The combination of the cherry blossom season, visa-free travel and cheap flights have propelled Japan to become the leading destination for Thai travellers during the upcoming Songkran period, traditionally a peak outbound travel period for Thailand as travellers make use of the long holidays during the annual water festival.

Mongkol Thitawannoned, manager of Miracle Time Travel, observes more Thai travellers heading abroad during Songkran this year, with 60-70 per cent of its tours booked for the holiday period.

Japan and South Korea are hot favourites for their cherry blossom season, while Italy and France are popular for longhaul Thai travellers, he shared.

“Most customers booked medium-haul tours of around five days, four nights, while others take holidays for as long as their companies allow during Songkran,” Mongkol said.

Veeraya Veerasupakarn, a planning staff of H.I.S. Thailand, told TTG Asia that the top outbound destination for Thai travellers is still Japan and the company’s group tours to Japan are fully booked.

“During Songkran, most of our customers chose six-day, four-night tour packages while others would not holiday beyond five days according to the national public holiday calendar,” Veeraya said.

And even as Japan is seeing more FITs from Thailand, the revenue for H.I.S. – which focuses on Japan tours – has not declined as the agency also offers other products such as flight ticket and hotel reservation to customers, she added.

Getting all sorts of questions and requests are part of a travel agent’s job. Ahead of April Fool’s Day tomorrow, we got our agent friends to spill some of the most ridiculous, over-the-top and absurd requests they have received. Here are 10 weirdest requests agents had to dealt with.

1. “A client asked: ‘If I don’t pay for a seat reservation on my flight, will I have to stand?'”

2. “After informing a client that a visa is needed to travel to Vietnam, he responded: “I have a MasterCard, will I need to speak to my bank and change it over?”

3. “A guest complained that he didn’t get a seaview room in a Kuala Lumpur hotel.”

4. “A Middle Eastern guest staying at a luxury property in Langkawi facing the rainforest asked me the following day if I wanted to kill him. His theory was that trees gave out carbon dioxide at night and so he thought I was trying to suffocate him.”

5. “Many years ago a man from Yorkshire greeted me at the beginning of a tour and said: ‘I don’t like fish. Now don’t get me wrong I like fish but I don’t eat them.’ There was no ‘Hello’ or ‘How do you do.’ I was, of course, non-plussed by his abrupt statement, particularly as we were in Japan. This set the tone for the rest of the tour as his wife would quickly remove any fish from his plate at mealtimes. When she failed to do this quickly at one dinner, he immediately returned to their room not to be seen for the rest of the evening.”

6.”A client, whose zodiac sign is Virgo, asked whether her husband and their s on could also cruise on board Superstar Virgo even though they are Aquarian and Capricorn, respectively.”

7. “A well-coiffed lady arranging a trip to Africa for her and her husband asked whether we could arrange a one-way ticket for her husband and do whatever it takes for him to never (come home). We never found out whether the lady was serious or was merely joking.”

8. “A man asked for the telephone number of a pretty Vietnamese lady he met on his Vietnam holiday. He just couldn’t remember where or when.”

9. “We run trips into the tropical jungle of Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains and we were asked many times to ensure there are no mosquitos or bugs in the jungle.”

10. “A client wanted to visit Dubai with family so I suggested a dhow cruise to him. When he came back he complained that it was not a cruise as he expected a big ship. He then tried to convince me that cruising can only involve large ships.”

This article was contributed by Adelaine Ng, S Puvaneswary, Marissa Carruthers, Rosa Ocampo, Julian Ryall and Rohit Kaul

A week into the large carry-on electronics ban, the Middle Eastern carriers are going all out to up one another. First there was Royal Jordanian’s tongue-in-cheek social media posts, then there was Emirates’ gate-check service for laptops and tablets.

Now, Qatar Airways is providing a complimentary laptop loan service for its business class passengers on all US-bound flights from next week. The loan device will be provided to passengers after boarding.

Qatar Airways Group chief executive, Akbar Al Baker, said; “By providing this laptop loan service we can ensure that our passengers on flights to the US can continue to work whilst on-board.”

The airline is offering a special service to collect all prohibited electronic items at the gate for all passengers. These will be securely packaged, tagged, loaded as check-in baggage and returned safely to the customer on arrival in the US.

Qatar Airways is also providing one hour of free Wi-Fi for all passengers and a special Wi-Fi package of US$5 on board US-bound flights.

US-based Dream Hotel Group (DHG) will be renovating the Dream Hotel Bangkok as it expands Dream and its other brands in Asia to ensure that properties keep with their models.

To some, DHG is having a ‘re-start’ in Asia. For 10 years, there has been just the Dream Bangkok, then Dream Phuket Hotel & Spa which opened two years ago, although this isn’t managed by the group but is a licence agreement with Singapore-based Castlewood Group which owns the property.

Dream Bangkok lobby

The deal with Castlewood, announced in September 2015, was to develop up to 20 Dream Hotels over the next 10 years. However, DHG recently set up its own Asia-Pacific development team in Bangkok led by managing director Kevin Wallace. This was part of the company’s new shift to expand globally through management than ownership. It now has development teams in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

DHG’s CEO Jay Stein, interviewed on the sidelines of the International Hotel Investment Forum in Berlin recently, said the group would not be doing any more licence agreements going forward. He declined to comment on the partnership with Castlewood in the future, only saying “there are discussions going on”.

