also having worked and lived in Europe, Latin America and USA. Mieke holds an MBA from INSEAD and an MSc in Industrial Design Engineering from the Delft University of Technology.




Amadeus




Trip.com
Chee Teong (CT) prior to joining Trip.com was the China General Manager for an international GDS for more than 7 years and has been working in the travel industry for 17 years. CT currently leads a team of Ctrip.com and Trip.com business development professionals; responsible for sourcing and developing flight content internationally. CT has successfully established 20Trip.com global IATA locations, whilst developing agency partnerships across 40 countries, aimed at supporting Ctrip’s flight global expansion across Trip.com.




Trip.com
In 2009, he spoke at our conference themed “Tough Love”. That year, he spoke about the start of the clash of civilisations and the decoupling of the world, To go forwards, we invite him back for another conversation and find out what he sees in our future the next decade.




Banyan Tree Holdings
The founder of Banyan Tree Holdings, Mr Ho is responsible for its overall management and operations. He has been a Director since 5 July 2000. He was designated Executive Chairman on 1 March 2004 and was last re-elected on 24 April 2019.
Mr Ho is also Chairman of Laguna Resorts & Hotels Public Company Limited, Thai Wah Public Company Limited and the Board of Trustees of Singapore Management University. He is a non-executive Director of Diageo Plc.
Mr Ho holds a Bachelor of Arts (Economics) from the University of Singapore, an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration in Hospitality Management from Johnson & Wales University, USA, and an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.




Banyan Tree Holdings
If there is one destination that needed to rise to the challenge of domestic tourism in Singapore, it’s been Sentosa. With a travel-hungry population not able to travel overseas, this island destination joined forces with the Singapore Tourism Board and Economic Development Board to launch a S$45m domestic tourism campaign. In this session, learn how Sentosa’s travel players adapted to a very changed market and how they are building for the future.
Sentosa Development Corporation
Sentosa Development Corporation




Madame Tussauds Singapore
Alex is a General Manager at Merlin Entertainments Group and is responsible for the Madame Tussauds attraction located on Sentosa in Singapore. Since joining the company in 2012, Alex has worked across a variety of the group’s brands and locations spending time in both Australia and the U.K before moving to Singapore. Before joining Merlin in Australia, Alex was raised and studied in New Zealand.




Madame Tussauds Singapore




The Lo & Behold Group
As Chief Operating Officer, Andrew leads operations across the group. He brings with him over 30 years of industry experience in F&B operations and management to The Lo & Behold Group. Prior to joining The Lo & Behold Group in 2012, he served as Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director of Catalist-listed St James Holdings from 2005. From 2001 to 2005, Andrew was the Regional Project Director of The Filter Group, handling major advertising projects for clients and providing support for public relations agency work. He served as Marketing Manager of Zouk from 1993 to 2001 and organised the first ZoukOut festival in 2000.




The Lo & Behold Group




Shangri-La's Rasa Sentosa Resort & Spa




Shangri-La's Rasa Sentosa Resort & Spa
Carnival Corporation has created the world’s first experience Internet of Things platform to deliver enhanced personalization at scale and maximize the guest experience (while leveraging AWS). Currently on ships within the Princess Cruises fleet, we explore how the scalable technology gives guests more control over how they engage in their vacation and generates intelligence that provides crew members with vital insights to deliver hyper-personalized service – and what the future of connected experiences might look like.
Interviewer:
David Peller
Global Head, Travel & Hospitality
Amazon Web Services (AWS)




Carnival Corporation
John Padgett joined Carnival Corporation in 2014 as the chief experience & innovation officer spanning the company’s nine global cruise line brands with a holistic focus on creating exceptional guest experiences. Leading a multi-disciplinary and cross-functional experience and innovation team, Padgett is responsible for guest experience innovation, development, creation and operations integration across creative, digital, technical and operational functions.
In his role, Padgett is creating game-changing guest experiences that are differentiated based on personal interactions, empowered by invisible technology and shared with the world via original media and gaming content.
Carnival took the CES2017 keynote stage to announce the OceanMedallionTM wearable and the world’s first experience Internet of Things (xIoT) as the hinge-pins to MedallionClassTM – a next-level guest experience based on personalization and frictionless service delivery.
On board MedallionClass ships from Princess Cruises, the award-winning transforms vacation by making the entire cruise experience effortless, delivering highly personalized service, and enabling touchless, interactive experiences and entertainment.
Prior to Carnival Corporation, Padgett enjoyed an 18-year career with Walt Disney Parks and Resorts where he spearheaded the invention, development and implementation of guest engagement innovations that include the MagicBand, FastPass+ and Disney’s Magical Express, among other.
Padgett earned a master’s degree in business administration and a bachelor’s degree in finance from Virginia Tech, and holds 35 patents and has won multiple innovation awards.




Carnival Corporation
Concluding our series of the women who are rewriting travel their own way. Dr Angelica Angles grew up in Valencia, looking at the stars with her grandfather. And while other girls dreamed of moonbeams and fairies, she dreamt of becoming a rocket scientist and exploring space, specifically Mars. She was part of the selection team for the site launch of NASA’s Mars Exploration Programme, that includes the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter drone. It was launched on July 30 and will touch down in Jezero crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. In this conversation, she tells us about her work about life on Mars and what lessons we can take from planets such as Mars and Venus – to go forwards, we have to go backwards, and she believes these planets have stories we need to heed.




Department of Earth Science, The University of Hong Kong
Dr. Angélica Anglés is a planetary scientist and astrobiologist (and pianist) whose research is centred around the search for extraterrestrial life on Mars. She studies extreme environments as Mars analog sites, mostly the Qaidam Basin in the mountains of Tibet to find clues for the possibility of life on Mars. Thanks to her research, she took part in the Landing Site Selection for the NASA Mars 2020 planetary mission and she has been part of several NASA panels.
She has won several awards and scholarships to study extreme environments on Earth, such as the Pilbara in Australia, the hot springs in Rotorua (New Zealand), Lake Ciso in Spain or the French Pyrénées. She is the author of several scientific publications in peer reviewed journals and has co-authored a book (Astrobiology & Society in Europe Today) published in 2017. Additionally, she is recognized in the media as an expert in this field, with multiple radio interviews, TV and social media appearances.
This year Harper’s BAZAAR magazine awarded her the title of Visionary Woman 2020, aimed to recognize and honor high-achieving female leaders with true vision in several different fields. Furthermore, she is the Chair of the Explorers Club Hong Kong Chapter, and currently she is still searching for life on Mars!




Department of Earth Science, The University of Hong Kong
The Proposition: The Future Belongs To Zoom-Plus: It’s so much better because we don’t have to travel, we are in control, we are more productive, the tech is going to get better and if we want serendipity, we can always engineer it.
The two teams from WiT Virtual Summit return for a rematch on this hot topic. Again, you decide who wins.
For:
Timothy Hughes, Vice President, Corporate Development, Agoda
Paulina Klotzbucher, Group Chief Commercial Officer, Travelstart
Chan Chee Chong, CEO & Co-founder, GlobalTix
Against:
Timothy O’Neil-Dunne, Principal, 777 Partners
Shyn Yee Ho-Strangas, Director, Product Management (Conversations Platform), Expedia Group
Emilie Couton, Vice President, Digital Marketing APAC, Accor
Adjudicator:
Louise Daley, Deputy CEO APAC, Accor
Your vision of Travel 2025 visualised in an art piece as well as other special items up for bidding. Funds raised will go towards The Island Foundation, our charity of choice for 2020. Since 2005, WiT has raised more than US$500,000 to support women and children causes in Asia. And we announce your People’s Choice, WiT Seoul Startup Winner and WiT Singapore Startup Winner.
To go forwards, we have to go backwards. This is a day where we look back at what happened, what we did, where we are now and where we are headed. The experience begins here.




WiT
Yeoh Siew Hoon is the founder of WIT, launching it in Singapore in 2005 and going on to launch WIT editions across Asia Pacific. In 2016, WIT Europe made its debut in London, days after the Brexit vote.
WIT has won several awards including Most Innovative Marketing Initiative and Trade Conference Of The Year from the Singapore Tourism Board and in 2014, Siew Hoon was recognised Tourism Entrepreneur of The Year. A journalist by profession and passion, she’s also a speaker and facilitator at events around the world.
She’s also a published author of titles such as “Around Asia In One Hour: Tales of Condoms, Chillies & Curries” and children’s books such as “Adventures of Habibie The Turtle” and “The Story of Baitong and Boon”.




WiT
“If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour… you’re gonna see some serious shit.” – Doc, “Back To The Future”
In an internal memo to his team at the beginning of July, Tao Tao wrote, “For many of us, 2020 will feel like a lost year in relationships and career progression. When we went into this crisis as a team, there was a high sense of urgency and adrenaline to keep us going. The crisis gave us clarity. Now we’re on the messy road to recovery.” In this opening session, we look through the eyes of a young leader on what he learnt, the controversial decisions they took during the crisis, and how they’re thinking about the future.




GetYourGuide
Tao Tao is the Chief Operating Officer at GetYourGuide. He leads the company’s business operations.
Tao co-founded GetYourGuide in 2009 while attending the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He has since led several strategic company functions, including Business Development, Supply, and Customer Service.
Under Tao’s leadership, over 30 million tickets have been booked to date via the GetYourGuide website, mobile app, and partnership network. GetYourGuide has raised over $650M from investors such as the SoftBank Vision Fund, Battery Ventures and KKR.
Tao is a native of Beijing, China, and studied economics at Tilburg University and physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.




