Over Korean barbecue with real beef (my Korean hosts insist on using the adjective, which makes me wonder if there’s a lot of fake beef going round like news), I asked my friends, 'How do you think living in a place that’s always in the middle of tensions and threats of nuclear bombs shape you as people?' 

Unlike Korean food which comes with lots of appetisers, I believe in cutting straight to the chase, and I am genuinely curious to know their answer because I want to know what it feels like to live in a place that’s caught between the devil and deep blue sea especially now, when we have a man in the White House who’s reputed to be as trigger-happy as the man in the north.

“Actually we don’t care much about it anymore, I mean, we hear it all the time,” said one. “We just get on with life.”

“Resilient,” said another. “And aggressive. Because you never know …”

Perhaps I am oversimplifying it but I wonder if that’s the reason why, in just one year away from Seoul, I feel the competition in the travel market has gotten downright aggressive �" not just among existing travel players but new ones that have burst onto the scene almost overnight.

And it seems to me that everyone’s in a hurry to stake their claim on the growing travel market �" both inbound and outbound �" because right now, there are no clear leaders that have emerged in online travel.

Traditional travel, yes �" the giants still rule but for how long?

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