Telum Vox Pop: Travel and Hospitality in 2022: How are you rebounding and adapting?
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Telum Vox Pop: Travel and Hospitality in 2022: How are you rebounding and adapting?

Telum gathered views from travel and hospitality professionals in Southeast Asia to learn how the communities bounced back and what's for the industry next.

Steve Dailisan, Spokesperson and Head of Communications and Public Affairs, AirAsia Philippines
At AirAsia, we remain empathetic to the customers' needs which enables us to work on transformation and diversification. We are transforming our business to better address the fast-changing needs of customers and diversifying our offers accordingly. 

We accelerated the digital transformation of our business – digitising multiple customer touchpoints and integrating several services into one app. On the AirAsia Super App, our guests can book their hotels, flights and soon, even rides. They can also do digital check-ins at least 24 hours before they fly. And soon, boarding can be done easily through our facial recognition system FACES. 

Internally, We also intensified our efforts on making collaboration easier. We have several tools that allow our Allstars to easily synergize with other functions and departments:
  • We are 100% immersed in the Google ecosystem as well for easier collaboration on key tasks and meetings.
  • We have our own chat platform Eko for quick messaging. 
  • We also have a Workplace and Workday that make crucial information and tasks available and social interaction easier. 
All of these internal platforms and tools we maximise to stay abreast with the needs of today as we explore a more hybrid working environment. I personally believe that the future of brands rests on being able to move as a singular, unified being - removing silos. 

Linda Koh, Senior Director, Communications, Sabre, Asia Pacific  
Sabre sits at the heart of the travel industry with technological solutions for airlines, hotels, agencies and other travel partners and we’re lucky enough to gain a 360-degree view of booking trends. We’re seeing incredibly positive signs in the market, so it’s a critical time to ensure the travel ecosystem has the technological tools needed to capture recovery.

Our latest data shows global travel recovery accelerated each month since January and broadened geographically. Corporate and international travel is rebounding sharply and we’re seeing a strong recovery trend in parts of Asia Pacific as soon as markets open back up. 

For Sabre, 2022 is a pivotal year for our own technological transformation to enable us to create catalysts and growth for the travel industry. We’re working with American Express Global Business Travel to create catalysts for recovery in the corporate travel space.

As part of a partnership with Google, we started Cloud migration two years ago and this year is a tipping point towards the completion of this journey. But this partnership is about much more than a move to the Cloud. We’re continuing to pair Sabre’s travel experience with Google’s AI and ML capabilities to accelerate innovation for the entire travel ecosystem, as we move ahead with our overarching goal to create a new marketplace for personalised travel by 2025. 

Ahmad Nazri Tashriq Rahmat, Corporate Communication Manager, Tourism Selangor
Even though most of the Tourism industry players' aim is to reset the tourism industry, however, we do not just keep hitting the reset button without any urgencies to drive the industry forward. Hence, Tourism Selangor will strengthen its digital platform to pave the way for a comprehensive promotional initiative.

This includes highlighting new tourism products in the State, as well as giving exposure to the ongoing promotions of Selangor’s tourism products. As we gear up towards tourism digitalisation, which has been a significant practice since the COVID-19 outbreak, Tourism Selangor will not take a step back as Tourism 4.0 is the way to move forward.

Apart from strengthening our digital presence through www.selangor.travel and our social media platform; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok application, and YouTube channel, Tourism Selangor will also promote the “Go Selangor!” mobile application, providing easement at the fingertips to both domestic and international travellers to Selangor.

Domestic tourism is expected to drive the tourism industry in Selangor this year as even the borders are open, we are still uncertain of the outcome of international travels, hence the best approach is to focus on and leverage the potential of the domestic market which Selangor is the leading and premier destination in Malaysia

John Flood, CEO, Archipelago International
Overall our domestic business in Indonesia has seen a steady increase since July 2021. The COVID surge in February saw a steep downturn but now and for the rest of this year we expect to see numbers increase month by month. Even with a few challenges in 2021 on stricter restrictions related to COVID in certain cities, Archipelago closed at 60%. 

We were the first chain to introduce mandatory and regular COVID testing for all employees as well as implementing a raft of other safety measures and all these efforts has helped position us as in people's minds as the safe and trusted hotel group to stay with - it really worked out well for us.  Foreign visitors will return but quite slowly as many countries such as Bali’s biggest market of China are still having issues and are now not allowed to leave China without a good reason.

The built-up desire people have to travel will continue for several years to come and we expect business to return to pre-pandemic levels and beyond by 2023. The move to online bookings has accelerated even more than before so seamless connectivity, global distribution and an easy booking experience is crucial for hotels now.

We have spent a lot of time and resources working on this in the past ten years and this is now paying dividends for us. We're also now offering this specific service to independent hotels though our Powered by Archipelago and a lot of hotels are starting to use it. We see this as a big growth area for us this year. 

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