Principal
Elmer Alinsog – Founder | Managing Director
Contact: 1.646.233.4258 New York | +63.929.684.7842 Manila
Mr. Alinsog has an extensive technology R&D and technology transfer background from Semiconductor, Flat Panel Display to Enterprise Software Architecture & Automation Design, with positions at Hewlett-Packard Labs HQ in Palo Alto, CA, as Thin Film Process Engineer; Qwest Communications as Business Development Manager in New York City's Wall Street corridor. Prior to architecting the Buy-Side and Sell-Side business model of AgentFactor (an International Travel Group Holdings Company), Mr. Alinsog held the title of Vice President, Business and Partnership Development at Fareportal and was responsible for business growth in the technology, corporate and consumer markets. Mr. Alinsog brings wealth of knowledge base in private aviation charter, scheduled commercial travel and luxury travel sector. Most recent notable milestone of Mr. Alinsog contribution to travel industry is automating the availability and book-ability of private yacht charter in real-time. To bring this type of product to the mainstream market, to making it affordable to charter a yacht by extending the availability of per cabin charter and a marina based lodging as alternative to hotel accommodation. Two of next on Mr. Alinsog’s project pipeline is (1) automating the availability to charter a private jet; with air taxi model spin through shared flight charter-by-the-seat-sell sponsorship program by tracking dead-legs aircraft availability in real-time; (2) building a Travel XML Registry, an Open API Marketplace for business-to-business to buy/sell travel products, similar to how NASDAQ trades financial instruments and services.
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Global Domain Experts Network
Martin Tuncaydin – Technology Consulting Partner
Contact: 1.909.954.8065 Los Angeles, USA
Mr. Tuncaydin brings a wide-ranging development background in the travel sector, including a proven record of creativity, design, collaboration and project completion. Mr. Tuncaydin has the programming proficiency required at International Travel Group including .NET web services development, PHP, JavaScript, AJAX and ANTHEM. Finally, Mr. Tuncaydin brings a fresh perspective to travel, and has a passion to drive and deliver new concepts with technology and architecture design. Martin has been programming and deploying travel web services since he was 14 years old, growing up in London.
Joe Buhler - Consulting Partner
Contact: 1.203.550.1641 Connecticut, USA
Global experience in destination marketing, tour operations, retail travel and the airline industry and since the early days in the largest e-commerce vertical - online travel. Senior executive positions in Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom and in the United States. Joe the principal and owner of buhlerworks, a consulting service for Vision, Strategy & Innovation in travel & tourism web marketing, with a focus on destination marketing organizations (DMO) at the national, regional and local level. He is also a Partner and Executive Vice President of Level 9 a web development company providing innovative solutions to the financial services industry and with experience in travel & tourism. In addition, he work as Senior Destination Analyst for PhoCusWright an independent travel, tourism and hospitality research firm specializing in consumer, business and competitive intelligence and producer of high-profile executive conferences. Previously he was a member of the management team of EuroVacations.com, the online tour operator unit of Rail Europe Group, as EVP Business Development, Strategic Alliances & Industry Relations. He contributed to the successful establishment of the company as the first tour operator to offer fully custom-designed vacation packages for independent travelers online. Prior to that he worked for Switzerland Tourism, the national marketing organization for one of the top 15 global tourism destinations. During his extensive global career he was responsible for their operations in North America, the United Kingdom & Ireland, Canada and South East Asia, where he established the first presence for Switzerland with an office in Japan. He also worked in Japan and Switzerland for Kuoni Travel Inc. one of the major European tour operators. Twice he was elected Chairman of the market operations groups of the European Travel Commission (ETC) both in Japan and in the United States and also served as Vice Chairman and Supplier Representative of the Alliance of Canadian Travel Agencies (ACTA). In the past years he appeared as a speaker, panelist and moderator at online travel industry events such as the Hostelworld '07 World Conference, PhoCusWright Executive Conference, Travel Commerce Conference & Expo, EyeforTravel Conference on Travel Distribution and Travel e-Summit.
Tue Paarup - Consulting Partner
Contact: +632-807-2842 Manila, Philippines
Mr. Paarup founded and now runs what is probably Asia Pacific's biggest consultancy specializing in tourism: Royal Intel. Royal Intel is a spin-off of Scandinavian Tourist Board where Mr. Paarup previously held the position of research and communications manager.
Mr. Paarup has considerable experience within APAC tourism including conducting market surveys, focus groups, in-depth interviews; carrying out online questionnaires; producing news letters; constructing websites, organizing promotional events; implementing branding strategies; and much more. His knowledge of and expertise within tourism is especially clear from the biggest single-study of APAC tourism to date, the APTEC project (available from www.royalintel.com
Mr. Paarup has recently expanded the services of Royal Intel to also include medical tourism into the Philippines. In addition to Royal Intel and the medical tourism venture, Mr. Paarup also runs the IT company Archants.
Al Karaki - Consulting Partner
Contact: +27825548873 Rivonia, South Africa
Mr. Karaki's primary expertise lies in ICT and e-business, particularly in the tourism sector. From 2002 to 2005, Al was E-Business Manager for South African Tourism (the South African's national DMO) where he designed and implemented a world class e-business system which included: a new internet website with 14 mini sites, a campaign monitoring system, an extranet website for the tourism industry locally and internationally, an international call centre, a brand management system and a global project management system.
Before working for South African Tourism, he was advisor and project manager to the South African Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism. Earlier on in his career, Mr. Karaki (born and bred in Canada) was CEO of Pacific Sun Corporation, a project management company whose clients included the Canadian Government Office of Tourism, for which he secured several Japanese travel wholesalers and jointly promoted Western Canada facilities (ski resorts, golf and fishing) as tourist destinations.
During his career, Mr. Karaki has worked across different sectors of the economy, on a wide range of projects. He is currently involved in various activities including Manager Africa for Kyoto Planet (a global energy development and investment company); Vice President Convergence for the TLD Consortium (a company that will be making a submission to ICANN for a new Top Level Domain); Project Manager for the New Partnership for Africa's Development and Founder and CEO of Gr8start.net and Chameleon International (companies developing and marketing branded desktop communications and branding software).
His accomplishments in the tourism sector include the development and sponsorship of TourismShare (a collaboration system for DMOs) and as a project consultant the development of a website and tourism plan for General People's Committee for Tourism in Libya.
Mr. Karaki has also been a speaker at various Tourism/ICT conferences, including those of UNWTO, IFITT and UNCTAD. He has been engaged by UNWTO as an expert in the e-business/e-tourism sector and made a contribution to the new ETC/UNWTO e-marketing handbook for destinations, prepared by TEAM.
Key Areas of Expertise
Planning and implementation of e-Business; CRM and e-marketing; Website and e-business evaluation; e-business training; Website maintenance; Online acquisition of targeted audiences; Implementation and management of operational e-marketing campaigns; Domestic e-marketing strategy; International (inbound and outbound) e-marketing strategy; Managing IT procurement process; Project management.