GetYourGuide
When the proverbial s… hits the fan, it takes nerves of steel as well as ability to raise funds to steady the ship and then, seek out the opportunities to forge a new path forward. In this session, startups share how they have raised funds, among other measures, to stay afloat, and what they see in their future. And for good measure, we throw an investor’s voice into the mix, as to why he would remain interested in travel at this time.




MyRealTrip
Jinmyeong Ju is the Head of Business Planning at MyRealTrip, a travel-tech platform that specializes in Experience products in South Korea. Prior to joining MyRealTrip, Jinmyeong worked as an investment professional at IMM Private Equity, and as a management consultant at Bain & Company.
At MyRealTrip, he led the company’s latest funding round which secured $36 million. Since the pandemic, he is contemplating how the people’s travel patterns will change and what MyRealTrip should prepare to satisfy the needs of future travelers.




MyRealTrip




Mystifly
Rajeev is a eminent visionary with a background rooted in the Technology & Travel Industry. He channelled his entrepreneurial spirit into building a travel technology platform that enables businesses scale newer geographies with ease.
Throughout his 20 years of experience, he has held leadership roles in various capacities across India, UK, Europe and North America. A Computer Science Engineering graduate from Bangalore University, he has consistently demonstrated thought‐leadership and ambitions that propel evolution in the technology and travel landscape. Not one to shy away from collaborative growth, he has supported and shared insights with leading players in the Travel and Hospitality sectors across the globe.
Born from his vision to ease global air travel, Rajeev founded Mystifly in 2009. Since its inception, Mystifly has gone on to win the title of “World’s Leading Airline Consolidator” four times in a row. Under Rajeev’s leadership, the business has scaled across borders with a customer base that is spread across 80+ countries.




Mystifly




Velocity Ventures
Nick is a founder and the Chief Executive Officer of ReadyVentures, a Singapore based early-growth stage investment fund. Nick has invested S$20M in 15 startups across SEA and Australia achieving exits, follow on investments and significant portfolio growth.
Nick started his career in 1985 with Arthur Andersen in Sydney. In 1989 he joined his family Readymix business in Australia and set about expanding to SEA. He has lived and worked in the region since, developing businesses in Australia, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam.
Nick sits on the board of an ASX listed Company, an SGX listed Company and multiple private companies in SEA.




Velocity Ventures




Luxe Nomad
Stephanie Chai, 32, is the founder of The Luxe Nomad, an accommodation booking website that caters to travellers searching for luxury hotels and villas at reduced prices.
Born in New Zealand and having grown up in between Kuching, Sarawak and New Zealand, you would never guess that Stephanie Chai has had a foot in almost every boat imaginable. With a background in modelling and TV hosting, and a Degree in Finance and International Business, she first ventured into the world of entrepreneurship with a startup called WeddingGuideAsia.com, an online wedding portal. A year later in July 2012, Stephanie created The Luxe Nomad to cater to the increasingly sophisticated travel market in Asia.




Luxe Nomad
Covid-19 set in motion a pivot from inbound to domestic. But make no mistake. This Kingdom, which is for the first time ever marketing itself as a travel destination, will influence the shaping of the global travel market in the years ahead, with its infrastructure plans and ambitions. If anything else, this time has given it a golden opportunity to test and prepare for the future.




Seera Group
Muzzammil is an internationally experienced management consulting and operations executive focused on scaling and optimizing operations to enable sustainable growth. Currently, Muzzammil leads Al Tayyar Travel Group’s Online Strategic Business Unit which houses two of the largest OTAs in the region – Almosafer & Tajawal. The Online Strategic Business Unit continues to grow at a significant pace and is focused on serving the needs of travel and tourism customers in the region by providing a seamless end to end experience using technology.




Seera Group
It was one of the early success stories, and its domestic travel was among the first to get back on its feet. Then it had a slight stumble. But make no mistake, this is a market of resilient and resourceful entrepreneurs, as well as young, aspiring travellers. Its population of 98 million makes it one of Asia’s most promising travel markets with high mobile and Internet penetration (expected to rise to 48% in 2023 from 35% in 2017: Statista), and a voracious appetite for social. Let’s get insights into the market




Thien Minh Group (TMG)
Tran Trong Kien is currently CEO and Chairman of the board of TMG, a company which he founded in 1994 and grown it to become one of the largest private travel, hospitality and aviation groups in Vietnam. Kien graduated as a General Practitioner from Hanoi Medical School and he got a MBA from University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Kien is also current chairman of Vietnam Tourism Advisory Board (TAB), Hue Tourism Advisory Board (HTAB), Vietnam Tour Guides Association (VTGA), trustee of Fulbright University Vietnam, Vietnam Tourism Association (VITA), board member of Vietnam Institute of Directors (VIOD), member of the Private Sector Development Research Board (IV Board) of the Advisory Council for Administrative Procedure Reform and ex-member of Asia Commercial Bank (ACB), VP Bank and Vinaland (listed in London AIM).




Thien Minh Group (TMG)
One of Asia’s earliest pioneers in destination experiences goes backwards in time to unpick what happened during the crisis, the weaknesses it exposed and what we have to do to fix it going forwards.




BeMyGuest
Blanca Menchaca is the co-founder and CEO of BeMyGuest, specialists in technology and distribution for Asia’s attractions, tours and activities industry. In her previous role as Chief Operating Officer, Blanca led a highly multicultural Asian operation spread out across Singapore, Philippines, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia.
Prior to BeMyGuest, Blanca was the Global Head of Online Marketing at Wego (www.wego.com), another successful Asian travel company. She helped the company build teams across Singapore, Indonesia, India and the Middle East.
Blanca was born in Mexico but has gained most of her travel and e-commerce experience abroad, with 6 years in Australia and 9 years in Asia so far. She has been referred to by the industry as “the face of a new global travel generation”.




BeMyGuest
Visit one of our lounges, meet, chat and learn.
This is a story of contrasts. One had one of South-east Asia’s most prolonged and severe lockdowns, and in the other, life is back to normal and the worry is actually over-domestic tourism. From the Philippines, we get insights into how Covid changed consumer behaviour and e-commerce spending, and how it will impact travel, and from Taiwan, we will learn how they are managing over-crowding and transforming domestic tourism.




Carousell Philippines
Raffy Montemayor leads Carousell’s business growth and development in the Philippines, with a focus on driving revenue and strategic partnerships. He also oversees the growth of key business verticals, cars, property and the general classifieds business.
Bringing a wealth of experience to the table, Raffy has held leadership positions at HSBC Philippines and was the country director for Agoda, one of the largest online travel agencies in the region. Raffy went on to become the General Manager of OLX Philippines, where he was responsible for the improvement in revenue over 2 years, reshaping the business to a more streamlined model.
Following the merger between OLX and Carousell, Raffy continues in his position of General Manager for the newly formed Carousell Philippines entity.
Carousell is one of the world’s largest and fastest growing mobile classifieds marketplace, with over 200 million listings and a presence in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Australia and is backed by leading international venture capitalists and investors such as Sequoia Capital, Rakuten Ventures, 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures, DBS Bank, EDBI and Naspers.




Carousell Philippines




MyTaiwanTour
Gina Tsai is the founder and Vice President of “Creative Tourism and Community Design Association in Taiwan” (CTCAT) which focuses on identifying and promoting local cultural activities and events offered by local communities and indigenous tribes to enhance the cultural capital of participants, planners, local communities and to differentiate and diversify tourism supply.
Gina is the founder and the Governor of Dream Travel Taiwan Association (DTTA), a think tank that partners closely with Taiwan Tourism Bureau to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and international best practices, and provide thought leadership and expertise to the tourism industry in digital transformation and destination marketing. She joins MyTaiwanTour, a top-rated local tour agency creating custom designed tours that connect international travelers to Taiwan, as the Head of Legal and Government Affairs in 2020.
Gina worked for Airbnb for 4 years. In her previous role in Airbnb as Head of Public Policy, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Gina developed and executed policy campaign for legitimizing home-sharing and short-term rental in Hong Kong and Taiwan, including lobbying, drafting position papers, building high-impact partnerships with public and private sectors, and worked closely with PR/communication team to develop media communication plan for improving corporate image in in these two markets.
Before Gina joined Airbnb, she had 15 years experience and legal expertise on all matters related to trademarks, copyrights, patents and trade secrets, including trademark and patent applications, licensing, and IP protection enforcement actions in Asia. She was the Associate Director of Legal & Corporate Affairs in Microsoft Taiwan for 10 years and Senior License Compliance Director, Asia, in PTC for 2 years.
She is a PhD Candidate at College of Law at National Cheng-Chi University in Taiwan. Gina holds two BAs in both Law and Foreign Languages & Literature from National Taiwan University. She got her LLM from the College of Law at National Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan.




MyTaiwanTour
It raised Series C US$70m funding in August 2019 and CEO and founder Amit Saberwal said for the first time, reaching unicorn status was no longer an outlandish claim. He attributed its success to focus and fearlessness, its mascot being Reddy, the badger. Let’s find out how focus and fearlessness held the ship steady during Covid and how it will see this branded budget accommodation startup through.




