I have a dream: Travelling with dignity and humility
How tech can play a role from armchair travel to the physical journey I’ve now come to an age when my mother needs a wheelchair for travelling. Day to day, she lives a fairly normal active life but...
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Letter from Cape Town: Of diamonds, dassies and naked surprises
As the Singapore Airlines flight came in for a landing in Cape Town Monday morning and I watched the beautiful vistas of the Western Cape unfold before my eyes, the first question that popped into my...
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Lessons from WiT Africa, Part 1: From Cape of Good Hope to the promise of...
“NDC adoption is slower than two elephants making babies”, among some of the more colourful quotes at the first WiT Africa “Isn’t it wonderful to wake up to views like these?” said Farai, our driver,...
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From Africa to FREENOW, Meili’s out to reduce friction in car rental to drive...
Domain expertise and experience count for a lot, says seasoned Irish entrepreneur Mike McGearty Right after Mike McGearty, CEO and co-founder, Meili Travel Technology, left Cape Town where he was...
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She went travelling for love; now she’s looking for global love for Yuko Yuko
Onsen ryokan business wants to target inbound and expand services beyond travel for Japanese seniors Fresh out of law school, Wakako Tokuda travelled the world looking for love and a potential husband...
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Of pain, suffering and low expectations: How to be happy founders and travellers
“If you’re not at one point about to go bankrupt, then you can’t say you really had a startup” Lately, I’ve been getting lots of messages sharing Jensen Huang’s speech at the Stanford Institute for...
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Fritz Demopoulos on new frontiers in travel & beyond
Where others see bad traffic and chaos, this entrepreneur sees opportunities. It was with this thinking that he fearlessly co-founded the first travel metasearch company in China in 2005, Qunar, which...
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Lessons from WiT Africa Part 2: The ties that bind us, from remote work to AI...
It’s been nearly two weeks since I left the majesty and scale of South Africa for the tiny dot of Singapore and here I am, in the even tinier (or as tiny) dot of Penang, Malaysia, where the evidence of...
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Zip Zap Circus: Giving kids in South Africa a chance to dare to dream
30 years on, flying trapeze partners, Brent and Laurence, continue to change lives In Cambodia, they have Phare, The Cambodian Circus. In South Africa, they have the Zip Zap Circus. Both have similar...
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Decoding travel jargon: From bleisure to rubbish tourism
Author and travel writer Paul Theroux had a very simple way of describing people who travel. He divided them into tourist and traveller, saying, “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travellers...
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Best way to know Japanese culture is through its museums, says author Sophie...
Museum experience is changing but “not everything can go online” As a young girl growing up in Aix-en-Provence, France, Sophie Richard fell in love with Japan, even before she visited the country. “I...
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MakeMyTrip tripling down on India to build comprehensive travel shop
“We’re not going global”, asserts Rajesh Magow. Here’s why. Firstly, Rajesh Magow, CEO and co-founder of MakeMyTrip, would like to clarify that his company is not going global, as was reported in...
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Noh Master Kawamura wants to keep 14th century art form alive by sharing with...
Third-generation performer to open WiT Japan & North Asia 2024 Compared with most Noh families, whose roots can go back to the 14th century, Noh Master Kawamura Haruhisa, who runs Kyoto’s Kawamura...
View ArticleI met a Black Hat and it led to this revelation
I was standing in a long queue at the café at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre and wondering why it doesn’t have a robotic barista because the human ones were looking rather frazzled when I...
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Why Caravelo’s betting it all on subscriptions
Launching rail product, eyeing corporate travel and expansion to Asia Born and raised in Pamplona, Inaki Uriz knows better than to take part in the Running of the Bulls, the annual festival which was...
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Letter enroute to Riyadh: A journey into The Land of Incredulous Possibilities
I am off to Riyadh today via Singapore. It was meant to have been via Paris but a flu bug changed my plans. It has a nasty way of doing that, as we’ve all learnt in the last few years. Nothing’s going...
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Letter from Saudi: Of cheeky encounters, cultural kaleidoscopes and social...
A funny thing happened to me while I was waiting at King Khalid International Airport, in Riyadh, while I was waiting for the car to my hotel, Radisson Blu, in the Diplomatic Quarter. Firstly, it’s...
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From the revolution in human-machine interface, to transformation of the...
Key takeaways from Phocuswright WiT Middle East There’s nothing like being on the ground, and getting around, to feel the energy and vitality of a region on the move and my trip, covering Saudi and...
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Saudi tourism chief Fahd Hamidaddin on lessons from his mother, Hafawah and...
Travel on verge of transformation, driven by AI – STA experiments with unconventional partners Given how openly most Saudis speak about their family, especially their mothers, I thought it fitting that...
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Letter from Tokyo: The human-machine and tradition-innovation dance unfolding...
Inbound rush, outbound slump, new tech and travellers shaping future of travel – how will it play out in Japan? WiT Japan & North Asia 2024 had it all covered. There is no better place in the world...
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