Covid has turned online travel from a game of inches to one of millimetres, said Timothy Hughes, vice president corporate development of Agoda, paraphrasing an oft-quoted phrase of former Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
Speaking during WiT Seoul, Hughes said, “A lot of the breakout tech is just your ability to execute quickly. It’s not sexy. It’s not being techie. It’s what have you got internally that allows you to change your rates fast, and how fast you can launch products to quickly chase whatever demand there is because this is a game now of millimetres of being able to execute today to capture the demand tomorrow.”
Hughes was answering a question on what kind of breakout tech Covid had spurred during a panel discussion.
For Expedia Group’s Ang Choo Pin, senior director, government and corporate affairs, and managing director, Asia, the most exciting tech is “the one which will potentially be the enabler for governments to have trust in restarting travel, and that is a great testing technology that is affordable and accessible, and that will allow people to essentially present a health passport to say that well, “I’ve been medically tested. I haven’t travelled in the past 14 days”.
“I think anyone who’s able to crack that will be able to really reinvigorate travel and potentially make a lot of money in the process.”
Indeed, testing is being used as a way to prise open travel corridors such as the one between Singapore and Hong Kong, which will start operating from November 22. PCR tests are being used by both governments to ensure the bubble stays as safe as possible. For physical events in Singapore, the government is using Antigen Rapid Test which gives results within 30 minutes.
The problem is there are so many types of tests available that it is causing confusion among travellers as to which tests are approved by whom and the last thing a traveller wants is to show up an airport after having done the test to find “sorry, it’s not the right one”, and have to retake.
Ang, who has been leading an alliance to persuade the Singapore government to open a bilateral leisure travel corridor with the Maldives, said that while it was all well and good to talk about domestic-led demand this year, “for next year, the time is ripe for us to really start working with government and lobbying them to open borders”.
“A big part of travel is international travel, cross border travel, and we need to work together as an industry – airlines and hotels – with governments to say, we need to start more of these travel bubbles, and apply them to other routes or corridors, because if we just sit here and wait for a vaccine, we don’t know when it’s going to happen.”
At Accor, domestic demand in China is certainly leading the way for its hotels to recover and Louise Daley, deputy CEO, Asia Pacific, said leisure travel has continued its upward climb through September and October and while business travel is picking up, it is still behind the curve of leisure travel. “We do need corporates to pick up,” she said.
Asked to share a recent piece of good news, Hughes cited the IPO for Airbnb “because I can’t wait for them to be under the same sort of scrutiny and disclosure requirements as the rest of us. So I’m excited as to finally see the inside of what’s behind Chesky and the crew and what’s going on in his company”.
The other piece of good news he cited is around the case fatality rate, “which is an awful way of saying the number of people who die versus the number of people who get it”.
“But if we can find some hope … the case fatality rate decline shows that medical techniques are keeping up. So I’m a little bit hopeful about what that means for the human side of this crisis.”
For Daley, the good news is the expected announcement of Singapore entering Phase 3, which will allow for more relaxation of social rules and that domestic borders in Australia are being opened. “What we are seeing … is the ramping up of travel inquiry once the announcement of those openings occurred. We know the demand is there, we know people are confident to travel. I think Japan and Korea will lead forward as well.”
Beyond travel, Daley is keeping a close watch on fintech and food tech. On payments, she said, “The reason I’m excited by it is people see fintech as the end of the journey of what we do. And I think we’ll be surprised that fintech will start to join the whole of the journey, and the disruption could well come from a fintech player in a very non-traditional way.”
On food tech, Daley said Covid has resulted in a mass consumer shift to online consumption as well as on the enterprise side. Referring to Hughes’ comment about inches vs millimetres, she said food was also about the latter. “There’s incredible engagement on both sides of the food equation. There are so many players making moves in it. And there are opportunities to combine these tech players and really make a difference for restauranteurs who are not necessarily tech savvy, or have the time or the inclination.”
Hughes meanwhile wants to see “better recommendations”, saying “recommendations remain broken on the internet”.
“The problem is every startup that’s tried to solve it has crashed and burned. The graveyard of travel startups is filled with more recommendation and travel planning than anything else … I want recommendations to be fixed. Can Covid change that? Maybe is this the time in which we can find a way to make money out of really good recommendations for travel.”
• Featured image credit: Kunal Mahto/Getty Images