Year In Review 2024, Looking Ahead To 2025

Another year has come and gone, and as per tradition, we asked our friends from the industry for their two cents on the last 12 months, as well as their outlook for the coming year.

T2Impact, LLC 's Principal, Timothy O'Neil-Dunne , said he’s looking forward to the travel tech industry “solving tech deficit and focusing on the consumer” in 2025, while Thayer Ventures ’ Chris Hemmeter thinks “data quality and orchestration” remains the industry’s biggest ongoing problem going into the new year.

When asked about an important trend that no one is talking about, Rob Rosenstein, Co-founder & Chairman of Agoda , pragmatically answered, “How to deal with a major economic crisis.” Meanwhile, Amy Wei , Senior Product Director at 携程集团 , said, “Predictive travel curation – where AI anticipates and suggests travel arrangements based on life events and behavioral patterns before travelers even start planning.”

Read their full list of responses here.

Many of these industry experts were also on stage with us at WiT Singapore this year. While there were countless nuggets of information spread over three days, we picked six key takeaways to highlight in a new video that you can watch here. Seek Sophie ’s Jacinta Lim , for example, spoke about how experiences are now determining travel booking decisions - a data-backed observation that led to the creation of Seek Sophie in the first place.

Circling back to AI, after a recent trip to Green Acres in Penang, Siew Hoon Yeoh (Founder, WiT) argues that not every mundane task needs to be fixed by Artificial Intelligence. As she outlines in a new post, “not all repetitive tasks are mind-numbing drudgery. Some, like clove harvesting, offer something no machine can replicate: a sense of grounding, connection, and shared humanity. The repetitive motion of plucking cloves wasn’t boring – it was therapeutic. It allowed my mind to wander while my hands stayed busy, creating a space for conversation, laughter, and reflection. AI can replace the task, sure, but it can’t replicate the context.”

Siew Hoon’s take is one that’s gaining traction among both travellers and travel professionals. On our special Year In Review podcast with Agoda’s Timothy Hughes , the Vice President of Corporate Development reminisced about his visit to the Elephant Village in Laos - a trip that’s largely ‘offline’ and doesn’t require, and in many ways could be impeded by, the gentrification of AI and digitalisation.

There are, however, inevitable trends that will influence travel - companies either have to get on the bandwagon or get left behind. For instance, short-form video content has disrupted the traditional travel booking process, decoupling inspiration from immediate search and booking, but the conversion path remains unclear. “We still have this open question about the link between the timing of inspiration and the timing of booking,” Hughes observed on the podcast. Listen to the full episode here.

So much happened in 2024 - ups, downs and in-betweens. If there’s anything we’ve learned from travel over the years, the best thing to do is take the good, learn from the bad, and keep moving onwards and upwards.

We’ll continue the discussions and discourse on all things travel tech next year at our first event of 2025, WiT Africa in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. Get your tickets now.

For more stories from travel and tech in Asia, visit www.webintravel.com.

Have a fantastic weekend and happy holidays, everyone! See you next year.