Episode 26: Scott Peterson, Assistant Vice President, Entertainment, Resorts World Sentosa

Travelling is a highly physical activity – those long walks to the gates and immigration, those long queues – not easy when you are not fully mobile. Especially for the elderly - the requests for assistance pre-flight, the waits at check-in for assistance, the arrival process – and the inevitable conclusion that one day it will happen to all of us.

For Siew Hoon (Founder, WiT), seeing life through her mother’s eyes made her highly cognizant of the ageing societies of Asia. According to the Singapore government's 2023 population report, citizens aged 65 and above make up almost one-fifth of Singapore's population, up 11.7% from a decade ago.

As much fuss as there is about the Gen Z and Millennials and their current and future spending power, there’s a silent and strong undercurrent going on in the silver generation.

So how can technology address the ageing population worldwide? And is the solution, as psychologists suggest, to simply travel inside our own minds?

Narrator: Yeoh Siew Hoon

As a student, Adrienne Enggist, Senior Director of Product, Customer Experience and Platforms for Booking.com, had an epiphany, not a hallucination, when she listened to Timothy O’Leary, the late American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs.

He wasn’t talking about acid but of the future, she said. ““He asked us to imagine a future that’s less than 20 years away, where you can talk to anybody in the world instantly in real time without paying for long distance … and he spoke of how you could create content like Arnold Schwarzenegger with Loni Anderson's head …”

That’s when she decided “that’s the world I want to work in”. Fast forward to now and Adrienne says all the things O’Leary spoke about – it was around 1987 – have come to pass – deep fakes that you can generate with an app, for instance.

In this episode of Customer Love, hosts Yeoh Siew Hoon (Founder, WiT) and Laura Houldsworth (Managing Director & Vice President for Asia Pacific, Booking.com) speak with Enggist about her views on AI taking over travel and hospitality and the role of tech in creating better products for customers.

For starters, Enggist's advice to developers is “you've got to make your mistakes differently”.

As for how she thinks AI will impact travel and how you can cook up “AI and Product Love” into your business to win “Customer Love”, have a listen. 

Taylor Swift has arrived in Singapore for the highly anticipated Eras Tour, which she'll perform for six nights over two weeks. Let’s face it, pop stars are good for business. More than 300,000 tickets have been sold for the concerts in Singapore, with a large number of fans travelling in from Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.

All round, it’s been a good news week for travel and tourism, with the top travel companies all reporting healthy fourth quarter 2023 and full year 2024 results – from Airbnb, Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, Trip.com Group, Amadeus. 

Also, why does AI get blamed for everything these days?

It's all on this week's WiT Stories. You can read the article version of this podcast here. 

Narrator: Yeoh Siew Hoon

Imagine. Fifteen years ago, there was no alternative accommodation category on Booking.com. Today, there are 7.2m short term rental listings and in its Q3 2023 earnings, this sector grew the fastest, 24% year over year, making it about 33% of all bookings.

And if you want to be part of this “New Wave of Customer Love”, Nuno Guerreiro, Regional Director South APAC and Chains, Booking.com, says you have to choose to be either green and growing, or ripe and rotting. 

The answer is a no brainer, so you simply must listen to this episode, focused on the fast-growing alternative accommodation sector, featuring Nuno and his colleague, Inas Abdella, Director of Product, Booking Home.

This episode contains lots of nuggets of insights about the reasons behind the growth, what travellers are looking for as well as what suppliers can do to ride on this new wave of accommodation, and understand what different travellers want.

As for their recommendations of their favourite short term rental places, well, have a listen.

Stay tuned for more episodes, in which Siew Hoon (Founder, WiT) and Laura Houldsworth ( interview a host of voices from Booking.com, as well as a few surprises from industry friends.

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 

There’s certainly a lot of practices travel suppliers have to put in place to fulfil and deliver on its responsibility to build a more sustainable industry, and everyone, from the grassroots to giants, must do their part.

Danielle D’Silva, Head of Sustainability, Booking.com and Eric Ricaurte, CEO of Greenview, are certainly trying to do their part in their centrestage roles in travel’s delicate and complicated dance with sustainability.

It’s interesting the different paths they have each taken to arrive at this common junction – Danielle through a scholarly path and deep research into highly niche topics such as an ethnography on the Muslim community who cares for elephants used for Hindu processions in Varanasi, and the role social enterprises play in preserving cultural heritage in Cambodia, and Eric who got an early introduction to urban farming during his childhood in rural Ohio, and an odd job stint in “a random lodge in the northeast corner of Costa Rica”, which opened his eyes to the kind of experiences travellers were willing to travel for.

Both agree the next wave in sustainability is biodiversity which is positive in the sense in that it will get the industry out of its carbon tunnel vision, says Danielle, into areas that travellers can relate to. As for the books they recommend if you want to dig deeper into this super important topic in travel, and how we can all move from Customer Love to Planet Love, have a listen to the podcast.