RedDoorz
RedDoorz, one of Southeast Asia’s leading budget hotel online booking platforms, is the brainchild of Amit Saberwal. The lack of standardisation in budget hotels, guesthouses and a budget brand are the reasons and alongside having amassed over 20 years of experience in the online travel, e-Commerce and hospitality sectors that drove Amit to creating RedDoorz. Headquartered in Singapore, the brand is spread across Indonesia, Singapore and The Philippines. Currently, the brand’s has more than 500 properties across 16 cities in Indonesia.
Prior to founding RedDoorz, he was the Chief Business Officer – Hotel and International Markets at India’s premier travel and airline booking site MakeMyTrip.com. He was instrumental in shaping the company and was also part of the leadership team growing it to IPO in three years and getting it listed on NASDAQ in 2010, with 85,000 properties globally. He was also turnkey in spearheading MakeMyTrip largest acquisition of Thailand-based HotelTravel.com.
Amit has also previously worked as Director Sales and Marketing with The Park Hotels in Bangalore and New Delhi. He is a Hotel Management graduate with a Post Graduate Diploma in Sales & Marketing from National Institute for Sales, New Delhi.
He also spent time at Cornell University honing his professional skills as a hotelier. He spent his childhood in Delhi, India. He lives in Singapore with his banker wife and two children.




RedDoorz
Every penny counts when marketing funds are limited and yet we have to drive results. This presentation will showcase the results generated through digital media, how it can be done, including micro targeting, as well as the rise of direct bookings during Covid and how to still win.




D-EDGE Hospitality Solutions
He began his career with Accor in New York in 2001 where he was instrumental in the creation of the North American Marketing department for the Sofitel and Novotel brands. In 2003, Pierre-Charles joined the New York-based Monaco Government Tourist Office to promote the destination and its luxury hotels to VIP clients and travel agents. An experience that lead him to join Monte-Carlo SBM where he held responsibilities as Sales, Marketing and E-Distribution Manager. He contributed significantly to the SBM’s commercial development, particularly via electronic platforms (Internet and GDS).
Pierre-Charles has a degree in marketing and management from ESSCA (l’Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Commerciales d’Angers).




D-EDGE Hospitality Solutions
In this session, we learn how Hilton navigated Covid in China, how it rethought its marketing given the constraints and circumstances, lessons learnt, what changes in customer behaviour did Covid accelerate, which are the breakout channels, and how Hilton intends to rewrite the future. Yes, we have a lot of questions to ask. Stay tuned.




Hilton
Wendy Huang joined Hilton in December 2016 as Senior Vice President and Commercial Director for Greater China & Mongolia. Ms. Huang is responsible for all commercial functions across Greater China & Mongolia, including sales, marketing, e-commerce, revenue management, and loyalty and partnerships.
Ms. Huang started her career at Embassy Suites Richmond, owned by Thayer Lodging Group, where she served for 8 years as Director of Revenue Management, managing inventory using various yield management techniques & tools to maximize revenue, monitoring and analyzing market conditions & comp set strategies.
Prior to joining Hilton, Ms. Huang worked for 11 years at Starwood Hotels & Resorts, where she last served as the Vice President of Sales & Marketing for the Greater China area. She worked closely with and provided strategic guidance to the Sales & Marketing teams in over 100 operating hotels and over 100 pipeline hotels throughout the region. She witnessed the growth and development of Starwood Hotels & Resorts in Greater China.
Ms. Huang has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Fudan University, a Master of Management degree from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, as well as a Master of Business Administration degree from Virginia Commonwealth University.




Hilton
Masashi Takahashi said goodbye to travel and the tours and activities startup he founded in 2011 on June 30. Voyagin (original name: FindJPN) was absorbed into Rakuten. As he says it, “Voyagin was my adolescence.” This is the story of growing up with all its associated pangs and pains, and joy, and the future that awaits.




Voyagin
Masashi is the CEO of Voyagin, a marketplace for authentic local experiences in Asia, based in Japan and Singapore. Prior to Voyagin, Masashi worked for AT Kearney and Cyta.jp, a startup for private lesson marketplace in Japan, which was acquired by Cookpad in 2013. While he worked at Cyta.jp, he started hosting international guests in his apartment in Tokyo and eventually became the top Airbnb host in the city, hosting several hundred guests in his living room over the course of 3-4 years. Based on his own travel and hosting experiences, he decided to create a travel marketplace for visitors to Japan called FindJPN in January 2011. This eventually evolved into Voyagin in Dec 2012.




Voyagin
In the run-up to “Rewrite” day on October 1, we put the spotlight on the women who are rewriting travel their own way. Anchalika Kijkanakorn left her 10-year career with GE Capital to set up her hotel group in 2003, with her first property, Aleenta Hua Hin-Pranburi. Her philosophy is about “sustainable luxury” and she achieved her plastic-free goal in June last year. In this one-on-one, we find out how she intends to stay the course she’s set into the future.




Akaryn Hotel Group, Thailand
Anchalika Kijkanakorn is the Managing Director and Founder of award-winning Thai hotel group AKARYN Hotel Group (AHG), a recent chairperson of SLH and SLH board member for the last 12 years.
Anchalika spent 10 years with GE Capital before she founded AHG in 2003 with the acclaimed Aleenta resorts in Hua Hin and Phuket. She later launched the akyra brand which now boasts four hotels in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Phuket and three more in the pipeline, including the brand’s first property in Vietnam. All six AHG hotels are proud members of SLH.
In 2006, Anchalika launched the Pure Blue Foundation, which focuses on environmental protection and local community work with schoolchildren – two causes close to her heart. This led to her inclusion in Forbes Asia’s list of the leading 40 philanthropists.
In conjunction with the Pure Blue Foundation, her newest hotel, akyra Sukhumvit Bangkok, recently became the first new hotel in Asia to launch without any single-use plastic, and was featured in The Times, BBC and Forbes. Under Anchalika’s leadership, every AHG property aims to be free of single-use plastics by June 2019.
She has two young sons and is based in Bangkok.




Akaryn Hotel Group, Thailand
No one has been spared in this crisis, big or small. Some may argue though that the scale that once favoured the global giants could be a handicap in a crisis such as this. You’ve got so much more to lose. Find out how this global OTA weathered the storm in Asia Pacific, what it did to get stronger and fitter, and how it sees the future of online travel in the region in this closing conversation of the day.




Booking.com
Angel Llull is the Vice President and Managing Director of Booking.com, Asia Pacific (A Booking Holdings Company). In this role, he’s responsible for growing and running the Asian and Oceania markets for Booking.com. This includes business development, strategic partnerships, marketing, sales, customer service, human resources, finance and all support and product functions in market.
Prior to joining Booking.com, Angel worked at Horwarth International as Senior consultant for merge & acquisitions. Prior to Horwarth, he spent almost 10 years in different management positions in IBB HOTELS, finalising that stage becoming CEO of the hospitality holding and Board Member. Angel earned different master degrees; one in Tourism Management from Pompeu Fabra University, and an Executive MBA from IE in Madrid. He’s also completed executive programs in Business Management from Stanford University.




Booking.com
In this opening conversation of the day, we find out how leading investors from different regions are thinking differently about their portfolio. In this scorched earth, what gems have emerged and what new ones are they betting on?
Moderator:
Fritz Demopoulos
CEO
Queen’s Road Capital
Panel:




Jungle Ventures
Amit is the Founding Partner of Singapore based Jungle Ventures that invests and helps build tech category leaders from Asia. Jungle invests across all early stages of start-ups and has 40+ investments in Singapore, Indonesia, India, Australia and other hotbeds of entrepreneurial activity in Asia.
Amit brings 20 years of experience in go-to-market strategies and corporate development for start-ups and corporations alike. His corporate life gravitated around Asian market development for public listed tech giants such as Progress Software Corp (NASDAQ:PRGS) and startup experience is dotted with founding and working for startups mainly spearheading new business/ product roll-outs in the region. A Kauffman Fellow(Class 18) Amit has also presided as Vice Chair on the Board of Business Angels Network South East Asia (BANSEA) and currently sits on the Advisory Council for Ethics in AI & Data by the Singapore Government.




Jungle Ventures




HV Holtzbrinck Ventures
Christian joined the HV Holtzbrinck Ventures team in 2013 and is managing the fund’s investments into Dreamlines, Cabify, Tourlane and Exporo among others.
Before coming to HV, Christian was CEO and Co-Founder of flight search engine swoodoo where he was responsible for company development, from market entry to market leadership in Germany and the sale of the company to KAYAK. Then, in his role as Managing Director for Europe, Christian managed the European organization at KAYAK. As a member of the KAYAK management team he was also involved in the successful IPO on the NASDAQ and the subsequent sale of the company to Priceline. During his time at KAYAK, Christian was also active as an angel investor, investing very early in GetYourGuide, one of Germany’s most successful travel startups.
Before swoodoo, Christian first worked as an Investment Manager at a venture capital company and then held management positions in two start-up companies in the media sector. Christian began his career in 1998 at an international strategy consultancy company.
Christian holds a doctorate “summa cum laude” in mathematics and also received an MBA with distinction from the London Business School.




