Asian travelers don’t need more choices, they need better ones.

Trusted content is a crucial consumer guide, especially when it comes to travel.

Who is best positioned to provide genuine trusted content?  The informed tastemakers pushing new trends and ideas to established audiences; Media Brands. There are examples of  media companies having moved past monetizing their sites via traditional banner ads and towards ecommerce structures, with travel booking a clear next progression in the evolution of the business model.

The combination of smart content and curated travel options embodies the consumer experience-first mentality missing from the intermediary online travel bookers.  

Mass market online travel agencies are sprawling warehouses of hundreds of thousands of hotel options  with endless reviews by faceless names that leave users overwhelmed and confused. Little is being done to accommodate for specific tastes. You can’t sort  by “culinary experience” or “high design,” and you can’t curate reviews by names you trust.

But what if you could?

There’s a need for this type of curation across hospitality especially for the emerging mass affluent travelers from Asia Pacific who rely heavily on guidance in travel experiences as they broaden across and ever increasing spectrum of destinations. 

Booking sites struggle to be hotel tastemakers — after all, it’s not what they’re built for. On these sites, hotels are merely inventory, leaving consumers to gravitate towards social review sites  to make informed choices. But here too lies the same problem: reviews are treated as inventory. There is little oversight to the reviews, written by unknown contributors, who may have limited experience or exposure to travel and are not necessarily providing advice in true context.  

As travel consumers become increasingly blind to advertisements and never-ending "Sale" promotions from OTAs, there is a rising need for the smart curation of hotels and travel experiences in partnership with trusted media brands.

It’s a matter of quality versus quantity.

The new Asian travel consumers don’t need more choices, they need better ones.