Wednesday, October 01, 2008

WebInTravel conference - pre conference interview with the BOOT

Siew Hoon Yeoh's WebInTravel conference is now less than three weeks away. October 21-23 in Singapore alongside the Asian ITB event.

I am presenting at the event as well as moderating a couple of sessions. Full agenda is here. Siew Hoon has recently published a pre-conference interview with me in the conference newsroom. It builds on the themes from my post "Financial Collapse. George Bush in charge. We're all doomed!". Here is the begining of the interview
At times like these, when the news is all bad on the financial front, there are the pessimists who see doom and gloom and there are the optimists who see silver linings behind every dark cloud.

You could probably put Timothy Hughes, who will be speaking at WIT this month, more towards the optimistic camp, albeit he is a pragmatist as well.

Asked what he thought the financial meltdown in the US would mean for travel and tourism, the vice president-commercial, Hotelclub,com and the blogger behind BOOT - The Business Of Online Travel, said, “The news will be bad. Money will dry up for investment in start-ups and people in affected industries will think twice (three times and more) before pulling out he credit card.”

But, being the optimist, he added, “We (the industry) have survived worse and the consumers have rebounded from worse and continued to travel. I blogged about this just recently pointing out that the US travel market bounced back from 9/11 within a quarter. Same for Hong Kong and Macau post SARs. Humans love to travel and will come back with a vengeance. However the industry can’t just wait for them (the consumers), we need to keep re-inventing.”

more at the conference site here....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

is this another cash for comments thingie