wbe.travel at ITB ASIA 2018 – discovering a market hungry for Travel Technology

wbe.travel attended for the first time ITB Asia 2018, in Singapore, after successfully launching more than 5 online booking engines in Asia for both B2B and B2C (responsive and Mobile) designed for local travel professionals with global reach. Our focus at ITB Asia for this year, was to test the Asian market, to open new local partnerships for XML integrations of hotels, flights, transfers etc, find out the specific needs of travel companies and engage more with the existing clients.

At ITB Asia wbe.travel presented its new Native Mobile App, both for iOS and Android, translated in 11 international languages: English, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian.

Moreover, on the second day of the event Mr. Radu Ciubotaru the Business Development Director of wbe.travel and Mr. Milad Sharafi – CEO of BookingEE, had an open discussion on the Travel Technology stage regarding a trending topic for local DMCs and Travel Wholesalers on how to use Travel Technology to sell contracted rates to a GLOBAL audience 24/7.

BookingEE as one of wbe.travel’s clients, has made a name for itself as a B2B wholesaler provider and Global DMC in the past 7 years and have won the titles of World’s Leading B2B Travel Provider 2016 & 2017 and also Asia’s Leading B2B Travel Provider 2017, 3 times in a row by World Travel Award organization.

During our stay in Asia we have discovered that the amazing local travel market that is still building ideas and has both the need and the hunger of adopting robust, complex travel technology to ease their work and automate all the processes.

Digital Travel Sales

As per our research we have found out that during the last years APAC countries became one of the new worldwide leader of Digital Travel Sales and will continue their growth until 2020. At the same time Asia is attracting more and more visitors into the region as the travel trends are moving to the Eastern part of the world. In terms of global destinations, six of the world’s top ten cities for international visitors are in Asia, with Bangkok leading all cities in 2016, ahead of London, Paris, New York and Dubai.

So all the travel industry is now focused on Asia. The market is becoming more and more competitive and in order for local Destination Management Companies and Travel Wholesalers to survive the powerful wave of competition approaching with great speed they must adapt to the Online Bookings trends.

The event ended for us in an extremely positive note. Although we went at ITB Asia not knowing about its true potential we came back with a great desire of creating more business opportunities and vision for opening a 3rd office in Asia to better cater our current and future clients and business partners.

wbe.travel is an active member of PATA, the Pacific Asia Travel Association, engaging in the annual events and studying the Asian-Pacific travel trends and researches in order to better cater the needs of its present and future clients.