Ep 325: Jet Fuel Costs Dominate Q3 Airline Earnings, Grab & ASEAN's Accelerating Agentic Travel Revolution & AirAsia's 2027 Bahrain Reset

The first week of November is normally a calm period ahead of the end-of-year peak season mayhem, but the hot travel talking points continue to proliferate. While Hannah is at WTM in London, Gary recaps the latest developments across South East Asia and beyond. First up, the data breach at Amadeus and the statements released by Asian airlines, including Malaysian Airlines and Qantas, about what this means for passengers and their personal data. Next, fuel cost spikes dominate the Q3 airline earnings reported so far by Vietnam Airlines, Garuda Indonesia, JAL, Korean Air and China’s Big-3 carriers. We transit in Bahrain, where AirAsia has set a new launch date for its international LCC hub, which has been repeatedly delayed by the US-Iran War. We look at how ASEAN SuperApp Grab’s profitable focus on digital financial services beckons the next phase of the agentic consumer revolution which is coming to travel. Finally, to Indonesia where a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air calculates the human costs of the 2026 fire-smoke haze choking Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore since August. This is perhaps the most distressing statistic of the pubic health crisis: “333,470 acute respiratory infection cases across seven provinces; [and] children aged 0-5 accounted for nearly a quarter of cases.” Read the report here.