Global Head of Travel,
Ingenico ePayments

Eric Liebman leads the Travel vertical for Ingenico ePayments and helps travel companies optimize their international payment capabilities. He brings more than 25 years of travel experience gained across several countries and continents.

Eric began his travel career working with Continental Airlines in Florida, then made the jump to the hotel industry as Sales and Marketing Director at Marriott in the Caribbean. Following that, Eric spent the next 20 years in Asia Pacific as a senior travel Industry executive, holding a host of regional and global roles with International hotel groups such as Starwood, Regal Hotels and Millennium Hotels. Later he held a position of Vice President - Asia Pacific at Pegasus, where he helped look after a portfolio of more than 1,500 hotels, 9 call centers and a range of operational offices throughout the region. Eric also worked at IBM’s Business Consulting Group as a Senior Managing Consultant based in Singapore where he helped Airlines and Hotel Groups grow and enhance their customer experiences.

In 2014, Eric joined Elavon as the Vice President, Global Head of Payment Strategy for their Hospitality vertical, responsible for the Strategy and Product Development of Elavon’s Hospitality sector throughout North America, Caribbean and Europe. He joined Ingenico ePayments to head up the Travel vertical in March 2019 and is responsible for the development of a cohesive strategy for their diverse and extensive Travel customer base.

Eric graduated from the prestigious Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and speaks English, French and Mandarin Chinese.

Senior Director of Sales,
Lufthansa

Based in New Delhi, he is responsible for overseeing all commercial activities for Lufthansa Group Airlines business in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. His experience over the last two decades spans airport operations and projects, financial controlling, HR development, aircraft line maintenance business strategy, process orientation, organizational development, change management and global airline B2B sales & distribution. In his current role he is globally responsible for all offers towards B2B customers, such as corporates and travel agencies, as well as the IT infrastructure for all Sale and CRM tools, as well as B2B customer platforms, such the Lufthansa Groups SME Program ‘PartnerPlusBenefit’.

Chief Business Officer - Holidays,
MakeMyTrip

Director,
Amadeus India

Recently honoured with the "Entrepreneur of the year – Travel Technology" award by BIG Brand Research and Brand Academy, Ankur is a prolific and outstanding leader, he has led the group’s strategic thrust to create multiple drivers of growth that made a significant and growing contribution to the company and industry at large. He also shaped and implemented blue ocean strategies that strengthen the overall brand proposition and accelerate a leap in core business value by exploring new growth avenues for building uncontested market leadership.

Articulating a vision for Bird Group and direction to the consortia of companies, Dr. Bhatia is credited with bringing in the Amadeus brand to the Indian subcontinent in 1994, which today is the market leader in providing travel technology for travel agents & airlines. Amadeus celebrates 25 successful years of operations in India in 2019.

Vice President Growth & Conversions, OYO Hotels & Homes

Burhan currently heads growth and marketing for OYO, where he is responsible for driving complete customer life-cycle right from acquisition to retention by use of Data Sciences and Product led growth engines.

Before this role, Burhan was heading South India for OYO, where he was instrumental in launching Bangalore and other key markets. He led the expansion in South India and took it to over 1000+ hotels from its start in Oct 2014 with the 1st hotel in Bangalore. He handled a team of over 300+ spread across Sales, Operations and Customer Experience.

Before OYO, Burhan Co-Founded a Technology-Driven Event distribution Company in 2012. This experience was key in shaping his learning around growing startups and teams fast.

Burhan is a Graduate from IIT Kharagpur and also has 3 years plus Leadership and Operations Management Experience at ITC Limited and Hindustan Unilever Limited through earlier stints.

At present Burhan is heading growth and conversion for OYO Globally except for China for consumer demand. He manages a team of over 200+ across India, US, UK and South East Asia driving a complete customer demand portfolio. OYOs unique strategies for growth have been key in entering new markets and start getting a solid direct demand very early on. While in-home market India, OYOs realized value run rate grew at 3X YOY in Dec 2018. Recently he bagged the title of Marketing Professional of the year at the National Awards for Marketing Excellence presented by BTVi.

