AirAsia CEO Looks to Disrupt Again, This Time in Online Travel
Photo Credit: AirAsia Group's headquarters, RedQ, at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. AirAsia Group.
Skift Take
Tony Fernandes is taking AirAsia on "the final part of the company's evolution," one that will see the airline become a tech player. But it’s one thing to disrupt legacy carriers, and another to disrupt the disruptors in the online travel space. He disagrees, of course.
Who will be the biggest online travel agency in Southeast Asia in future? Traveloka? Expedia? Agoda?
If you have not added AirAsia to the usual suspects, now’s a good time. As we’ve said before, online travel agencies will face competition from an unlikely source: AirAsia. Now its CEO Tony Fernandes has made it clear that the company’s future lies in being “more than just an airline.” And a lot of that has to do with “disrupting the disruptors” in today’s online travel space.
So if not an airline, what will AirAsia be? A tech player that happens to own an airline? “Yes, yes, yes,” Fernandes told Skift in an interview this week.
AirAsia has quietly been observing the disruption in the online travel and fin-tech space and believes its future is in travel e-commerce, he said.
See AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes at Skift Forum Asia
It sees that without so much as lifting a finger, or spending the millions that the big bad online travel players do on marketing
