Thailand-based travel platform Agoda says it is focusing on finding the “best inventory” for its customers, operating with the “best tech” and fending off the intense competition in Asia armed with the “best weapons."

There's a theme there. In a wide-ranging interview at WiT Singapore 2019 with WiT’s founder Yeoh Siew Hoon, Agoda’s CEO John Wroughton Brown, shared his thoughts on Asia, new products, forming “unorthodox” partnerships and the future.

Prior to this change, Special Offers received a placement lower in the TripAdvisor listing coupled with the hotel website link. This required consumers to scroll down past the metasearch auction, pictures, reviews, and amenities before reaching the link.

With the UI change for Special Offers, advertisers will need to be mindful of how this changes the auction space within the listing as well as their current position within that auction. When a special offer is present, the auction space is reduced from three slots down to two slots, which will impact the visibility of ads, particularly those that live on the border of the fold.

Since an average year has an odd number of days, the number of weekdays shifts when comparing the same month year over year: A month that starts on a Friday and has five Saturdays one year will in the following year start on a Saturday and have five Sundays, and so forth. So, in effect, this hypothetical month dropped a Friday and added a Sunday.

Since room demand is not equal across weekdays, this shift can impact monthly key performance indicators materially.

A guy named Rick Klau posted a classic hotel guestroom hack: Use the clips of the pants/skirt hanger in the room to pinch the blackout drapes closed.

People chimed in with their own hacks. Some of the most popular were suggestions to use the ironing board as an extension of the desk or dresser, wrap the remote in the shower cap to avoid germs, and drape a towel over the PTAC to avoid it blowing directly on you overnight.

Triptease launches Email Capture Messages within the Targeted Messages section of the Triptease platform.

Through easy-to-implement, unobtrusive pop-up messages, you can give a guest an incentive to sign-up for a special offer or benefit. Email Capture Messages then provide you with the guest’s email address, so you can contact them directly if they weren’t ready to book on their first visit to your website.