Reddit now ranks as the top source of travel advice fed into large language models, and Agoda's Timothy Hughes believes online travel agencies have a narrow window to reassert themselves before AI assistants route bookings around the OTA layer entirely.

Hughes, who has spent 14 years at Agoda as vice president of corporate development and 25 years in online travel overall, laid out the stakes at WiT Queenstown. Both Agoda and WiT turn 21 this year.

What is the "AI Reddit dilemma"?

Hughes framed the threat as direct disintermediation. "I don't think we have a moral responsibility. We have a commercial one. If we just leave it, ChatGPT ends up owning the content stream, Reddit becomes the default source, and they cut OTAs out of the booking entirely."

"Reddit is now the number one source of travel advice being fed into LLMs," he added. "Reddit is not good travel advice, for sure — so that's not the solution either." His summary: "Garbage in, garbage out."

The defensive playbook inside Agoda leans on owned distribution: an app customers prefer to open directly, rather than routing through Google or an AI assistant. The company is also positioning AI as a differentiator, not only a threat.

Why has the advice-to-booking path split?

Hughes returned to a fracture he did not see coming when he joined Expedia in 2000. "I expected content to be at the heart of booking. It's not. We're in a world where the place you get advice is different from the place you book."

"The original travel agent gave you the advice and took the booking. Now people get their advice from TikTok, from forums, from AI — and then go book somewhere else entirely."

That gap, he said, is what AI accelerates, not closes.

How does Asia's payment rail reshape unit economics?

Hughes pointed to South-east Asia's pandemic-era "digital boot camp" as a structural edge. QR-code, bank-to-bank transfers run at close to zero cost across the region.

"In Asia, we're not doing that. We're doing QR code, bank-to-bank, basically free," he said. "That digitises payment from the noodle vendor all the way up to booking an airline ticket, on almost zero-cost infrastructure."

Australia remains card-based, with merchant fees of 2.5–3.5%. The friction lands on inbound visitors, not locals — a foreign traveller often cannot interface with a noodle-stall QR code at all.

India's UPI system, processing billions of daily transactions at near-zero cost, was Hughes's sharper example of government-led leapfrogging.

Can New Zealand own "authentic" before AI erodes the claim?

Hughes predicted authenticity becomes tradable currency precisely because AI-generated media will make it impossible to verify any single photo or story.

"There's going to be a role somewhere in travel technology for marked authenticity — a way of saying, this one is real," he said.

New Zealand, he argued, does not need to invent that positioning. The "100% Pure New Zealand" campaign predates the AI authenticity problem by decades. The remaining work is infrastructure, not branding: building mechanisms that surface and verify genuine New Zealand content ahead of Reddit.

How many times has Agoda reinvented itself?

Hughes counted five distinct versions of Agoda across his 14-year tenure: an original, SEO-driven app built on third-party South-east Asian supply, evolving to today's domestic Korea and India operation with owned payment rails, flights, and tours and activities.

"You have to break your own business model before somebody else breaks it for you," he said. He admitted Agoda arrived late to flights and tours and activities. "We probably should have done both earlier. You learn these lessons."

The next round of self-disruption, he warned, is underway. AI makes companies better optimisers — not better process-breakers.

What does Hughes actually want from startup pitches?

Hughes, who fields a steady stream of pitches as Agoda's VP of corporate development, dismissed "AI-based" as an opener. "It's not an exciting thing to say you're using AI. AI isn't a thing — it's the thing you build on top of. Tell me what you're actually building."

His second filter: whether the founder is optimising a broken process or genuinely rebuilding it. "If you're optimising something, that thing is still broken. Excite me about how you're changing the process itself."

He reserved equal impatience for travel-industry pitch clichés: "the first two slides always say travel is a big industry, and Asia is exciting. I've got it."

Hughes closed with a lesson from four years of stand-up comedy alongside his day job: give the audience silence so they can process the joke. The instinct trained into executives, he said, is to barrel through that pause. The stage taught the opposite.

Whether a data-driven company can learn to lead with instinct rather than incremental optimisation is the test Hughes set for the next Agoda, which the post described as already underway.