At Groupon, there is no platform, it’s full of entrepreneur fervour and the feeling is ‘we can do anything’.” Travelocity was a platform that couldn’t change and the speed of change was slow. “Groupon is full of entrepreneurs and I wanted to be among entrepreneurs – how they think, how they disrupt, how they question everything. To Seah, the move represented an opportunity for personal growth. So when Seah Seah (left), formerly with Langham Hotels and prior to that, ZUJI, joined them as their travel head last October, many people were surprised – why would Seah join a company that is perceived to be floundering and its CEO Andrew Mason left in rather dramatic fashion, writing the most-talked-about resignation letter in the US corporate world? In the rapid-fire world of online, it seemed only yesterday when Groupon, the daily deals monster, was hailed as the game-changer in travel and today, some people are surprised that it’s actually still around and not imploded like the thousands of copycat sites that mushroomed after “the Groupon phenomenon”. One of the most frequent questions I’m asked these days – after Groupon set up its Travel vertical group in Asia Pacific earlier this year – is “how long do you think they will last?”

Groupons travel