Stay tuned for more episodes, in which Siew Hoon (Founder, WiT) and Laura Houldsworth ( interview a host of voices from Booking.com, as well as a few surprises from industry friends. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 

What does 'customer love' mean in 2024?

For the first time since 2019, travel companies are unanchoring themselves to the events of the last 3 years and embracing the freedom, opportunities, and challenges that come with this new travel landscape.

In the pilot episode of our new series, Customer Love, Yeoh Siew Hoon (Founder, WiT) speaks to her co-host for all upcoming episodes, Laura Houldsworth (Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Booking.com), about travel trends to look forward to this year. With a background in financial services, writing, communications and marketing, Laura gets candid about seeking Booking.com thanks to her passion for travel. She also talks about what kind of traveller she is based on Booking.com's research data. 

The duo then talk about rising trends in Asia Pacific, and what mega-platforms like Booking.com are doing to not only retain customer loyalty in a crowded marketplace, but attract new travellers with exciting new demands. 

Stay tuned for future episodes, in which Siew Hoon and Laura interview a host of voices from Booking.com, as well as a few surprises from industry friends. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 

Top Of The WiT is a grab of the trendiest news in travel, tech and Asia - all condensed into a nugget-sized podcast. 

For the last couple of weeks, we've featured our year-end series, Goodbye 2023, Hello 2024 on the WiT website, showcasing global travel leaders nutshelling 2023 while anticipating 2024. Many were positive about the last 12 months and are looking forward to 2024, while a few are more trepeditious due to shaky socio-economic conditions worldwide. 

In this episode, Siew Hoon and Arvindh discuss some of those answers - from Expedia's Michael Dykes elaborating on robust demographics in Asia, specifically Gen Z, to Wego's Ross Veitch pointing out “the long-term impact of demographic changes as a result of declining birth rates” which he says is off most people's radar but is going to massively impact economies worldwide.

We also go over some less hefty questions, like the most interesting things our featured travel leaders have read or watched this year, and one word they'd use to describe the year that was and the year that will be. 

Stream the episode to join the discussion.

What happens when as an eight-year-old, you are moved from Okinawa to Indiana, two more contrasting places you couldn’t imagine? Well, for half-Japanese-half-American Michael Dykes, it was definitely “jarring”, but it taught him some valuable life lessons which have stood him in good stead in both his career and life.

The Vice President, Market Management of Asia-Pacific for Expedia Group said growing up on a farm in rural America taught him self-sufficiency as well as an appreciation for the origin of food. It also made him determined to return to Japan, and Asia, where his heart is and so he made sure he never lost his Japanese language skills while building a new life in the US.

In this podcast, Dykes talks about how countries in South-east Asia are more interwoven with each other – a lot of cultural awareness across boundaries, not seen so much in North-east Asia, which then leads to e-commerce in general, including travel, cutting across boundaries as well.

Dykes also talks about Expedia's partnerships with Jetstar and Philippine Airlines, and a deal now with general e-commerce players such as G-Mart of South Korea. The company is also also expanding the definition of B2B, and he sees opportunities within Asia-Pacific, both vertically and geographically, for Expedia to “power travel for everybody”.

Interviewer: Yeoh Siew Hoon, Founder, WiT

For more episodes in this series, look for the WiT Podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts.

After 15 years at Google's marketing and advertising division, Rob Torres recently returned to his former home at Expedia Group as Senior Vice President of Media Solutions. Like many key figures in travel and hospitality, Rob has seen the industry shift and evolve over time, with technology driving most of the change in the last couple of decades. 

In this episode of Expedia Talks, we ask Rob about the lessons he has collected and curated over the years to help him prepare for the future of travel. With so much new technology at one's disposal, how does an experienced travel pro like Rob pick and choose what works best for the task at hand?

We also chat about new trends in Rob's specialty, Destination Marketing, and how data is helping companies like Expedia create more personalised experiences for each customer, which in turn adds value to Expedia's partners and suppliers.   

Interviewer: Yeoh Siew Hoon, Founder, WiT

Stay tuned for more episodes in this series. Subscribe to the WiT Podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts.

Technology has come a long way in the last 20 years and Expedia has always evolved its tech platforms to stay on the forefront of change. Now, travel and hospitality are at an inflection point driven by decentralised tech like Generative AI. As the Senior Vice President of Product & Technology at Expedia Group, how does Karen Bolda and her team stay on top of all these trends? And how do tech-centric providers sift through the hype without getting distracted by the 'next big thing' that enters the market?

In this episode of Expedia Talks, we ask Karen about what drew her to the intersection of travel and technology. We also chat about her first startup and how it got acquired by Expedia all those years ago. 

Karen also gets candid about her time growing up and the formative years that brought her to Expedia, before answering today's most pressing question - what's a human quality that cannot be codified?

Interviewer: Yeoh Siew Hoon, Founder, WiT

Stay tuned for more episodes in this series. Subscribe to the WiT Podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts.