Name: Future of travel: To Asia and beyond
Uploaded: 2020-10-27
Duration: 3 min 38 s
Description: A conversation about how companies are reimaging travel and what’s in store for the future of travel throughout Asia.

 CLAIRE ZILLMAN: So the [INAUDIBLE] in June, the most recent estimate is is that air travel globally will lose $84 billion this year. And that's just one measure of the travel industry and how it's been impacted by the pandemic. We're 9, 10 months into this now. I'm wondering if each of you can start by sort of telling me, telling us the biggest lesson you've learned so far in all of this, whether that's about your own business or about the travel industry, in general. Karen, do you want to start? KAREN CHAN: Sure. I guess one of the biggest lesson that all of us have learned as we are actually in the forefront of unfortunately of the results of the pandemic is that never waste a crisis. As you can imagine, the aviation industry has been quite hard hit. And we are doing whatever we can. If you don't see a silver lining, you need to go and create one. And that's why in October we have actually relaunched AirAsia.com to become the fastest growing ASEAN [INAUDIBLE],, not just covering travel, but also covering lifestyle as well. If we look at what's actually been happening to travel within ASEAN, I think Asia is actually in a relatively better position than maybe some other parts of the world. Most of the countries that we actually fly to are actually in green zone, whether it is China, whether it is in Taiwan, Australia, Indo-China. And we are working very, very closely with a lot of the different governments to ensure that we can actually go and start accelerating the green bubbles. Now what that means is that international travel will still be about three to six months away. So a lot of our focus is now basically moving to domestically. We are very fortunate. For AirAsia, we are actually in eight different countries. So we actually have flights to somewhere and not flights to nowhere. So a lot of the effort right now that we are doing is, how do we actually go and pivot and really start accelerating domestic travel? Understanding that domestic travel is only about 40% of what are basically the revenue versus 2019. How do we actually go and start expanding beyond just flights to other complementary travel-related activities, like hotels, like activities in ground, like mobility? And that's where we have actually been focusing in the past six months a lot of our effort in ensuring that our foundation, our platform is ready, our consumers can continue to stay relevant and come to our site, and also ensuring that as we actually pivot when a lot of people actually are in lockdown, we can also go and have a last mile logistics fulfillment e-commerce play. CLAIRE ZILLMAN: Yeah, that's great. Angel, I'm curious to hear from you too. What's the what's your number one lesson so far in all of this? ANGEL MANCAS: Yeah. The lesson that I would say is while they're trying to be as big and agile as possible run, themes are changing week after week. And the customer's needs and the customer's preferences are also changing despite them and then quite drastically. So basically, we've been able to-- [INAUDIBLE] we've been able to do some changes from a demand perspective on how we treat our product and how we can cover the supply in a different way in order to adapt to the new reality that we have today. And that is the best thing that we can do for our customers as quick as possible. 

A conversation about how companies are reimaging travel and what’s in store for the future of travel throughout Asia.

Future of travel: To Asia and beyond

Leadership

What’s in store for the future of travel throughout Asia.