Stein said Wallace to-date had opened new areas for DHG. Vietnam is a good example. Opening this summer or fall is a 351-villa Dream Oceanami in Long Hai Beach, Ba Ria province. DHG had also signed an Unscripted hotel in Danang and a Chatwal hotel in a location south of Ho Chi Minh City. Both are new constructions.

Two properties in the Maldives, Chatwal Maaga and Dream Gasveli, are slated to open in 2019 and 2020 respectively.

Stein: no more licence agreements for DHG

DHG’s four brands, Chatwal, Dream, Time and Unscripted, are positioned at upscale and upper upscale. Chatwal, named after the founder, is the group’s topmost brand, followed by Dream, whose model rests on a large number of F&B offerings. It launched Time to target hotels that want a Dream brand but are unable to have the vastness of F&B. Unscripted, as its name suggest, does not need to follow a script and lends itself to secondary markets such as Danang.

But it all started with Dream, recognised as an early lifestyle hotel brand which tries to inject life and excitement back into hotels, with the antics of Vikram Chatwal, the founder’s son, adding celebrity notoriety. The first Dream opened in 2006 in New York as a standalone hotel, followed by Bangkok in 2006 and Dream Downtown New York in 2011, which “created the new format of Dream”, said Stein.

Diverse, long-standing F&B and nightlife partnerships with such established names as TAO/Strategic Group, Jay Zhous, Geoffrey Zakarian are integral to Dream and have generated a consistent revenue stream over the years. Dream Hollywood, which is opening in a couple of weeks, has six to seven high-end, large-scale F&B concepts.

Stein admitted that Dream Bangkok wasn’t built to the current Dream ideal but a complete renovation would change that. Plans are to add another building to the existing two buildings of the hotel, which DHG owns. The hotel already has significant F&B, he said, including a rooftop bar, a second floor bar and restaurant, and full meetings and banquet space. “We’re looking at bringing an Italian concept into the first floor which will give a lot more energy to the lobby level,” said Stein.

The project is expected to span over 1.5 years.

Read more in the upcoming Analysis on new hospitality models in TTG Asia May 2017 issue

Tokyo-based discount travel agency Tellmeclub has filed for bankruptcy with liabilities of around 15 billion yen (US$134.9 million), affecting as many as 90,000 corporate and leisure travellers.

Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Tellmeclub president Chikako Yamada said customers should not go ahead with their trips as they were not guaranteed accommodation at their destination.

She added that applications for packages would be cancelled but the company was not able to refund payments already made. An estimated 36,000 tour contracts for around 90,000 individuals are affected, worth some 9.9 billion yen, local media reported.

A spokesperson for the Japan Association of Travel Agents told TTG Asia: “Those customers are protected because Tellmeclub was our member and subscribed to our insurance.”

“It is a complicated situation – and also a legal issue now – but we are doing everything we can to help customers and also its partner companies and operators.”

The failure of Tellmeclub is “much more complicated than simply a question of intense competition,” the official said, suggesting that the “strategic decisions and policies” that the company took to grow rapidly played a part in its downfall.

“We issue guidelines to member companies, but we cannot guarantee that a situation like this will not happen again,” the official said. “We are however looking at the causes and will do what we can to protect customers and other companies in future.”

Delta Air Lines and Korean Air have come together to establish a joint venture to share costs and revenues on flights and coordinating schedules for better-timed connections amid greater competition in the aviation sector.

The two also agreed on joint growth in the trans-Pacific market with co-location at key hubs, which will see both airlines boasting a combined network of more than 290 destinations in the Americas and more than 80 in Asia.

(From left) Korean Air’s Walter Cho and Yang Ho Cho; and Delta Air Lines’ Ed Bastian and Steve Sear

Frequent flyer benefits will be enhanced to allow customers of both airlines to earn and redeem miles on Delta’s Sky Miles and Korean Air’s Skypass programmes.

Delta will launch a new service between Atlanta and Seoul in June 2017, while Korean Air will introduce a third round-trip service between Los Angeles and Seoul, as well as a second flight between San Francisco and Seoul.

After 11 years in operation, New Majestic Hotel, part of the Unlisted Collection group, will close its doors on June 1, 2017 to make way for new developments.

The Singapore hotel is housed in a traditional conservation shophouse, featuring 30 individually-designed rooms that emphasises on design, local culture and arts. Opened in 2006, it is the brainchild of Loh Lik Peng, director of the Unlisted Collection.

“New Majestic Hotel holds great sentimental value to me. It is one of my first hotel ventures and, in many ways, Unlisted Collection’s flagship hotel. But when a golden opportunity comes up at the perfect time, you have to take it. To grow, you have to be open to change,” said Loh.

An appreciation party will be held for all hotel staff and their families. A memory wall will also be set up in the hotel lobby for members of the public to share their memories and pen their thoughts from April 28 to May 20, 2017.