Senior Partner, Genesys Digital Transformation

Paul is Senior Partner of the world’s leading independent travel technology consultancy, Genesys Digital Transformation (www.genesys.net). Paul founded the consultancy over 25 years ago and during that time Genesys has helped many travel companies across the globe select and implement new technology.

Clients range from some of the largest, market leading, global players to smaller niche players. All benefit from Genesys’ unrivalled experience, expertise and in-depth knowledge of the travel industry’s strategies, technology and business processes.

Paul’s consultancy work includes board-level advice on profitable strategies for the digital world, assisting clients with the purchase of new travel systems, due diligence for acquisitions and mergers, project management of technology projects, website and technology audits. Paul chairs the majority of the industry’s digital travel conferences in Europe so he has built up an extensive knowledge of leading edge best practice. His advice propels his travel industry clients to new levels of profitability.

Paul holds an MBA from Cranfield School of Management, is a Fellow of the Institute of Travel & Tourism and Member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

VP, Head of Travel, APAC and Greater China, SAP Concur

Carl Jones is the Vice President, Head of Travel for SAP Concur across Asia Pacific and Greater China. In this role, Carl oversees the travel strategy, management, innovation and partnerships for SAP Concur’s travel portfolio suite including Concur Travel, Request, Locate, TripLink and TripIt. Responsible for the commercial development of SAP Concur’s travel business within the region, his charter includes building a travel management and ecosystem strategy that helps customers navigate complexities and optimise travel.

Carl is an industry veteran with extensive experience throughout Asia Pacific, having held regional leadership roles in countries including China, Singapore and Thailand. Carl brings with him over 10 years of experience in Asia within the travel industry. Prior to SAP Concur, Carl was the Vice President, Global Client Management, Global Business Consulting and General Manager of American Express Thailand, Global Business Travel.

Carl holds a Bachelor of Physics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Applied Physics from the University of Manchester, as well as a Master's Degree in International Relations from the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore.

President and Group Head - Marketing, Thomas Cook

Abraham Alapatt is a Marketing & Brand professional with over 23 years of professional experience at senior strategic levels across the varied domains of Brand building/advertising, corporate communication, PR/media relations, internal communication, customer service & web-technology. During this period, he has worked as part of senior management teams, with 2 leading advertising agencies, an international internet solution provider start-up, a leading asset management company (mutual fund), a bank, a national insurance company (life + general) as part of its original start up team and currently leads the Innovation, Marketing and Service quality efforts of India’s largest integrated travel services Group that operates leading travel brands like Thomas Cook, SOTC, Sita, TCI, TC Travel and others across 25 countries and 4 continents.

Director,
PayPal India

Siddharth is the Director for Enterprise Business segment in India and spear heads growth initiatives for this segment.

Siddharth brings with him over two decades of rich payments experience from both within India and the globe across sectors including payments, ecommerce, telecom, mobile financial services and IT. He also had a very successful stint with Razorpay where he helped them scale from 500 to 50,000+ merchants in a short span of two years.

Siddharth has done is MBA and lives in Bangalore. Besides having a keen interest in innovations in the payments sector he is passionate about Badminton.

CEO,
HappyEasyGo

Boris ZHA, the founder and CEO of HappyEasyGo. Through continuous innovation in technology and service, the company promotes the reform of the travel industry, so that everyone can enjoy the lowest prices and most thoughtful services.

HappyEasyGo.com, one of India’s leading OTAs providing professional services for leisure and business travel, was founded in the year 2017 by Boris. Ever since the launch of its air ticket business in 2017, the performance has been growing by leaps and bounds, having obtained hundreds of thousands of page views per day, which ranked to the top 2 of peer industry in India. And just right behind that, Hotel business launched in September 2018 provides full service to travellers in the mode of “Air ticket + Hotel”.

Before entering the travel industry, Mr Boris devoted himself to the education industry for quite a long time. In the year 2006, Boris Joined NEWORLD Education Group as a founding member of Sakura International Japanese. During that time, he contributed the core code for the company, leading the team to establish the industry leadership. Later, Boris served as CIO of NEWORLD Education Group, which employs more than 10,000 employees.