HV Holtzbrinck Ventures




Google Greater China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand
Frank is a Principal at Google Corporate Development, leading Goolge’s M&A and investment efforts in Greater China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Before joining Google, he was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company Greater China Office where he focused on advanced industries and digital media practices. Prior to McKinsey, he was the CEO and Co-Founder of Affordable Luxury Network (myALN.com), a leading flash sale online travel company based in Shanghai. Before myALN, Frank was a Principal at Newbury Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based VC firm investing in Internet, mobile, e-commerce, enterprise software and semiconductor companies. Frank has also worked at Panasonic in its corporate venture/incubator and business development group as well as at Goldman Sachs (Hong Kong) and Salomon Smith Barney (New York) in their investment banking division.
Frank enjoys taking last minute getaways with his family while curating luxury hotels around the world (which led to the founding of his startup). In addition to spending time with his wife and two kids during his spare time, he also does yoga, badminton, and jogging. Frank holds an A.B. with honors in Applied Mathematics from Harvard and an MBA from U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business.




Google Greater China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand
How do we market places to go when we can’t go anywhere? And when for most countries in the world, it’s about domestic versus cross-border travel. This presentation sheds light on how destination marketing took a detour on the road to inspiration and the breakout moments in customer engagement.




Expedia Group Media Solutions
As senior director for the EMEA and APAC regions at Expedia Group Media Solutions, Andrew drives business development and sales for the growing display advertising space. His team works closely with agencies, destination marketing organizations, hotel and airline partners in the region.
Prior to joining Expedia, Andrew was the Director of Business Development & Operations at the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions (NBTC). Before this, he also worked at NBTC in the London office as country manager for the UK and Ireland. He started his career at NBTC after his role as an international marketing manager at VisitScotland.




Expedia Group Media Solutions
The first round of our annual competition to pick out the entrepreneurs who want to reboot travel. Three will be picked to pitch at the Grand Finals on Oct 1. The winner will have the opportunity to present at the Innovation Summit at The Phocuswright Conference in Phoenix, November 16-19, 2020. You get to vote for The People’s Choice, which will also be announced on Oct 1.
In partnership with
Visit one of our lounges, meet, chat and learn.
Our partners in Seoul ran their own competition to pick three worthy finalists who will compete today for the prize of WiT Seoul 2020 Startup of the Year in this final round.
We catch up with the winners of the two previous years, 2018 and 2019, to find out how they survived the storm, how they rebooted and where they see themselves headed.
Moderator:
Marissa Trew
WiT
Panel:




Split
Dylan is Co-founder & CEO of Split, Web in Travel’s Startup of the Year 2018. Backed by 500 Startups & Entrepreneur First, Split began as a payments solution for the travel industry, but had to soon find new footing as COVID-19 dropped their revenues to 0. In 6 months, Dylan has led the turnaround of Split into a leading buy-now-pay-later solution in Malaysia & Singapore, helping consumer businesses gain incremental revenue while making consumer purchases more budget-friendly.
Before starting Split, Dylan spent his career in the online travel industry, most recently in regional marketing & commercial roles at meta-search giant Skyscanner.




Split




Senior VP, General Manager, Attendee Experience, Groups360
Matthew is the co-Founder & co-CEO of IDEM Hospitality and the proud winner of the WiT Startup 2019 Pitch.
Matthew’s vast experience over the past 20 years leading MNC technology firms within the Asia Pacific region (including Getty Images, The ACTIVE Network & Lanyon) has aided him in challenging the status quo with IDEM Hospitality to simplify group travel.
IDEM Hospitality is now Groups360 thanks to an acquisition deal sealed during the onset of the pandemic earlier this year. Groups360 are an online marketplace for meetings and are focussed on simplifying the ways meetings are booked. Marriott, Hilton, IHG and Accor believe in Groups360’s mission and have invested US$50M to accelerate the development of our GroupSync technology (Press Release).
Matthew is responsible for Groups360’s next-level growth, overseeing all aspects of product management in his role as the Senior Vice President of Attendee Experience.




Senior VP, General Manager, Attendee Experience, Groups360
The second round of our annual competition to pick out the entrepreneurs who want to reboot travel. Three will be picked to pitch at the Grand Finals on Oct 1. The winner will have the opportunity to present at the Innovation Summit at The Phocuswright Conference in Phoenix, November 16-19, 2020. You get to vote for The People’s Choice, which will also be announced on Oct 1.
In partnership with
Continuing our run-up to “Rewrite” day on October 1 where we put the spotlight on the women who are rewriting travel their own way.
These past months, all of us have had to dig deep to search for strength to get us through this period, to reboot ourselves for the long climb ahead. Well, there’s no one better to learn from than this journalist who turned to mountaineering on a quest for personal redemption. Find out how Sophie Cairns overcame her fears and asthma to climb seven volcanoes to save herself.




Everything changed for Sophie Cairns when she was thirty and a party-loving journalist in China. Her father died so suddenly that she arrived at his bedside two hours too late. In her grief, she defied her chronic asthma and climbed the world’s seven highest volcanoes to raise funds for charity in his memory. This is a story of redemption through mountain climbing, from Papua New Guinea to Russia by way of Antarctica.
As an amateur climber the author does not gloss over her limitations and (sometimes hilarious) mistakes. She encounters the snobbery of the professional climbing world. ‘I was smothered in a purple goose down onesie as thick as a duvet. Under the plush expedition suit, I wore two pairs of climbing pants, a soft-shell jacket, a fleece top, a pair of inner gloves, a pair of outer gloves, and plastic boots. Not to mention thermal underwear. My plastic climbing boots barely closed around my ankles, which were adorned with three layers of socks.’ Only to be told by those lounging around in T-shirts and shorts: ‘You don’t need to wear your Antarctica clothes yet. Everyone changes on the plane.’ She suffers altitude sickness – so much more dangerous for an asthmatic – but she makes it. Sophie somehow finally said goodbye to her father in that enormous ring of fire.




Battle scars and all, veteran entrepreneurs will tell you about the day the music died, and how they intend to find new songs to sing.




Travelstart
Stephan Ekbergh married father of 4, lives in Cape Town. Ex professional DJ for 10 years. Entrepreneur in Travel. Started the E-commerce revolution in Scandinavia 1999. Is now doing the same in Africa. Passion for releasing gifts and entrepreneurship with people. Writes and speaks about business, life and taking risks. Investor and active boardmember, also works with and finances non profits organization Thembalitscha foundation.




Travelstart




Cleartrip
Stuart Crighton is a founding member of Cleartrip and is responsible for the vision, performance and overall success of the company. He sets the strategy and direction for Cleartrip and ensures scalability of the business model.
Prior to founding Cleartrip, Stuart worked with Abacus Distribution Systems, Asia’s leading GDS as Head, South and West Asia. He was responsible for all aspects of Abacus’s operation and strategy across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal




Cleartrip
*Stay tuned for news of the three winners of the WiT Startup 2020 Pitch who will go on to pitch at the Grand Finals on Oct 1.
“Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?” Marc Andreessen in his article, “It’s Time To Build”. We put product evangelists in the spotlight to ask how Covid-19 changed their product thinking and what they are building for the future.
Moderator:
Mario Jobbe
CEO
Interval 3
Panel:




Wego
Ross is CEO & Co-Founder at Wego, which is online travel marketplace that provides top ranked mobile apps and websites for users living in the APAC and MENA regions. Wego harnesses powerful technology that simplifies the process of searching, comparing and booking flights and hotels across hundreds of airlines, hotels and online travel agency websites. Wego is has dual-HQs in Singpaore and Dubai and is backed by top-tier investors including Tiger Global, Crescent Group, Square Peg Capital and the MBC Group.
Ross is a veteran of the Asian internet industry having established Yahoo!s Southeast Asian operations in Singapore back in 1998 and leading product development efforts across the region for 6+ years. He is also Singapore Co-Chair of H2, the premier global leadership network for the digital industry. Ross has been an active angel investor in the technology sector for a decade and enjoys working with other passionate entrepreneurs. He has worked in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Kuala Lumpur and is now splits his time between Singapore and Dubai. He travels frequently for business but not nearly enough for leisure.




Wego




Travelstart
Paulina Klotzbucher has spent almost 15 years in various verticals in ecommerce and the last decade in the OTA space with Travelstart. In those years she has worked on the technology front as the CTO and later driving the sales and marketing initiatives as CDO/CMO. She currently spends her time between Cape Town, Dubai and Cairo in the role of Group Chief Commercial Officer heading up the Northern Markets and focusing on all spheres of the business; expanding Travelstarts’ reach into the MENA region which also includes developing incubation markets. She has an undergraduate in finance and accounting from the University of the Witwatersrand and later a postgraduate in marketing and information systems from the University of Cape Town.




Travelstart




GlobalTix
Chee Chong is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of GlobalTix Pte Ltd, a leader in ticketing technology in Southeast Asia’s tourism industry.
As GlobalTix’s lead visionary and architect, Chee Chong drives key relationships and provides the overall strategic direction of the startup-up. He is fully committed to developing a global distribution system (GDS) to enhance the overall experience of travel partners, merchants and end consumers.
Since the inception of GlobalTix in 2014 when the first ticket was sold, Chee Chong and the team have grown the business exponentially. Now, it sells one ticket every 10 seconds and hosts more than 80,000 products in 120 cities on its marketplace. Under his leadership, GlobalTix has won numerous industry accolades, including being named Top Partner in 2017 by Resorts World Sentosa and Wildlife Reserves Singapore. Its roll call of partners include major names such as Singapore Airlines, National Gallery Singapore, TripAdvisor and niche operators such as Boon Teng Kee chicken rice restaurant chain.
Chee Chong holds a Bachelor of Engineering (2nd Upper) degree from the National University of Singapore.




