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Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Trip.com Secures Exclusive Ticketing Partnership with Palawan Innovation Studios for The Palawan @ Sentosa
SINGAPORE, Aug. 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- a leading global travel services provider, is proud to announce an exclusive third-party ticketing distribution partnership with Palawan Innovation Studios Pte Ltd for HyperDrive, Southeast Asia's first indoor gamified electric go-kart circuit located on Sentosa. Under the agreement, will serve as the exclusive distributor across all online third-party sales channels for HyperDrive. Palawan Innovation Studios will continue to operate its own direct-to-consumer channels through its official website and on-site ticket counters. This collaboration marks a significant milestone in regional strategy to move beyond conventional attraction products and strengthen its portfolio of "Play & Experience" offerings – a category focused on immersive, lifestyle-driven entertainment that appeals to the modern traveller. "Today's travellers are seeking more than just sightseeing – they want energy, immersion, and unique experiences," said Chase Liu, General Manager of Attractions & Tours, Group. "HyperDrive is exactly the kind of high-octane, experiential attraction that defines our growing focus on 'Play & Experience' products. We're excited to lead the charge with Palawan Innovation Studios to bring this next-generation experience to a broader audience." As part of this exclusive arrangement, will manage and centralise HyperDrive's ticket inventory across various platforms including its sister platform Ctrip, other affiliated sites, and selected resellers to ensure consistency in availability, pricing, and customer experience. This streamlined distribution approach eliminates market fragmentation and enhances operational efficiency for all stakeholders. "We're pleased to appoint as our exclusive ticketing distribution partner for HyperDrive," said Markus Christ, General Manager at Palawan Innovation Studios Pte Ltd. "Their extensive network, digital expertise, and proven ability to scale destination products across the region make them the ideal partner to support our growth ambitions." In addition to managing distribution, will support the partnership through joint marketing campaigns targeting both local and international audiences. Initiatives will include digital promotions, seasonal campaigns, and increased visibility across regional platforms. This partnership reaffirms commitment to delivering differentiated experiences across Asia's key tourism hubs, positioning the platform as the preferred destination for high-quality, experiential travel products. This has underpinned growth in bookings for attractions and tours in Singapore, which grew by over 50% in the first six months of this year. Bookings by Singapore users was particularly strong, jumping over four-fold. The top source locales for Singapore attraction bookings in the same period were mainland China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. There was also strong growth for bookings from India, Vietnam, Australia, and Southeast Asian neighbours Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. About is an international one-stop travel service provider, available in 24 languages across 39 countries and regions in 35 local currencies. has an extensive hotel and flight network consisting of more than 1.5 million hotels and flights from over 640 airlines covering 3,400 airports in 220 countries and regions around the globe. world-class 24/7 multilingual customer service help to 'create the best travel experience' for its millions of customers worldwide. To book your next trip, visit About The Palawan @ Sentosa – HyperDrive Located at The Palawan @ Sentosa, HyperDrive is Asia's first indoor gamified electric go-kart circuit. The three-level indoor track features 308 metres of exciting straightaways and 14 thrilling turns. The experience is powered by a fleet of high-performance electric go-karts, equipped with industry-leading engines, ergonomic seat designs and pro-level steering wheels. In 2024, HyperDrive introduced Asia's first Game of Karts — an interactive race where players collect 'weapons' to sabotage competitors or 'boosts' to turbo-charge to the finish line, all while immersing in special lighting and sound effect for the ultimate experience. HyperDrive is one of the many vibrant experiences at The Palawan @ Sentosa which is Shangri-La Group's first standalone lifestyle and entertainment precinct located on Sentosa Island, Singapore. The 183,000 square-foot development is a beach wonderland curated with multi-faceted, unique leisure and dining experiences for guests. Designed for both local and international visitors, patrons can expect to spend an entire day exploring, playing, and bonding over activities and delicious fare, in a tropical island setting. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Entrepreneur
6 days ago
- Entrepreneur
The Hidden Costs of Siloed Teams
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Throughout my career, I've seen a recurring pattern inside countless organizations, from agile mid-market players to global enterprises. I'll see talented, hard-working teams in marketing, sales, customer success and R&D pushing relentlessly to hit their numbers. On paper, everyone is doing their job. Yet, the organization as a whole feels stuck, fighting against an invisible current of internal friction. This is a frustration I hear constantly from CEOs and other executives. They see the immense effort but not the exponential results that should follow. There's a palpable disconnect they can't quite pinpoint, because the problem isn't a lack of talent or effort. The problem is that their go-to-market (GTM) engine isn't a cohesive unit; it's a collection of high-performing but disconnected silos. And in today's volatile market, this internal fragmentation isn't just inefficient — it's a direct threat to survival. Related: How to Break Down Silos in Your Company by Building Lanes The real problem: Your biggest threat is internal fragmentation A fragmented go-to-market is one of the most significant, yet hidden, costs in business. When teams operate in isolation, the symptoms are immediate and corrosive. Budgets are wasted on redundant tools and overlapping efforts, and because cross-functional finger-pointing becomes the norm, employee morale inevitably drops. It