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Industry leaders predict top trends for Asia’s travel market

January 19, 2012 | Online Travel

2011 was marked by many dramatic challenges to tourism and the travel industry. But there is plenty to look forward to this year and Asia's travel market is growing steadily despite facing tougher market conditions and a global economic slowdown.

- Search will become personal. You will have a chance to see personal search results. This means, when you search for "hotels in Ho Chi Minh City", you might see a colleague's reviews about a hotel on a review site, a college friend's pictures on a photo website, your brother's video about the Cu Chi Tunnels on YouTube or a business page of a local Vietnamese Travel Agency on Google+. So search results will become more personal, more social and most importantly more relevant.

- Air Travel will grow and become digital in Asia. There will be an inevitable growth of air travel in Asia. It will either be in the form of more aircraft being ordered, more budget airlines coming into the game, new destinations opening or more flight aggregators taking the stage. Regardless of any or all of these happening, they will have to become more digital. Airlines will have to adapt to the digital consumer faster than their counterparts in US and Europe otherwise they will fail.

- Travel players in Asia will have to adapt to the digital consumer. Travel players have to realise the local trends in Asia. Asian traveller is becoming way more digitised faster than the rest of the world and mobile is taking the stage faster than the desktop in the region. The classical approach of "desktop first mobile second" approach will fail in Asia as the consumer leap-frogged the desktop. Travel industry players have to realise that Asia is skipping some of the Internet evolution steps and catching up with the rest of the world.

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