In the year of 2012, Mr Boris made an important decision to change his career direction with great ambition and courage. He founded Lvbanx.com, now become one of the top B2B OTAs in China. Through innovations of technology and operating model, Lvbanx.com achieved a turnover of 1.2 billion RMB and an operating income of more than 10 million RMB in 2015.

Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Aroundtown SA

Daniel Wishnia is an advisor, speaker and Entrepreneur in the field of Digital Tech. Digital Transformation director, marketing consultant, eCommerce manager, technical director, head of experimentation and development, project manager, consultant and adviser, programming, supervision, assimilation, development of applications in different systems. Extensive experience in information and communication technology (ICT) and internet technology.

VP - Digital,
Indigo

Nitin brings deep experience in product design and digital customer experience, which he has acquired over the last 19 years across leading internet companies in India. He is currently leading IndiGo as VP Digital to help the group undergo Digital Transformation. He previously built Quikr.com, Yatra.com, Naukri.com, Indiatimes, Rediff and Bharti Airtel. He is an expert in crafting loveable experience for the consumers through simple and usable products. Nitin mentors many startups and has invested in a few of them, as well. He also likes to speak on Design Thinking on many public forums.

Nitin has won the 'Design-led Entrepreneurship Awards' 2017 at TiE 2017. Nitin has been awarded with Karnataka Brand Leadership Award 2017. He got recognised as top digital influencer and made it to Adobe Content 100 list for 2017. Nitin has recently also made it to Adobe Digi100 list for 2018.

General Manager,
Trip.com Japan

Event, Sponsoring & Motorsport Manager, Michlien

Managing Director,
Travel Boutique Online

CEO,
Thrillophilia

Manager- Business Solutions and Quality Assurance, Copa Air

Antonio Saad is a business solutions and quality assurance manager for Copa Airlines. In this position, Antonio was appointed to lead the Hub of the Future Strategy, a program that seeks to improve the competitiveness of the hub, by modernizing the passenger experience. Prior to this, Antonio was the information and communication technologies (ICT) director for the National Assembly of Panama and a consultant for the Global Center for ICT in Parliaments, a joint initiative of the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU) and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science engineering from the Latin University of Panama and a master´s degree in business administration (MBA) from Eada Business School, Barcelona, where he was elected President representing the class of 2012. He attended programs on strategy at Linköping University, Sweden, on leadership at the University of Bradford, UK, on disruptive innovation at New York University, United States and infrastructure in a market economy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, United States. Antonio is a Fellow of the fourteenth class of the Central America Leadership Initiative and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

Director,
Taiwan Tourism Bureau

Founder,
Elevated Consultancy Singapore

Nisha is a tourism practitioner, consultant, lecturer and corporate trainer with more than 20 years of extensive management experience in the Tourism and Hospitality industry. She is currently involved in regional consultancy work in the area of tourism and hospitality development in Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Vietnam and Malaysia. She has provided marketing and management consul to destination marketing teams to develop long term strategic plans in light of the global changes and challenges.

Founder,
Izi. Travel

Alex has a degree in Computer science from Moscow PhysTech and an MBA from British Open University. He worked in many industries at top positions. He started his career as a software developer for the Soviet Mars program “Phobos” in 1988. After Perestroika he worked as a business consultant for EBRD. From 1998 he was in cryptography and developed one of the first implementations of VPN/IPsec. In 2004 he launched the car navigation industry in Russia and in 2006 he sold to TomTom. Then he established the NGO for international knowledge transfer in road safety. In 2009 Alex took control of the High Speed Rail line construction between Moscow-St.Petersburg.

Alex founded the izi.TRAVEL platform in 2011, with the ambitious goal to change the way people learn this world when they travel. izi.TRAVEL now is the largest storytelling platform with 12000 city guided tours and 2500 museums, and now he develops advanced eco-system in the Experiences Segment of the Tourism