Asia Pacific travel tips

Here are the top stories from the Daily Lodging Report newsletter in the past week. Get news on hotel deals, development, stocks, and career moves. Sign up here now.

Two months after Expedia Group abruptly stopped providing Hopper with hotels and vacation rentals, Hopper announced Wednesday that it struck deals with two hotel bedbanks — Hotelbeds and WebBeds — to add more than 700,000 properties to its roster.

Bookings have surged for Klook, one of Asia’s leading online marketplaces for travel experiences.

Middle East-based online travel marketplace Wego has acquired corporate travel platform Travelstop as part of its expansion into business travel and expense management.

Within the Hotel & Hospitality division of the company, Gilda has amassed close to twenty years of expertise, delivering high-level strategic guidance to key players in the industry.

In her role as Senior Vice President (SVP) at CIBT, Maura Geertsma will leverage these skills to enhance client relationships and contribute to strategic advancement.

Ramsey, an accomplished professional with academic achievements from the University of Surrey, City University London, and Cornell University in New York, contributes a wealth of two decades’ worth of experience in the premium hospitality sector.

From today’s Daily Lodging Report newsletter: Nikkei Asia published an article on Hilton planning to expand its luxury offerings in Asia. Hilton will be bringing its Waldorf Astoria brand to Malaysia, Vietnam, India, and other countries for the first time as part of its plans to open 25 new luxury hotels in the Asia Pacific region over the next few years. That’s up from the 33 luxury hotels it currently runs in the Asia Pacific.

Earnings seasons for the hotel sector is nearly over, and one striking aspect of executive comments on calls with investors was the resilience of development pipelines for hotels belonging to brands run by global groups. For new construction, conversions, and franchise signings, hotel companies painted an optimistic picture.

American Express Global Business Travel continues to benefit from the ongoing rebound of business trips. In particular the reopening of countries in Asia Pacific, barring China of course, bodes well for the world’s biggest travel agency.

Yanolja said this week it expected that a post-pandemic rebound in international travel will continue to boost its twin businesses of online travel sales via a superapp and software sales to hotels and other travel companies. The South Korea-based startup has made progress on both ambitions since 2011, when it received a $1.7 billion investment from the Softbank Vision Fund in a transaction that valued Yanolja at the time at approximately US$9 billion.

As announced in mid-2022, Accor is now in the process of reorganizing its operational structure into two divisions, the hotel group stated Tuesday.

Airlines around the world are ripping up schedules and bringing in new flights to cope with a COVID-triggered trend in corporate travel for executives like Jerome Harris – the scrapping of one-day business trips in favour of longer stays.

China’s Trip.com has struck two new partnerships, covering the UK and Asia Pacific, to give customers the opportunity to delay or spread out payments for their purchases.

Skift Research has been tracking the performance of the major travel sectors in 22 countries since the beginning of the pandemic in the Skift Travel Health Index. We have seen a steady upward trend, but the final push to full recovery seems more stubborn than we initially thought.

Travel platform Agoda has been pushing ahead with a series of new fintech partnerships, with its eye on Asia’s corporate travel recovery.

Airfares on key corporate travel routes are expected to rise by as much as 25 percent in 2023 amid high fuel prices, a stronger U.S. dollar and labour and aircraft shortages, a forecast from American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) showed.

Even though China’s recent relaxation of Covid measures is widely seen as a step forward for travel, Trip.com is still cautious in the very near term as winter is usually a slack season for both business and leisure travel.

Cendyn, a software company that offers customer relationship management, digital marketing, and operations tools to hotels, has hired a new chief executive. 

Mastercard Inc forecast current-quarter revenue growth short of Wall Street estimates on Thursday, saying the boost from pent-up demand for travel will diminish going forward.

Both the Middle East and Europe are on track to reach their pre-pandemic levels in 2023 , according to the UN World Tourism Organization. Last year saw a stronger than expected recovery for the global tourism economy.