Agoda’s Tim Hughes on preparing for the coming travel boom

As travel begins booming again in some parts of the world, the travel market in Asia Pacific continues to face significant challenges in its recovery, according to Phocuswright’s Asia Pacific Travel Market Report 2021-2025.

Agoda’s vice president of corporate development, Tim Hughes, estimates Asia is about six months behind the rest of the world due to ongoing restrictions.

But Hughes sees this as an opportunity for the online travel agency, a subsidiary of Booking Holdings.

“We don’t want to be at the starting line of the COVID travel boom standing still, we want to be racing. So we are investing ahead of that,” he says.

In an interview in the PhocusWire Studio at Phocuswright Europe, Hughes explains how the company is now bigger than it was pre-COVID and is hiring for hundreds of open positions in a variety of roles around the world (Agoda has 75 offices worldwide) – while also still figuring out the right balance of home- versus office-based work. 

Additional priorities include building out Agoda’s travel platform to serve the end-to-end experience for consumers and exploring new options related to payments and other fintech solutions.

“If you’re not a fintech company as a travel company, you’re missing a beat,” he says. 

“We spend as much time thinking about payments as we do about travel.”

Watch the full discussion below.