SHIV Singh, the new senior vice president and general manager of Brand Expedia, was sitting in front of an impressively-stacked bookcase when I spoke to him on Zoom, I had to ask, 'Is that fake or are those real books?'.

'It matters who you travel with' falls on shoulders of new brand custodian, Shiv Singh.

You never know for sure on the Internet and he is after all the co-author of “Savvy – Navigating Fake Companies, Fake Leaders and Fake News”, which won a gold medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards. “No,” he laughed, “these are real books but I can’t say I have read them all.”

Singh, who joined Expedia on December 15 last year, is the new face picked to lead this fresh chapter in Expedia’s brand history. Twenty five years ago, the OTA was created out of the idea that the “green screen” facing travel agents should be flipped to face the consumer to enable them to book travel in a click, not the brick.

Shiv Singh: “Without a doubt, when Expedia was established 25 years ago, it democratised travel but now we recognise we can and should do more to support travellers.”

On April 19, with its new brand promise of “it matters who you travel with”, Expedia is flipping the screen back to embrace all the tenets of a traditional travel agency model – to be a traveller’s companion, to hand-hold the customer through all the steps of the trip using a mix of data, AI and chatbots.

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