GlobalTix




Ixigo
Rajnish Kumar is CTO & Co-founder at ixigo. Rajnish is a technology enthusiast, who has been spearheading Product and Technology, at ixigo. He masters the art of blending technology with business and thinks much ahead in time to serve innovative travel products on a traveller’s plate.




Ixigo
We showcase the best of the entries we received for our Open Call for Product Innovation of Covid-19. Each product gets 4 minutes to tell us what it does, how does it work and why was it necessary.
If there’s one breakout star of Covid 19 and the great human experience of staying home for prolonged periods, it is food. It kept us alive, cheered us up, opened up our world to new food choices. There was wholesale migration online of those who cook as well as those of us who eat. Let’s find out how the whole space of food is being disrupted.




Dish Cult
Jordan is currently Acting CEO of Dish Cult, a restaurant discovery & booking platform, currently available in New Zealand.
Jordan has worked in product strategy & management roles across media & telecommunications companies in the region for over 17 years. He has developed & launched digital products for organisations including News Corp, Fox Networks , and Network Ten across multiple regions including Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan & The Philippines.




Dish Cult
There are some who believe some parts of corporate travel will never return. Then there are those that believe that things will return to normal once the health and safety issues can be addressed. But then there’s the economic meltdown that Covid has accelerated. How will it all play out in the corporate travel sector? We get a buyer’s perspective on how we can rebuild the road to a new future?




Rio Tinto Group
With over 20 years as a senior Corporate Travel, Expense and Payments leader for some of the world’s largest companies, Mike is recognized as an innovator and visionary strategist. He has been based in San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, London and Singapore during his varied career while working for companies such as American Express, Citigroup, Credit Suisse and since 2013, Rio Tinto.
At Rio, Mike oversees the global category strategy for a multi‐hundreds of million dollar program including commercial air travel, charter aircraft, accommodation, card & payment systems and all related technologies. Along with key supplier partners, Mike drove innovation in the Rio payments program resulting in being awarded Best Card Program by Treasury Today at the Adam Smith Asia industry recognition awards. He is currently at the forefront of driving the “digital traveller” and speaks frequently at industry conferences.
Mike is married to acclaimed hotel designer Paula O’Callaghan and lives in Singapore with his two active children. They (naturally) enjoy exploring other cultures and have travelled to dozens of countries as a family.




Rio Tinto Group
Visit one of our lounges, pop in and meet, chat and learn.
We continue our showcase the best of the entries we received for our Open Call for Product Innovation of Covid-19. Each product gets 4 minutes to tell us what it does, how does it work and why was it necessary.
An entrepreneur at heart, Hugh has spent 30 years leading ventures and building innovation communities around startups and corporations. He co-founded what is arguably the first accelerator in Southeast Asia, JFDI, in 2010, raising a fund of $3m. The idea was to place $25,000 in each startup then get them from idea to investment readiness in 100 days. From 2012-2015, JFDI.Asia backed more than 70 startup companies and the harvest is now coming in, realising 30% IRR. In March, when Hugh contracted Covid-19, he launched a new business in quarantine. Let’s listen to his story.




TrustScan
Hugh is an entrepreneur with 30 years success leading ventures and building innovation communities around startups and corporations. He is currently building Predictive, Preventive, Personalized and Participatory Health Ventures as Cofounder at Re:Mission Health and an Adjunct Associate Professor at National University of Singapore. Since 2012 Hugh has co-founded, mentored or invested in more than 70 startup companies, realising 30% IRR.
Hugh’s Physics degree was sponsored by GEC-Marconi Research, where he worked on digital radar, radio propagation and home automation. This technical background gave him the opportunity to train as a TV producer-director with the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, a live primetime science show watched by up to 8 million viewers each week.
Hugh left the BBC to found Narrateo, an independent TV production company. It received a British Academy Award nomination making over 150 documentaries for Discovery Channel and National Geographic.
Building on his experience managing creative people and IP, in 2001, Hugh co-founded Pembridge Partners. This London-based investment and advisory firm raised over USD50m working with 300+ technology media and marketing firms. Hugh captured the insights he gained in his first book Brainfruit, co-authored with Mark Chong, and published by McGraw-Hill.
In 2009 Hugh and his wife chose to raise their son in Singapore, where Hugh co-founded JFDI.Asia. As the first business accelerator in SE Asia, JFDI proved pivotal in kick-starting Singapore’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, deploying approximately USD3m into a portfolio of 70 international startups. JFDI has also supported thousands of start-up founders through its outreach programs. The second book that Hugh co-edited, Facing Down Failure, captures eight Singapore startup stories.
Outside work, Hugh co-founded UAS, a UK education charity, with Simon Singh MBE. UAS has enabled hundreds of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) undergraduates to explore a career in teaching and it now forms part of more than 25% of UK STEM undergraduate courses.
Born a UK citizen, Hugh is now a Permanent Resident of Singapore.




TrustScan
We showcase the best of the entries we got for our Open Call for Covid-19 Business Pivot stories. Each will have 4 minutes to tell us, what they did, why did they do it, how they did it and the results and metrics achieved. Time to celebrate agility, creativity and resourcefulness.
While the global travel sector continues to withstand the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, some markets have started to show signs of recovery. Changed user behaviour requires a change of business strategy. Google Travel has adjusted by leveraging data and Machine Learning to follow recovery.








He started with small community clean-ups to rid beaches of plastic waste after a holiday on a tropical Thai island turned into a plastic horror movie. But he knew clean-ups would not be enough to address the massive problem, and so he started a social enterprise and put on his finance hat to tackle the problem from a business angle. Here’s how he intends to make plastic and sustainability a viable business.




Seven Clean Seas
Tom Peacock-Nazil graduated in the UK in 2011, having studied International Business. After moving to Singapore in 2013 with his wife Pamela, Tom was always upset with the level of plastic pollution in South East Asia as a whole. After one particularly eye opening trip to Thailand, Tom and Pamela decided to start hosting educational, coastal clean ups in Singapore with the hope of highlighting the issue of ocean plastic pollution to the masses. Tom can best be described as an accidental environmentalist and after quitting the rat race to pursue his passion for plastic free seas is now championing the responsible plastic usage movement full-time at Seven Clean Seas.




Seven Clean Seas
At WiT Singapore last year, travel tech evangelists Timothy O’Neil-Dunne and Johnny Thorsen did predict that the industry would change faster than ever in 2020. But we doubt that even they saw the Covid comet coming. In that talk, they painted a future where user interfaces will disappear, thanks to AI; where we will own our identity (can’t wait for that day); and “space tourism is normal and costs the price of a cruise and sleep on demand technology eases the burden of ultra longhaul flights”. We thought we’d invite them back for a reprisal of the future, see how things have changed in their view.




777 Partners
Timothy O’Neil-Dunne joined 777 Partners in 2018. Prior to joining 777, Mr. O’Neil-Dunne founded and served as head of product at Air Black Box. Previously, he held roles at Expedia and Worldspan.




777 Partners




American Express




American Express
In this debate, two Millennials argue it out over how they see the future of work. Who wins? You decide.
For:
Aurélie Krau
Founder
#MissionNomad
Against:
Alicia Eu
Head of Corporate
WE Communications, Singapore
Adjudicator:



Shyn Yee Ho-Strangas
Director, Product Management (Conversations Platform)
Expedia Group
She’s one of Singapore’s most celebrated and animated food guides and chefs. The Israeli-born entrepreneur went from guiding customers through the streets and stalls of Singapore to zooming them into her home and showing them how to cook through her virtual experiences on Viator and Airbnb. Well, tonight, you get a chance to learn to cook a special Singapore dish and you never know with Karni, she’s bound to throw in a surprise or two. Free for the first 20 delegates who sign up. The rest at S$40 each.




Wok 'n' Stroll
Karni Tomer is the Founder and Managing Director of Wok ‘n’ Stroll. Born and raised in Israel, she is deeply passionate about food, having been a food writer for the local business newspaper. She has been living in Singapore since 2000 and also obtained a tourist guide licence in 2015.
Incorporated in March 2013, Wok ‘n’ Stroll specialises in culinary tours. Their tours range from visits to wet markets in the various cultural precincts to luxury gourmet experiences in Michelin restaurants. They also run food photography tours, late-night supper tours, Halal and Vegetarian themed tours. Wok ‘n’ Stroll was shortlisted as the finalist for Singapore Tourism Award (STA) – Best Tour Experience category from 2016 to 2018. Karni Tomer was also one of the finalist of Best Customer Experience (Tourist Guiding) in STA 2018. Her tours are made available for bookings on its website, www.woknstroll.com.sg and across major Online Travel Agents (OTAs) including Expedia and TripAdvisor.




Wok 'n' Stroll




WiT
Yeoh Siew Hoon is the founder of WIT, launching it in Singapore in 2005 and going on to launch WIT editions across Asia Pacific. In 2016, WIT Europe made its debut in London, days after the Brexit vote.
WIT has won several awards including Most Innovative Marketing Initiative and Trade Conference Of The Year from the Singapore Tourism Board and in 2014, Siew Hoon was recognised Tourism Entrepreneur of The Year. A journalist by profession and passion, she’s also a speaker and facilitator at events around the world.
She’s also a published author of titles such as “Around Asia In One Hour: Tales of Condoms, Chillies & Curries” and children’s books such as “Adventures of Habibie The Turtle” and “The Story of Baitong and Boon”.




