Fried scorpion may not be his thing but helping travellers have better vacations is: Steve Kaufer, CEO & founder of TripAdvisor, could hardly remember what he ate for dinner the evening before.

'It was something interesting,' he said. I was curious because he kept talking about how TripAdvisor wants to help travellers have awesome experiences in destinations �" from tours to activities to restaurants �" and I wondered what kind of traveller he was himself.

Clearly, like all of us, he has a different persona when travelling on business or leisure. He was in Singapore only 24 hours before flying off to Tokyo where TripAdvisor signed a partnership with Japan Airlines to spread inbound tourism across Japan with the launch of a multi-media platform. This time, he combined both because travelling with him was his 18-year-old son.

So your son must have been just one when you started TripAdvisor, I asked him? “Yes,” he said, somewhat taken aback by the recollection.

Steve Kaufer in Singapore: “There’s so much more that TripAdvisor and the travel industry can do to help travellers have a tremendous time.”

Most founders would have left by now �" it’s been 17 years since you started TripAdvisor �" what keeps you going, I asked?

And you can tell from his answers throughout the interview that Kaufer remains deeply passionate about the company he started and travel in general.

“There’s so much more that TripAdvisor and the travel industry can do to help travellers have a tremendous time. The world’s gotten smaller, travel has picked up steam. I’d like to think that TripAdvisor has played a modest role in making people feel comfortable travelling abroad.

“But we are still at the early stage yet �" airplanes haven’t changed that much, a bus still looks like a bus. But you can now have a completely new experience when you land because of the smartphone �" imagine combining 500 million recommendations with location awareness, imagine the power of TripAdvisor to combine all that to make great suggestions and help travellers have awesome vacations.

“If you think of why people go on vacation, it’s not to stay at a hotel but the experience of being here �" who you are with, what you are going to do in terms of activities, tours and restaurants.”

His vision is for TripAdvisor to offer “the complete package to enable our 400 million users to experience much better vacations”.

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