gets worse when misaligned KPIs incentivize teams to optimize for their own success, often at the expense of the company's larger goals and, most critically, the customer's experience. This internal chaos, in turn, spills outward. From the customer's perspective, the experience is disjointed and frustrating. They are forced to navigate a maze of different departments that don't seem to talk to each other. But this isn't just a minor inconvenience; it's a strategic vulnerability because while you're busy managing internal friction, your more agile, integrated competitors are delivering the seamless, personalized and relevant experiences that customers now demand. So they aren't just stealing market share; they are making you obsolete. The 3 pillars of an integrated go-to-market engine Breaking down these silos requires more than a simple reorganization. It demands a fundamental shift in mindset. Based on my experience and reinforced by what I see every day in the SAMA community, this transformation is built on three core pillars that connect and build on one another. Shared metrics, shared mission: A fascinating thing happens when you get leaders from marketing, sales and product in the same room. And when you peel back the layers, they discover they have much more in common than they thought. In fact, they're all accountable to the same macro-outcomes: customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value (LTV) and net promoter score (NPS). Therefore, the first step to integration is to elevate these shared metrics above any siloed functional goals. This aligns everyone around a single, unified mission: creating and retaining high-value customers. Radical empathy: Once you have a shared mission, you need a new way of working together to achieve it. After all, structure follows strategy, but culture determines success. You cannot simply mandate collaboration; you have to cultivate it, and that begins with empathy. This means creating forums where teams can openly discuss their priorities, challenges and processes. When the sales team understands the data behind marketing's lead-scoring model, and the product team hears firsthand from customer success about user frustrations, the dynamic shifts. As a result, what were once transactional handoffs become genuine collaborations built on trust. A unified view of the customer: The ultimate outcome of this mission-aligned, empathetic collaboration is the ability to see the business through a single, powerful lens: the customer's. This unified perspective is powered by a cohesive GTM engine that gathers data and insights at every touchpoint, creating a true 360-degree view of the customer journey. And in the age of AI, this becomes the very foundation for resilience. Instead of just analyzing historical data, your organization can finally build predictive models to anticipate needs, identify risks and uncover opportunities for innovation. With that, the entire business moves from being reactive to proactive, creating a competitive moat that is nearly impossible for fragmented competitors to cross. When these three pillars are in place, the result is a formidable competitive advantage. The organization becomes more agile, more innovative and more attuned to the customer. Related: The Best Leaders Follow These 13 Rules of Cross-Functional Collaboration Your playbook for breaking down the silos And the good news is that this transformation doesn't require some massive, multi-year initiative. For any leader who recognizes their organization is caught in this silo trap, the path forward begins with three surprisingly direct and intentional steps: Step 1: Get the leaders in a room and define the "why." The first move is to convene the heads of marketing, sales, customer success and R&D, but the purpose here is critical: The first conversation must center on the why . This means framing a shared mission around the business impact you expect and, most importantly, the value it will deliver to the customer. This initial step transforms what could be just another meeting into the formation of a new, unified leadership coalition. Step 2: Map your common ground. From there, it's about getting everything on the table. Have each leader present their team's top priorities and the primary KPIs they are measured against. As you put these on a whiteboard, the shared metrics — LTV, CAC, churn — will become obvious. This simple exercise visually dismantles the illusion of separate missions and builds a foundation of shared accountability. Step 3: Build a unified plan. Once that common ground is established, the conversation naturally shifts toward identifying one or two critical gaps — like improving lead conversion, reducing customer churn, or launching a new product — that no single team can solve alone. The key then becomes to collaboratively build a single, unified plan to tackle it, complete with shared responsibilities and metrics for success. This first joint effort, however small, is what begins to build the crucial muscle memory for cross-functional collaboration. These steps are not just a one-time fix; they are the building blocks of a new operational rhythm. By making this process a habit, organizations move from concepts to execution and begin to instill a resilient, integrated culture from the ground up. Related: How to Build a Solid Go-to-Market Strategy for 2025 The future is collaborative, not isolated Yet still, the pushback I often hear from busy executives is that while this sounds great on paper, they simply lack the time for another initiative. The reality, however, is that this is not additive. This is a strategy for unlocking immense productivity and leverage from the resources you already have. It's about making your entire organization more effective at a time when budgets are tight and every dollar counts. I recently gave a keynote at a large energy company that had completely shifted its operating model to ensure this kind of GTM integration was baked into its culture. Instead of treating it as an extra project, they embraced it as the only way to get better together and meet the relentless pace of customer and market demands. In an era of unprecedented disruption, having the best product or the most aggressive sales team is no longer enough. The ultimate competitive advantage is organizational alignment. So, the question is no longer if you should integrate your go-to-market teams, but how quickly you can do it. Because your growth, and perhaps survival, depends on it.