WiT




Singapore Tourism Board
Keith Tan was appointed CEO of the Singapre Tourism Board in October 2018. Prior to that, he was deputy secretary of policy at the Ministry of Defence (Mindef), responsible for defence policy, strategic communications, national education and Total Defence.




Singapore Tourism Board
We go behind the scenes on what it took to create WiT Experience Week, how we went from analogue to digital to today’s hybrid format. To do this, we had to stitch many pieces together to create an collaborative eco-system of like-minded partners who also needed to rebuild for the new world. This is a story of how content came together with tech and venue to build a new kind of event experience, which will be a model for the future.
Moderator:
Yeoh Siew Hoon
Founder
WiT
Panel:




GlobalSign.In
Veemal Gungadin is the CEO of GlobalSign.In Pte Ltd (GSI) and Vice President for Digital & Innovation at SACEOS. Co-founded by Veemal in 2006, GSI today is a leading event technology company with offices in Singapore, Australia, India, Myanmar and the US. Having graduated from the National University of Singapore with a degree in Computer Science, Veemal remains at the forefront of technology and spearheads the software products being crafted at GSI. GSI’s core products are GEVME, an enterprise events management platform, Judgify, an enterprise awards & contests submission and judging platform and Wylcome a visitor management solution. Veemal is also an investor and advisor for several innovative startups.




GlobalSign.In




Mr Ong Wee Min serves as the Vice President of MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conventions & Exhibitions) at Marina Bay Sands.
In this role, he is responsible for the overall management of the Sands Expo & Convention Centre to ensure its continued success as the top business events and MICE venue in the region.
Prior to his promotion, Weemin was the Executive Director of Sales at Marina Bay Sands and is responsible for Marina Bay Sands’ sales and marketing processes and activities for the various market segments in Association Meetings, Tradeshows and Events both locally and internationally.
In this role, he is responsible for bringing in various first-to-Asia trade shows and exhibitions to Marina Bay Sands. These include iconic events such as Maison & Objet Asia, Lions Club International Convention, Tax Free World Association Asia Pacific and Milipol Asia.








Jublia
At Jublia, we enable attendees to discover event content and meet relevant others through our AI Engagement platform. Jublia is well positioned to deliver game changing solutions with our deep partnerships with leading global event organisers in the digital transformation of their businesses.
Yan leads the synergy between the teams within Jublia, striving to make a positive impact on the digital transformation for events globally.




Jublia




Pigeonhole Live




Pigeonhole Live
The future will be rewritten at both the local and global level. In the short-term, you could argue that Covid-19 swung the pendulum back towards local players who were able to dig deeper into their domestic markets while global giants struggled with their scale and breadth. How will the future pan out? We put several themes to the debate in these two panels.
Panel 1:
Christian Suwarna
CMO, Traveloka/
CEO, Traveloka Experience
Aloke Bajpai
CEO & Co-founder
Ixigo
Panel 2:
John Brown
CEO
Agoda
Cyril Ranque
President, Travel Partners
Expedia Group
COVID-19 has brought upon a generational challenge to the travel industry. While we are now seeing pent up demand for travel in APAC, the path forward is likely to be uneven across the region. To shed light on how the APAC travel industry might evolve post-COVID, we draw lessons from China’s experience thus far – we analyze how Chinese consumers have shifted their preferences, how travel businesses have adapted and ascertain how these can be applied to different countries in the region.




Hermione is a leader with 15 years’ experience in sales, marketing, strategy and business development in the technology & travel sector.
Hermione leads the APAC Travel team for Google’s Large Customer Sales business, working with leading online travel agents, airlines & hotel chains to develop digital business strategy & products for Asian consumers. Additionally she oversees the APAC Vertical search team, who help clients adopt our more technical solutions such as Hotel Ads, and work with our Product & Engineering team to build products for our region. Prior to this, Hermione worked in Google’s Sydney office managing major Retail clients.
Before her time at Google, she worked in the TV industry for 4 years, working for 7media West running the Key Accounts team. When she launched her career she started in Creative Advertising working initially for M&C Saatchi and then TBWA in Sydney.
Hermione was educated in Sydney Australia, completing a degree in Economics & Social Sciences from Sydney University and was awarded the Young Citizen of the Year (2009) by the Woollahra Mulinciptilty.
Hermione now lives in Singapore, and has done so for six & a half years. She is a mum to three young children and a Red Kelpie, and is an incredibly passionate traveler.




Covid has sent e-commerce into hyperdrive. South-east Asia will be home to 310m digital consumers by this year end, reaching a number previously forecast for 2025, according to Facebook and Bain & Company’s Riding the Digital Wave: Capturing Southeast Asia’s digital consumer in the Discovery Generation report released August. That means almost 70% of the region’s population 15 years old and older will go digital by end-2020, and the average online spending per person will triple from US$124 in 2019 to US$392 by 2025. We catch up with a veteran in e-commerce in South-east Asia, who’s had experience with Grab and now Carousell, the consumer marketplace for new and second hand items, and his views on the fast tracking of e-commerce and its implications for travel.




Carousell Singapore
As Managing Director of Carousell Singapore, Chee Soon is responsible for managing overall business strategy as well as daily operations for Carousell Singapore. He is accountable for the overall revenue goals across verticals including Advertisements, SMBs/Merchants, Internal Self-Serve, Autos, and Property, as well as future revenue streams. Chee Soon is a seasoned business leader with over 30 years experience managing businesses of varying scale and complexity, from disruptive startups like Grab, to well established large companies, like HP and Compaq, as well as smaller organisations like Sennheiser. In the process of acquiring deep knowledge of the Asia Pacific region, he has built businesses across different geographies and managed staff across diverse cultures, in more than 20 markets in varying degrees of development.
Some of the key management positions that Chee Soon has held includes Chief Operation Officer of 701Search, Regional General Manager of Grab for Business at Grab, President & Managing Director of Sennheiser Asia, Managing Director of Compaq Singapore and Compaq Philippines, Managing Director of Lexmark ASEAN and South Asia and Managing Direct of Supplies Business for Lexmark Asia Pacific.




Carousell Singapore
Accelerating public cloud adoption was picked by Morgan Stanley as the number one technology theme of Covid-19 changes in this report in June. One investment firm at the forefront of how the cloud will change the world is Future Now Ventures, which was the first Australian private investment firm to partner with Microsoft Australia to accelerate the pace at which independent software vendors (“ISVs”) can grow and succeed. Future Now Ventures launched its first A$100m fund late last year. Co-founder Chris Lee has a successful track record growing and monetising cloud related businesses across the world, including Cloud Sherpas which was acquired by Accenture for a sum said to be greater than $250m in 2015. In this interview, you will hear from Chris how he sees software and the cloud changing the way we work, live, play – well, everything really – and what are the pitfalls and opportunities along the road to the Promised Land?
Interviewer:
Louise Daley
Deputy CEO, APAC
Accor




Future Now Ventures
Chris is responsible for leading origination, financing, structuring and asset management. Prior to Future Now Ventures, Chris held several senior executive finance and operations roles across various IT sectors, including the regional expansion of Cloud Sherpas, which saw over 10 times revenue growth in 4 years. Prior to Cloud Sherpas, Chris held the role of CFO at Kamco (now part of NTT), who were awarded a $494M contract to be the technology and operating partner for the Victorian Public Transport Ticketing System. Chris is a highly experienced finance and operations professional, specialising in assisting fast-growth global consulting services, technology and network integration companies.




Future Now Ventures
This is a crisis that challenges assumptions on all levels. It stripped us down to essentials, made us think hard about the way we work, live and play, and our business. We ask two leaders with different perspectives to tell us in 5 minutes each what Covid-19 challenged their thinking on, and how it will rewrite the future for travel.




Klook
Eric Gnock Fah is the co-founder of Klook Travel, Asia’s leading platform or travelers to explore and book a curated selection of activities. These amazing experiences are verified and vetted by Klook’s team of travel curators and made easily bookable online and on-the-go at unbeatable prices of up to 50% off.
Prior to founding Klook Travel, Eric worked in hedge fund and Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley, focused on consumer and travel companies in Asia. Originally from Mauritius, an exotic travel destination, Eric grew up speaking 7 languages and is a cultural explorer at heart.




Klook




Travelstart
Stephan Ekbergh married father of 4, lives in Cape Town. Ex professional DJ for 10 years. Entrepreneur in Travel. Started the E-commerce revolution in Scandinavia 1999. Is now doing the same in Africa. Passion for releasing gifts and entrepreneurship with people. Writes and speaks about business, life and taking risks. Investor and active boardmember, also works with and finances non profits organization Thembalitscha foundation.




Travelstart
For travel in Asia to take steps towards recovery, bilateral leisure green lanes have to open safely between borders. After all, intra-Asia travel accounts for the bulk of tourism in the region and domestic tourism cannot be the answer for the future. This panel will discuss the importance of establishing leisure green lanes, what is needed to make it happen and who needs to come together to make it happen.




