Growing up in Myanmar in the 70s, May Myat Mon Win dreamt of a day 'when our country could be like our neighbours' in South-east Asia, 'We just didn’t know how long it would take,' she said.

Today, as the chairperson of the Myanmar Tourism Marketing Committee (MTMC), she sees that the dream is within sight but “the journey has just begun, we gave to work hard” �" work in terms of building up tourism arrivals to the country which once housed South-east Asia’s busiest airport in the 60s and developing its tourism infrastructure to cater to growing demand to visit this once-closed destination.

“We were like the sleeping beauty of Asia, waiting for the prince to wake us up,” laughed May, who became Myanmar’s first female general manager of a five star hotel when she took on the reins at Chatrium Hotel Royal Lake Yangon in 2014. “Now we have a lot of catching up to do.”

May was heading the first Myanmar B2B roadshow in Singapore to mark the 30-day visa free exemption for Singaporeans as well as the launch of new flights to Singapore by state-owned Myanmar National Airways.

“This will help stimulate last minute travel,” she said. “Today, people like to make last minute plans and it’s about instant decisions, instant booking �" you have to be there at the point of where the customer is.”

Mobile’s leading the change

Myanmar is a good example of a country that’s leapfrogged to mobile. Mobile penetration is at nearly 50% and “people’s first experience of the Internet is via mobile and probably Facebook”, she laughed. “In the last few years, we have seen a lot of changes �" before, we couldn’t even get Internet, now we’ve got a fourth telco, we have e-banking and car-on-demand services like Oway Ride.

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