Panel at Cruise World Asia tackles 'how to bulletproof your travel agency business with technology'.

Cognizant of the trend of consumers going online to book their flights and hotels, second generation travel agency owner, Dr Frederic Yip, of Goldjoy Travel, Hong Kong, decided to do a little digging into the online cruise sector a couple of years ago.

Yip, who eight years ago had joined the company started by his father, said during a panel at Cruise World Asia this week, “We’ve been selling cruises for close to 25 years and as I had an engineering background, I was curious about the tech side of things. I started digging deeper into the cruise vertical. I found out the way cruises were sold and distributed in Asia was very much behind how flights and hotels were sold and for valid reasons.

Chan Chee Chong, GlobalTix (left) and Fred Yip, Goldjoy Travel (centre), and Yeoh Siew Hoon, WiT who moderated the panel

“At that time, there wasn’t anything quite like Expedia Cruises in our region and most probably even now, most travel agents market and sell cruises through offline channels and travel fairs. When I started, CLIA (Cruise Lines International Association) reports cite that 80% of cruise bookings globally were still being conducted offline.”

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