Expedia Group
Choo Pin ANG is Expedia Group’s Senior Director for Government and Corporate Affairs for Asia. In this role, he spearheads the Group’s Asia governmental affairs and public policy strategy across its portfolio of brands such as Expedia, Hotels.com, and Homeaway. Through the engagement of public and quasi-public stakeholders in the region, Choo Pin helps the Group forge partnerships with governments, advocate on regulatory issues and identify business opportunities. He has also helped shape the debate surrounding travel, tech and e-commerce in Asia. He is the Chair of the Travel and Tourism Committee of the US ASEAN Business Council, and has provided training to senior Southeast Asian government officials on e-commerce under the Singapore-US Third Country Training Program.
Choo Pin has extensive experience in political and economic issues across Asia. He previously headed the China operations of a New-York based investment advisory firm conducting political and reputational risk analysis for a clientele of PE funds and SWFs, before joining Standard Chartered Bank as its Head of Public Affairs. Before that, he served as a diplomat in Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs covering International Organizations, Middle East, and Northeast Asia, where he was Singapore’s Deputy Consul-General to Shanghai. Choo Pin has a BA degree from Tufts University and a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, both obtained through the Government of Singapore’s prestigious Overseas Merit Scholarship. He speaks English, Chinese, German, and Spanish.




Expedia Group




Scoot




Scoot




TrustScan
Hugh is an entrepreneur with 30 years success leading ventures and building innovation communities around startups and corporations. He is currently building Predictive, Preventive, Personalized and Participatory Health Ventures as Cofounder at Re:Mission Health and an Adjunct Associate Professor at National University of Singapore. Since 2012 Hugh has co-founded, mentored or invested in more than 70 startup companies, realising 30% IRR.
Hugh’s Physics degree was sponsored by GEC-Marconi Research, where he worked on digital radar, radio propagation and home automation. This technical background gave him the opportunity to train as a TV producer-director with the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, a live primetime science show watched by up to 8 million viewers each week.
Hugh left the BBC to found Narrateo, an independent TV production company. It received a British Academy Award nomination making over 150 documentaries for Discovery Channel and National Geographic.
Building on his experience managing creative people and IP, in 2001, Hugh co-founded Pembridge Partners. This London-based investment and advisory firm raised over USD50m working with 300+ technology media and marketing firms. Hugh captured the insights he gained in his first book Brainfruit, co-authored with Mark Chong, and published by McGraw-Hill.
In 2009 Hugh and his wife chose to raise their son in Singapore, where Hugh co-founded JFDI.Asia. As the first business accelerator in SE Asia, JFDI proved pivotal in kick-starting Singapore’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, deploying approximately USD3m into a portfolio of 70 international startups. JFDI has also supported thousands of start-up founders through its outreach programs. The second book that Hugh co-edited, Facing Down Failure, captures eight Singapore startup stories.
Outside work, Hugh co-founded UAS, a UK education charity, with Simon Singh MBE. UAS has enabled hundreds of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) undergraduates to explore a career in teaching and it now forms part of more than 25% of UK STEM undergraduate courses.
Born a UK citizen, Hugh is now a Permanent Resident of Singapore.




TrustScan




Wego
Ross is CEO & Co-Founder at Wego, which is online travel marketplace that provides top ranked mobile apps and websites for users living in the APAC and MENA regions. Wego harnesses powerful technology that simplifies the process of searching, comparing and booking flights and hotels across hundreds of airlines, hotels and online travel agency websites. Wego is has dual-HQs in Singpaore and Dubai and is backed by top-tier investors including Tiger Global, Crescent Group, Square Peg Capital and the MBC Group.
Ross is a veteran of the Asian internet industry having established Yahoo!s Southeast Asian operations in Singapore back in 1998 and leading product development efforts across the region for 6+ years. He is also Singapore Co-Chair of H2, the premier global leadership network for the digital industry. Ross has been an active angel investor in the technology sector for a decade and enjoys working with other passionate entrepreneurs. He has worked in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Kuala Lumpur and is now splits his time between Singapore and Dubai. He travels frequently for business but not nearly enough for leisure.




Wego
Since 2008, he’s been leading the charge at Accor Asia Pacific, building up the company to 1,200 hotels with 232,500 rooms across 22 countries. The region now accounts for nearly half of Accor’s secured pipeline. He’s overseen the various acquisitions and integrations – Accor purchased Fairmont Raffles in 2016 for US$2.7b, Movenpick Hotels & Resorts in April 2018 for $567m, and the month after, Mantra Group for $1.2b. So if anyone knows APAC like the back of his hand, been through the ups and downs, it’s this Boston-born hotelier. Let’s find out how he sees this biggest of downers, how he keeps up his spirit as a leader of a huge team and what’s his view of hospitality in the future.




Accor
Michael Issenberg is a graduate of Cornell University, USA, and began his full-time hospitality career in 1981 with the Westin St Francis Hotel in San Francisco. In 1986 he moved to Sydney, Australia, where he was Director of Leisure Services for Horwath & Horwath, managing a consultancy practice focused on hotel feasibility, operations and tourism strategy. In a career spanning more than three decades, he has held senior positions across hotel management and property investment including Director of Development for Merlin Properties and CEO of Mirvac Hotels.
He moved to Accor in 1994 as Director of Operations Pacific, and joined the Group’s Executive Committee as CEO Asia-Pacific in 2008.




Accor
Our three semi-finalists picked on September 29 pitch live to our panel of judges. The winner, who will have the opportunity to present at the Innovation Summit at The Phocuswright Conference in Phoenix, November 16 – 19, 2020, will be crowned at the end of day. The People’s Choice, voted by you, will also be announced. Stay tuned.
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Offset the impact of the COVID crisis by understanding new travel data insights and trends on recovery globally and for the APAC region in particular with Martin Herbert, Senior Commercial Director – Operators at Travelport. Martin will also cover key results from the newly released Travelport Global Recovery Guide, the technology measures needed to be implemented by the industry to fully restore consumer confidence and the importance of various capabilities to help you build your recovery strategy.




Travelport
Martin is responsible for managing the P&L and growth strategy for key Operator territories including India, Pakistan and Turkey; in addition to leading key commercial projects in the APACMEA region. Martin reports to Travelport’s Global Head of Operators. Operators represent Travelport’s business interests in some 100 markets globally.
In his last role, Martin led the Agency Commerce sales team in Asia in expanding Travelport’s commercial presence across the region (excluding Greater China region, India and Japan), while providing expertise and support to Travelport’s travel agency subscribers and distribution partners.
Martin joined Travelport in 2009 to develop key relationships with airlines in Africa, based in Dubai. He then relocated to Nairobi, Kenya in 2011 as Regional Director. Martin was instrumental in establishing a Travelport Regional Office, and the successful acquisition of Travelport’s Kenya operation and entry into several key countries.
Martin started his career as a software developer working on projects for Thomas Cook and Lastminute.com. He has previously worked for Worldspan, Galileo and Expedia.




Travelport
Fintech and Loyaltech are now as core to travel as Supply and Marketing. COVID has accelerated that process. For many airlines, the only business making money in COVID is the Loyalty unit. For many in hospitality, Fintech cost improvements and credit management are as crucial to survival as reservations. Fortunly predict that in 2020 there will be $4.8trillion spent using digital payments. Travel is changed forever by Fintech and LoyaltyTech. This panel will discuss what you need to do take part in and advantage of this change.
Moderator:
Timothy Hughes
Vice President, Corporate Development
Agoda
Panel:




BIGLIFE
Spencer joined the AirAsia Group in 2006 serving the company in different key roles. In 2015 Spencer became the Commercial Director of AirAsia Malaysia, overseeing multiple portfolios including marketing, S&D, digital, ancillary, revenue management, partnerships and loyalty. In the last 2 years of his service, he grew the commercial revenue by 258% with only 121% capacity increase.
With 13 years of experience with the airline, Spencer was appointed the COO of airasia.com in Aug 2019 to spearhead the digital transformation of airasia.com into a travel tech and lifestyle platform, focusing on non-airline businesses including hotels, experiences, deals and other lifestyle offerings.
Spencer now holds the responsibility to transform BIG Loyalty into a comprehensive lifestyle rewards platform with BIG Points as the universal digital currency. Under his leadership, in the short span of one year, the company’s revenue increased remarkably by almost 60% compared to the year before.




BIGLIFE




Accor
Louise Daley, Deputy CEO of AccorHotels Asia Pacific, has over 29 years’ experience in the Hospitality and Tourism industry in the region. In her current role, Louise is responsible for the financial oversight and management of over 830 hotels with turnover in excess of €4.5b, as well as the non-hotel businesses encompassing vacation ownership, lounge management and subscription loyalty.
Louise is on the Board of the group’s various joint venture businesses including Huazhu Hotels Group, AAK Korea, InterGlobe Hotels in India and Reef Casino in Australia. With responsibility also for Business Intelligence and Analytics, Digital platforms and IT, Louise has a key focus on growing businesses opportunities across Asia Pacific through digital transformation and partnerships.
Her previous roles have included CEO for Accor Plus, Accor’s loyalty subscription program in Asia Pacific; CFO for Accor in the Pacific region; and CFO for Asia. She most recently served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Asia Pacific since June 2015.
Louise completed her Executive MBA at SMU Singapore, has a Diploma in Hospitality and Catering Management, a Bachelor of Business (Accounting) and is a Certified Practicing Accountant (CPA). She has lived and worked in Australia, Thailand, and briefly in Japan, and has been based in Singapore since 2011. She is also a regular speaker and panellist at industry events, and is a member of both the Australian and Singaporean Institute of Company Directors.




