At 21, WiT Singapore asks what's left for travel companies to own in the age of AI agents

Web in Travel (WiT) Singapore turned 21 last week, and the first day on the event’s mainstage felt like a coming-of-age moment for the industry.  Agentic AI came up in almost every session.  So did a stubborn question: if machines can search, compare and book, what is left for travel companies to own? 

The answers ranged from bullish to sobering, but most speakers landed in the same place.  Trust, resilience and the human side of travel matter more now, not less. 

"What's the point of speed if you don't know where you're going?"  asked Yeoh Siew Hoon, founder of WiT, as she opened the day.  "If there's anything that generative AI has taught us, it is that we need to ask smarter questions." 

Tony Fernandes finally takes the WiT stage 

Siew Hoon told the audience she had waited 21 years to get Tony Fernandes, CEO of Capital A Berhad, on the WiT stage.  He finally made his debut this week, in the middle of yet another crisis.  Jet fuel jumped from around $85 to almost $200 overnight, leaving AirAsia with tickets sold at the old price.  The airline has since adjusted fares and costs and now budgets for $160 oil. 

He was unfazed.  AirAsia lost billions during COVID and came back, and demand is holding up, with a record day of sales just days before the event.  "I always say, why waste a crisis?"  said Fernandes.  "We'll come out of this stronger for sure." 

He was just as direct about AirAsia MOVE, the group's travel platform.  "We can't be another Trip or another Agoda.  That ship has sailed," he said, promising something "quite different" within the next six to 12 months. 

Looking further ahead, Fernandes wants to take the low-cost model into healthcare and education, so that ordinary people can afford decent schools and hospitals.  When Siew Hoon asked, in jest, whether patients would be charged ancillaries halfway through an operation, he laughed, in good humour, that it couldn’t be ruled out. 

Travellers are moving faster than the industry 

New research from Phocuswright, presented by managing director Pete Comeau, put numbers on the gap that ran through the day.  More than half of US travellers now use AI for travel.  Agentic AI has become the top technology investment priority for a third of travel companies, yet only 9% say they are fully prepared, down from 12% last year.

"I don't think AI has created any underlying problem, but it has exposed it," said Timothy O'Neil-Dunne, principal at T2Impact.  "Now the customer is back in the driving seat, and we are not ready.

"Expedia Group's Golan Shaked made a similar point from the platform side.  Around 68% of travellers use AI to make trip decisions, he said, but only about 8% feel confident booking through it.  Expedia is already putting AI to work behind the scenes: more than one million AI recommendations were taken up by its hotel and airline partners in the past year, adding $6 billion in booking value.  Viator founder Rod Cuthbert was calmer still, warning AI companies that hope to become travel companies that they "are in for a very rude shock when they discover the spaghetti that is at the back end." 

Not everyone thinks there is time to wait.  Ross Veitch, CEO and co-founder of Wego, said he would not be surprised if, within two to three years, companies like his were taking more bookings from AI agents acting for travellers than from travellers themselves.  The reason, he argued, is that AI is improving exponentially rather than in a straight line.  "30 linear steps gets me across the stage.  30 exponential steps gets me around the world about 16 times," he said. 

ixigo locks a team away to rebuild from scratch 

The most striking story of the day came from Rajnish Kumar, co-founder and group co-CEO of ixigo.  To force an AI-native rebuild, he took 40 to 50 people out of a 500-strong company, moved them to a different floor and switched off their Slack and calendars.  Anyone caught talking to the old company would be sent back to it.

The result, launched earlier this year, is an app with AI agents that check travellers in automatically, hunt for cheaper fares and even call hotels the day before arrival to reconfirm bookings.  "If you're not really full stack, you won't even survive in the age of AI," said Kumar. 

