As a first-time speaker and attendee at WiT Singapore, Jacinta Lim, CEO & co-founder of Seek Sophie, found the experience very enlightening.
“I actually went to a lot of conferences (tech though, not travel) when we first started because the conversations were quite shallow. But I found the opposite at WiT. It was really refreshing to see what’s been built and it was very inspiring.”
Here are her key takeaways:
- I was surprised at how most of the people I met from the travel industry have been there for decades. Makes me wonder how much innovation will come out from within the industry. This translates to many strategies not necessarily catering for the younger audience for example, distribution channels. Seems to be very limited understanding of how the younger generation uses TikTok, as an example.
- That said, it was also very interesting to see the new generation of hoteliers and start-up founders in the space. Many of them are thinking from the perspective of brand building and building lifestyle brands that cater to a new audience. A lot of people came up to me after my panel to say they were glad I voiced the opinion that the next generation was flipping the script on how people were travelling, that is, experience first, not destination/flight/hotel first, unlike how a lot of the bigger players were thinking about it. So that dichotomy between the new guard and old guard was very interesting to me.
- Good to know that Booking.com and Expedia haven’t condemned experiences to death yet… with the pause in Airbnb experiences and the other OTAs not quite knowing what to do with it, I think there’s a lot of uncertainty in the space. For Booking and Expedia, it seems to no longer be the most unloved child in their organisations. Klook’s statement that they need to do billions in GMV to even cover their operation costs was also quite telling about the experiences model that most are pursuing, and why Booking, Expedia and Airbnb aren’t prioritising it.
- I found airline strategies to be quite interesting. How AirAsia is trying to diversify away from just low cost airline revenues with MOVE, whereas Ryanair is firmly set on doubling down on their model. Likely because Europe has air transport liberalisation whereas Asia doesn’t, so perhaps the model is not as attractive in Asia. Also understood from Nadia Omer from AirAsia MOVE that the trend is skewing towards favouring domestic airlines more, not less, with Sarawak coming up with their own carrier.
- TikTok for travel is always a big question mark for me from an investment perspective, because the attribution and measurement isn’t great, and will only get worse over time with privacy settings. But understanding it as a search engine with usage just trailling YouTube for travel was interesting. Search data is not made public though, so until it’s made public it’ll be hard for travel brands to redirect much investment into it. But in a world where Google is increasingly competing with OTAs, it could be a good idea to diversify spend.