Accor




The Monetary Authority of Singapore
Following stints at global insurance companies and payments companies, ran Money20/20s global content program, successfully building their Europe and Asian platforms. Currently leading the International FinTech Office at the Monetary Authority of Singapore. A broad remit, from building the next iteration of the Singapore FinTech Festival to collaborating with a number of national FinTech events, supporting the VC community in Singapore and driving a number of strategic national projects.




The Monetary Authority of Singapore
How will distribution models change in our industry and what is each player doing to survive and move forward? A GDS and an OTA meet up in this session which will ask questions around the present – NDC, the changing dynamics between low cost carriers and full service carriers, living in a domestic only world – and the future. How will the emergence of new demographics influence the model and how must the GDS model and OTA evolve?




Amadeus
She joined Amadeus in January 2019. Mieke is leading a global team to support online travel agencies, travel media companies and travel start-ups grow their businesses and position Amadeus as the partner of choice.
Mieke brings more than 17 years of experience in managing B2C and B2B businesses. Before Amadeus, Mieke worked for Expedia Group, where she held the role of Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer of Egencia, the corporate travel brand of Expedia Group. Earlier, as the Vice President of Expedia Group’s Lodging Partner Solutions, she was responsible for growing and managing the hotel relationships in Asia Pacific.
Prior to Expedia Group, she spent 10 years with Phillips Electronics having held various global, regional and local leadership roles in product, marketing and sales. She started her professional career with McKinsey.
As someone who loves travel and tech, Mieke has her “top three” favorites while on the go
- Her travel is incomplete without her AirPod, Netflix and Spotify!
- Her bucket list includes exploring Bhutan with friends which she believes will up her GNP – Gross National Happiness and traversing the Great Wall of China with her two kids!
- Her mantra is travelling light but with maximum volume – hand carry only!
A Dutch national, Mieke has lived in Singapore for almost 15 years, while also having worked and lived in Europe, Latin America and USA. Mieke holds an MBA from INSEAD and an MSc in Industrial Design Engineering from the Delft University of Technology.




Amadeus




Trip.com
Chee Teong (CT) prior to joining Trip.com was the China General Manager for an international GDS for more than 7 years and has been working in the travel industry for 17 years. CT currently leads a team of Ctrip.com and Trip.com business development professionals; responsible for sourcing and developing flight content internationally. CT has successfully established 20Trip.com global IATA locations, whilst developing agency partnerships across 40 countries, aimed at supporting Ctrip’s flight global expansion across Trip.com.




Trip.com
In 2009, he spoke at our conference themed “Tough Love”. That year, he spoke about the start of the clash of civilisations and the decoupling of the world, To go forwards, we invite him back for another conversation and find out what he sees in our future the next decade.




Banyan Tree Holdings
The founder of Banyan Tree Holdings, Mr Ho is responsible for its overall management and operations. He has been a Director since 5 July 2000. He was designated Executive Chairman on 1 March 2004 and was last re-elected on 24 April 2019.
Mr Ho is also Chairman of Laguna Resorts & Hotels Public Company Limited, Thai Wah Public Company Limited and the Board of Trustees of Singapore Management University. He is a non-executive Director of Diageo Plc.
Mr Ho holds a Bachelor of Arts (Economics) from the University of Singapore, an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration in Hospitality Management from Johnson & Wales University, USA, and an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.




Banyan Tree Holdings
If there is one destination that needed to rise to the challenge of domestic tourism in Singapore, it’s been Sentosa. With a travel-hungry population not able to travel overseas, this island destination joined forces with the Singapore Tourism Board and Economic Development Board to launch a S$45m domestic tourism campaign. In this session, learn how Sentosa’s travel players adapted to a very changed market and how they are building for the future.
Sentosa Development Corporation
Sentosa Development Corporation




Madame Tussauds Singapore
Alex is a General Manager at Merlin Entertainments Group and is responsible for the Madame Tussauds attraction located on Sentosa in Singapore. Since joining the company in 2012, Alex has worked across a variety of the group’s brands and locations spending time in both Australia and the U.K before moving to Singapore. Before joining Merlin in Australia, Alex was raised and studied in New Zealand.




Madame Tussauds Singapore




The Lo & Behold Group
As Chief Operating Officer, Andrew leads operations across the group. He brings with him over 30 years of industry experience in F&B operations and management to The Lo & Behold Group. Prior to joining The Lo & Behold Group in 2012, he served as Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director of Catalist-listed St James Holdings from 2005. From 2001 to 2005, Andrew was the Regional Project Director of The Filter Group, handling major advertising projects for clients and providing support for public relations agency work. He served as Marketing Manager of Zouk from 1993 to 2001 and organised the first ZoukOut festival in 2000.




The Lo & Behold Group




Shangri-La's Rasa Sentosa Resort & Spa




Shangri-La's Rasa Sentosa Resort & Spa
Carnival Corporation has created the world’s first experience Internet of Things platform to deliver enhanced personalization at scale and maximize the guest experience (while leveraging AWS). Currently on ships within the Princess Cruises fleet, we explore how the scalable technology gives guests more control over how they engage in their vacation and generates intelligence that provides crew members with vital insights to deliver hyper-personalized service – and what the future of connected experiences might look like.
Interviewer:
David Peller
Global Head, Travel & Hospitality
Amazon Web Services (AWS)




Carnival Corporation
John Padgett joined Carnival Corporation in 2014 as the chief experience & innovation officer spanning the company’s nine global cruise line brands with a holistic focus on creating exceptional guest experiences. Leading a multi-disciplinary and cross-functional experience and innovation team, Padgett is responsible for guest experience innovation, development, creation and operations integration across creative, digital, technical and operational functions.
In his role, Padgett is creating game-changing guest experiences that are differentiated based on personal interactions, empowered by invisible technology and shared with the world via original media and gaming content.
Carnival took the CES2017 keynote stage to announce the OceanMedallionTM wearable and the world’s first experience Internet of Things (xIoT) as the hinge-pins to MedallionClassTM – a next-level guest experience based on personalization and frictionless service delivery.
On board MedallionClass ships from Princess Cruises, the award-winning transforms vacation by making the entire cruise experience effortless, delivering highly personalized service, and enabling touchless, interactive experiences and entertainment.
Prior to Carnival Corporation, Padgett enjoyed an 18-year career with Walt Disney Parks and Resorts where he spearheaded the invention, development and implementation of guest engagement innovations that include the MagicBand, FastPass+ and Disney’s Magical Express, among other.
Padgett earned a master’s degree in business administration and a bachelor’s degree in finance from Virginia Tech, and holds 35 patents and has won multiple innovation awards.




Carnival Corporation
Concluding our series of the women who are rewriting travel their own way. Dr Angelica Angles grew up in Valencia, looking at the stars with her grandfather. And while other girls dreamed of moonbeams and fairies, she dreamt of becoming a rocket scientist and exploring space, specifically Mars. She was part of the selection team for the site launch of NASA’s Mars Exploration Programme, that includes the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter drone. It was launched on July 30 and will touch down in Jezero crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. In this conversation, she tells us about her work about life on Mars and what lessons we can take from planets such as Mars and Venus – to go forwards, we have to go backwards, and she believes these planets have stories we need to heed.




Department of Earth Science, The University of Hong Kong
Dr. Angélica Anglés is a planetary scientist and astrobiologist (and pianist) whose research is centred around the search for extraterrestrial life on Mars. She studies extreme environments as Mars analog sites, mostly the Qaidam Basin in the mountains of Tibet to find clues for the possibility of life on Mars. Thanks to her research, she took part in the Landing Site Selection for the NASA Mars 2020 planetary mission and she has been part of several NASA panels.
She has won several awards and scholarships to study extreme environments on Earth, such as the Pilbara in Australia, the hot springs in Rotorua (New Zealand), Lake Ciso in Spain or the French Pyrénées. She is the author of several scientific publications in peer reviewed journals and has co-authored a book (Astrobiology & Society in Europe Today) published in 2017. Additionally, she is recognized in the media as an expert in this field, with multiple radio interviews, TV and social media appearances.
This year Harper’s BAZAAR magazine awarded her the title of Visionary Woman 2020, aimed to recognize and honor high-achieving female leaders with true vision in several different fields. Furthermore, she is the Chair of the Explorers Club Hong Kong Chapter, and currently she is still searching for life on Mars!




Department of Earth Science, The University of Hong Kong
The Proposition: The Future Belongs To Zoom-Plus: It’s so much better because we don’t have to travel, we are in control, we are more productive, the tech is going to get better and if we want serendipity, we can always engineer it.
The two teams from WiT Virtual Summit return for a rematch on this hot topic. Again, you decide who wins.
For:
Timothy Hughes, Vice President, Corporate Development, Agoda
Paulina Klotzbucher, Group Chief Commercial Officer, Travelstart
Chan Chee Chong, CEO & Co-founder, GlobalTix
Against:
Timothy O’Neil-Dunne, Principal, 777 Partners
Shyn Yee Ho-Strangas, Director, Product Management (Conversations Platform), Expedia Group
Emilie Couton, Vice President, Digital Marketing APAC, Accor
Adjudicator:
Louise Daley, Deputy CEO APAC, Accor
Your vision of Travel 2025 visualised in an art piece as well as other special items up for bidding. Funds raised will go towards The Island Foundation, our charity of choice for 2020. Since 2005, WiT has raised more than US$500,000 to support women and children causes in Asia. And we announce your People’s Choice, WiT Seoul Startup Winner and WiT Singapore Startup Winner.