Forbes
6 days ago
- Forbes
Striking The Right Balance: AI, Humans And The Go-To-Market Engine
Aaron Biggs, VP of Revenue at Summit, is a tenured technology leader with expertise in growth, go-to-market strategy and customer success. If you're a sales or marketing leader right now, there's a good chance you're feeling the squeeze: Every budget conversation includes some variant of "Why haven't we automated this yet?" or "Can't we just add an AI tool instead of hiring?" It's a fair question. AI has been positioned as the great equalizer, offering scale, speed and analytics that no human could match. But when it comes to your go-to-market (GTM) motion, the right answer isn't binary. It's not a matter of AI or people. It's about deploying the right blend of automation and human engagement to differentiate in an increasingly impersonal landscape. The AI Temptation (And The Risk) AI is a powerful accelerant. Sales enablement, lead scoring, content generation, personalization at scale—these are all fertile ground for AI-driven efficiencies. But here's the rub: Automation alone can only get you to parity with competitors also wielding AI. Where AI starts to struggle is where the complexity of human decision making and the nuances of buyer behavior live. AI can help you predict when to reach out, but it can't (yet) sit across from a client, read the room and navigate the layered politics within an account. As of now, there's no GPT model that can decode why a champion suddenly went cold because of an internal reorg. At Summit, we often see clients eager to deploy AI tools for their infrastructure, sales or customer support, hoping for an overnight transformation. Yet the most successful outcomes come when those tools are implemented alongside strategies that amplify human expertise, not bypass it. Over-indexing on AI tooling risks creating a sterile buyer journey, efficient but undifferentiated. And in a market where experience is the differentiator, that's a strategic misstep. Human-Driven, AI-Augmented GTM What high-performing organizations are discovering is that AI is best used to augment the human component of sales and marketing, not replace it. • Insight Generation: AI can synthesize vast data sets, surfacing insights that enable sales teams to be more strategic in account planning. • Administrative Automation: Free your best sellers from data entry and research tasks, empowering them to do what they do best: Build relationships and navigate complex deals. • Content And Messaging Support: AI can help draft messaging frameworks, but humans still need to tailor the message to the specific business context, industry trends and stakeholder personas. When you approach AI as a co-pilot rather than an autopilot, you empower your teams to deliver a buyer experience that feels both personalized and thoughtful with the added speed and intelligence that AI brings. At Summit, we embrace this philosophy ourselves. Whether we're designing cloud infrastructure solutions, managed services or data protection strategies, we integrate automation and AI insights where they add value, but we always keep a seasoned expert in the loop to guide the client through complex decisions. It's how we ensure every engagement feels custom-fit, not cookie-cutter. The Buyer Experience Is Your Differentiator Buyers today are sophisticated. They know when they're talking to a bot, and they're increasingly resistant to cookie-cutter outreach. The buyer experience itself has become a competitive advantage, especially in complex B2B deals where relationships and trust still matter. Human sellers backed by AI insights can better read the subtle signals of buying intent, customize their engagement strategy and build the credibility that moves deals forward. This is especially critical in late-stage sales conversations and renewals—areas where trust and authenticity outweigh automation. At Summit, we see this play out in the infrastructure space all the time. Customers evaluating cloud hosting, colocation or disaster recovery solutions aren't just buying capacity, they're buying confidence. They want a partner who understands their business, anticipates risks and tailors solutions to their unique needs. AI helps us identify patterns and flag potential issues early, but it's our people who bring the consultative insight that wins trust. How To Invest Smartly When debating whether to invest in more AI tools or expand your GTM team, ask yourself: 1. Where are our current bottlenecks? If reps are buried in admin work, automation can free them up. If you lack deep account penetration, consider expanding human resources. 2. Where is the buyer journey breaking down? AI can improve early-stage lead gen and qualification, but mid-to-late funnel stages often benefit more from experienced human engagement. 3. What is our differentiation strategy? If experience, service and expertise are how you win, human investment should be prioritized and AI should act as a support layer. 4. How will we continuously optimize? The best AI tools improve with data and feedback, but your people are the ones providing that feedback loop. Summit routinely reviews the performance of our AI-driven insights with our client-facing teams to ensure we're tuning our approach, not just scaling it. A Practical Example From The Field In our own GTM efforts at Summit, we've invested in AI to streamline prospect research, competitive analysis and even content recommendations tailored for vertical markets like financial services or SaaS providers. But we also bolstered our sales engineering team to ensure that when a prospect raises a technical question, there's a real expert who can engage in depth. That combination of AI-enhanced targeting paired with human expertise has helped us build credibility faster and progress conversations more effectively than if we had leaned exclusively on automation or hiring alone. Final Thought AI isn't here to replace your people; it's here to make them more effective. But leaders need to resist the allure of full automation at the cost of buyer experience. The organizations that win in this new era will be those who get the blend right, pairing human authenticity with AI-powered intelligence to meet buyers where they are, with what they truly need. Summit's own journey has taught us that the future isn't AI versus humans. It's AI with humans. And when you strike that balance? You won't just keep up. You'll lead. Forbes Business Development Council is an invitation-only community for sales and biz dev executives. Do I qualify?
