Northstar

www.travelweeklyweb.com www.travelweeklyweb.com 8 | ■ TRAVELWeekly AsiA | JULY 2014 TEchNology Singapore Travel Startup BeMyGuest secures $1M investment SINGAPORE – BeMyGuest, Asia's leading provider of tours and activities, has won the Start-UP Asia competition ahead of more than 150 companies. The inaugural edition of Start-UP, hosted by Channel NewsAsia, aims to nurture and inspire entrepreneurship for a select group of promising businesses who impress with their potential and original concepts. A s a r e s u l t o f t h e w i n , B e M y G u e s t s e c u r e d i n v e s t m e n t from lead investor TNF Ventures, with additional follow on strategic investments from TideSquare (one of the top three Korean online travel agencies), Adrian Ong, of Match.com (CEO, singlesnet.com), and Woon Shung Toon (Founder, The Analytics Company and CEO, Cornerstone Asia, acquired by NTT Data), amongst others, which combined to a total seed funding of SG$1 million. Wego launches private marketplace for advertisers SINGAPORE – Wego has launched Wego's Private Marketplace – one of the first large premium travel publishers to do so. The initial line-up of Wego's clients span the world and include Xaxis (trading desk for some of the world's largest ad buyers), Amnet, RadiumOne in the UK and USA and other highly established trading desks in APEC, Macau and the Middle East. Wego's Audience Engagement Platform enables advertisers to select users shopping for travel by country of origin, destination, brand preference, price range, travel window, length of stay, cabin class and many other parameters. Users can be targeted on Wego but also re-targeted off-site and all of this, fully-managed by Wego's internal Publisher Trading Desk. HotelQuickly launches re-designed app HONG KONG – HotelQuickly has released from scratch a re- programmed and re-designed app. Travellers can now lock in the unbeatable hotel deals of HotelQuickly one day ahead of checking into the hotel. Besides the tomorrow-booking feature, HotelQuickly added a new payment gateway, price filters; third-party hotel reviews, and managed to get more hotels to offer multiple night stays than with the previous app. All partner hotels are hand picked, only above-average rated 3-5* hotels will make it onto the app. Any traveler relying on HotelQuickly can therefore be assured to always find a great hotel at better rates than anywhere online—or else HotelQuickly will refund twice the price difference. To date, the app has been downloaded more than 300,000 times and is available in 6 languages for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry 10 devices. Travelport hosts Asia Pacific Customer and Partner Conference in Bali BALI – Travelport hosted a conference for its APAC customers at the Grand Hyatt Bali in June, attended by over 350 travel agents, airlines, hoteliers, developers and corporations from around the region. Travelport's newly launched brand vision, Redefining Travel Commerce, was the theme of the conference, and delegates were updated on the latest research, innovation and trends affecting the travel industry. Speakers included Azran Osman-Rani, CEO of AirAsia-X, Peter Harbison, Executive Chairman of CAPA – Centre for Aviation and Mark Meehan, Travelport's Managing Director for Asia Pacific. G u e s t s w e r e i n v i t e d t o p a r t i c i p a t e i n i n t e r a c t i v e p a n e l discussions with airline leaders, agencies, TMCs and other industry representatives, and attend breakout sessions hosted by Travelport experts focusing on core areas such as point of sale tools, airline retailing and marketing, mobile and online.

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