Asia's builders look to their next chapter 

Klook co-founder and president Eric Gnock Fah said AI "can be a coffin, it can be a saviour," but sees offline as the bigger competitor, since more than 60% of Klook's merchants still have no website.  In the meantime, the company is moving product resources away from perfecting its app and into its chatbot, which will soon be able to take bookings.  Klook has been profitable since last year, and nearly 20% of its revenue now comes from Western markets, when five years ago it all came from Asia. 

In India, Rajesh Magow, co-founder and group CEO of MakeMyTrip, dismissed the idea that post-pandemic demand was a blip.  "A lot of people initially thought it was revenge travel.  It's actually not revenge travel, it's sustained," he said.  With 75% of MakeMyTrip's transactions coming from existing customers each quarter, he put that loyalty down to word of mouth rather than advertising.  He sees plenty of room to grow, with the Indian travel market expected to rise from about $90 billion to $150 billion in the next four to five years. 

Booking.com and Skyscanner rethink their own models 

Laura Houldsworth, managing director, Asia Pacific at Booking.com, said the group is testing new AI-first brands alongside its core business.  "Plugging AI into an existing machine is one thing, starting from the ground up is something else," she said.  She also shared findings from Booking.com's first travel happiness index for the region: 84% of travellers now see travel as a necessity for their wellbeing rather than a treat.  Only 73% say they enjoy planning a trip, and Houldsworth challenged the room to push it to 95%. 

At his first WiT, Skyscanner CEO Bryan Batista said the business must move "from search to answers" and eventually to acting on travellers' behalf.  His summary was simple: "Trust is the moat." 

A 680-room hotel with 30 staff: Hotel 101 brings fast-food thinking to hospitality 

In a conversation with Siew Hoon on how hospitality is moving forward, Hannah Yulo-Luccini, CEO of Nasdaq-listed Hotel 101 Global, explained how the Philippine brand applies fast-food principles to hotels.  Every property has one room type, right down to a single type of light bulb.  Its 680-room Madrid hotel, which opened less than six months ago, directly employs just 30 people and has already gathered more than 8,000 guest reviews scoring between 9.1 and 9.4. 

Investors buy individual rooms and receive 30% of gross room revenue, with no deductions.  Around 90% of bookings come through OTAs.  "Commission to the OTAs is our marketing," said Yulo-Luccini.  Having one standard room also means Hotel 101 can be first to adopt new technology, such as robot housekeepers that can be programmed once and sent from room to room.

Sharing the stage, Tan Bee Leng, chief commercial officer of The Ascott Limited, said the group's AI work is starting behind the scenes, by connecting its inventory, reservation, payment and loyalty systems.  "All of the systems need to come together like an orchestra and then really create beautiful music in harmony," she said. 

Other highlights from Day 1

• Loyalty: HeyMax's Alice Goh and Pelago's Ricky So went head to head on two very different models.  HeyMax First lets members "fly now and earn later," while Pelago's biggest single redemption topped 600,000 KrisFlyer miles for a Disney cruise.

• Payments: "Travel companies have to be fintech companies," said Agoda's Timothy Hughes, who moderated a panel with Visa, Xendit and Checkout.com.  Agoda has gone from 40 to 122 payment methods in five years.

• Agentic distribution debate: In a close audience vote on the panel's predictions, the favourite came from Cara Whitehill of Thayer Investment Partners, who argued that human travel agents will become more important, not less. 

The day closed on a human note.  Morris Sim of Brand Karma recalled that his first sentiment analysis engine for hotels took 20 engineers three years to build two decades ago.  Recently, a friend built an AI tool that audits how brands appear across AI platforms, on his own, in three months.  Businesses, he said, now need to focus on what is uniquely human: trust, relationships and taste.

The final panel showed what that looks like in practice.  Shinta Mani's foundation never asks guests for donations, yet one guest gave $20,000 on the spot after seeing its work.  "It's going to take a human to actually make another human change," said Kittisak "Kitt" Pattamasaevi, CEO of Montara Hospitality Group Thailand.