Ceo Journal

AirAsia India is close to appointing an executive from Tata Steel Ltd to head the troubled low-cost carrier as its local partner, Tata Sons, moves to take greater control of the company, two sources aware of the matter told   Reuters   on Wednesday. Sunil Bhaskaran, who is currently vice president of corporate affairs at Tata Steel, has been chosen to head the airline — a joint venture between India’s autos-to-steel conglomerate Tata Sons and Malaysian low-cost carrier AirAsia Group Bhd. AirAsia India   did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bhaskaran could not immediately be reached. AirAsia India has seen several high-profile exits in recent months and has been without a CEO for nearly six months. Bhaskaran’s appointment would also come at a time when the airline and some of its executives are being investigated for alleged wrongdoing. Indian police in May filed a case against AirAsia Group,   CEO Tony Fernandes and its domestic entity Ai...

Ten years from now, travel won’t involve any paper, says Darren Huston , president and CEO of the Priceline Group and booking.com. “You’ll have no passport, no credit cards, no confirmation,” predicts the Amsterdam-based Canadian. “You’ll just have your phone in your pocket, and if you lose it, everything will be in the cloud.” Until someone invents teleportation, though, we’ll still have to fly – something Darren Huston doesn’t actually like to do. (He makes the most of his air time by sleeping and working.) But for now, it’s the only way he can access all the local experiences he craves. “I like bizarre flavours and tastes. I’ve eaten ants in Nairobi, frogs in Vietnam and lots of strange things in China – I really enjoy that about travel.” Black book: Europe Comfort food: “In Amsterdam, if I feel homesick, I go to Restaurant Red. They only serve three things: steak, Canadian lobster and wine.” Local fave: “Outside of Amsterdam is a little city called Delft, which...

Darren Huston was trying to watch a hockey game, half-listening to a headhunter talk about a company he had never heard of before. But as the headhunter went on, the then-45-year-old executive in charge of Microsoft’s global consumer and online businesses tuned out the arena noise and began listening to what he thought was an impossible story. “I said, ’There’s nothing that big in Europe on the Internet,‴⁣ he recalled, laughing. The 2011 call was from Booking.com, the Amsterdam-based unit of Priceline Group that dominates the European online travel market. By last year, Darren Huston became president and CEO of Priceline Group itself, which has come from dot-com laughingstock to the fifth most-valuable U.S. Internet company—if one still really considers it a U.S. company, because 90 percent of its profits come from overseas, most of them from Booking.com. Read full story @ https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/31/why-pricelines-booker-in-chief-is-spending-big.html

China has been unkind to the U.S. Internet giants Google, Facebook and Amazon.com. But as a growing China spurs demand for foreign travel, Darren Huston a smaller player—Priceline Group—is trying to change the narrative. Rather than going head to head with homegrown Chinese sites, Priceline has invested more than $1 billion (via convertible debt and equity) in local travel site Ctrip, spent advertising money with search services like Baidu and Qunar to capture consumer clicks, and opened 11 offices in the country. That’s helped brighten Priceline’s outlook, pushing its stock up 13 percent in the past month and within about 6 percent of its all-time high from early 2014. (The stock has slid this week, including a 1.2 percent on Tuesday, after China surprisingly devalued its currency, raising concerns about future growth.) “Travel is such a huge business in China right now,” said Glenn Fogel, head of worldwide strategy at Norwalk, Connecticut-based Priceline. “As countries deve...