Finding Opportunity in the Chaos of Asia’s Travel Market

The Asian market is so big that there’s enough to go around for everyone, even if Google and Amazon make deeper inroads into travel. AirAsia becomes the Amazon of travel. Airbnb goes mainstream. Agoda offers homes and is distributed on Grab. Travel executives made these declarations as speakers at the first Skift Forum Asia last week.

Who were they trying to reassure?

Instead of simplifying the business, the industry has simply gotten more complex and chaotic. Just look at the crisscrossing of travel players into one another’s turf.

In fact competition in Asia is as bloody as the plot line from hit HBO series Game of Thrones, shot forth John Brown, CEO of Agoda.

Although Brown was referring to the mighty battle among online travel agencies, it’s safe to say that every sector of the industry could relate to that sentiment. You think Singapore Airlines has it easy? CEO Goh Choon Phong, in a rare public appearance, described how, without a domestic market, the world’s best airline company must fight tooth and nail in Southeast Asia, where low-cost carriers take 50 percent market share, the highest in the world.

Similarly, even though Genting Cruise Lines is the Asian cruise pioneer with a 25-year history and experience in the region, that doesn’t mean it can sail away blithely into the blue. It competes with global lines that have made a beeline for Asia and China in particular, some with more success — think Royal Caribbean — than others. Here’s to better luck in Alaska, Norwegian.

Genting has embraced the insatiable Asian demand for new, better products by installing the next biggest theme park and technology aboard its ships. Competition is so fierce that the cruise operator acquired its own shipyards in Germany to construct two Global Class ships for its Dream brand, each of which can accommodate up to 9,000 passengers. As Dream Cruises President Thatcher Brown stressed, “We need all the help” to fill those ships when they join the fleet in early 2021.

So if there’s one takeaway from Skift Forum Asia, it’s that Asia isn’t readily for the taking. The future of travel is being tested in the region in a raw, cutthroat theater, with only the strongest surviving the game.

No, there really isn’t such a thing as enough to go around. At least not in Asia.

For the full coverage of Skift Forum Asia, visit this link.

— Raini Hamdi, Skift Asia Editor, [email protected], @RainiHamdi

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Asia Editor Raini Hamdi [[email protected]] curates the Skift Asia Weekly newsletter. Skift emails the newsletter every Wednesday.

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