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- Bleisure travel remains a priority for business travelers across Asia-Pacific, where a striking 76% of surveyed business travelers plan to combine business trips with personal leisure.
- Bleisure interest exceeds 85% in the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, with business travelers eager to extend their stay for some downtime.
- Markets with typically conservative business travel cultures show strong bleisure intent, with over half of Japanese business travelers planning to add personal time to work trips.
SINGAPORE, Jan. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital travel platform Agoda's 2026 Travel Outlook Report reveals that business travelers across Asia-Pacific are increasingly blending work with play, with a striking 76% of surveyed business travelers planning to combine business trips with personal leisure. Some markets are seeing interest from travelers exceeding 90%, signaling a fundamental transformation in how professionals approach corporate travel, turning airport layovers into extended getaways.
Business travel among respondents remains a priority for 2026, with Indonesia leading at 27%, followed by the Philippines at 20% and Vietnam at 19%. However, the real story emerges once their meetings wrap up.
Among those planning business trips, the appetite for extending stays to include leisure activities proves overwhelming. This is especially so in the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, where more than 85% of business travelers stated they are eager to extend their stays for some downtime. Filipino respondents topped the bleisure rankings at 95%, while Thai travelers followed closely at 92% and Vietnamese at 86%.
In markets like Japan and Indonesia, where work culture is traditionally more reserved, a majority of business travelers appear to embrace the trend. In Japan, 58% of business travelers plan to tack on personal time to their corporate itineraries, while South Korea showed strong adoption at 76%.
These findings reflect broader industry momentum, with the global bleisure travel market projected to reach as high as $1.71 trillion by 2032.
Omri Morgenshtern, Chief Executive Officer at Agoda shared: "Across Asia-Pacific, we're seeing professionals plan to intentionally extend their work trips with personal days to enjoy local experiences and make the most of their time on the road. At Agoda, we're focused on making it easy for travelers to seamlessly plan both the business and leisure parts of their journey, all in one place and at great rates."
Whether booking a hotel near the convention center or extending a stay to explore local attractions, Agoda's platform offers over 6 million holiday properties, more than 130,000 flight routes and over 300,000 activities that can all be combined in the same booking. Travelers can seamlessly plan both the business and leisure portions of their trip with great value deals at agoda.com or Agoda's mobile app.
- Bleisure travel remains a priority for business travelers across Asia-Pacific, where a striking 76% of surveyed business travelers plan to combine business trips with personal leisure.
- Bleisure interest exceeds 85% in the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, with business travelers eager to extend their stay for some downtime.
- Markets with typically conservative business travel cultures show strong bleisure intent, with over half of Japanese business travelers planning to add personal time to work trips.
SINGAPORE, Jan. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital travel platform Agoda's 2026 Travel Outlook Report reveals that business travelers across Asia-Pacific are increasingly blending work with play, with a striking 76% of surveyed business travelers planning to combine business trips with personal leisure. Some markets are seeing interest from travelers exceeding 90%, signaling a fundamental transformation in how professionals approach corporate travel, turning airport layovers into extended getaways.
Business travel among respondents remains a priority for 2026, with Indonesia leading at 27%, followed by the Philippines at 20% and Vietnam at 19%. However, the real story emerges once their meetings wrap up.
Among those planning business trips, the appetite for extending stays to include leisure activities proves overwhelming. This is especially so in the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, where more than 85% of business travelers stated they are eager to extend their stays for some downtime. Filipino respondents topped the bleisure rankings at 95%, while Thai travelers followed closely at 92% and Vietnamese at 86%.
In markets like Japan and Indonesia, where work culture is traditionally more reserved, a majority of business travelers appear to embrace the trend. In Japan, 58% of business travelers plan to tack on personal time to their corporate itineraries, while South Korea showed strong adoption at 76%.
These findings reflect broader industry momentum, with the global bleisure travel market projected to reach as high as $1.71 trillion by 2032.
Omri Morgenshtern, Chief Executive Officer at Agoda shared: "Across Asia-Pacific, we're seeing professionals plan to intentionally extend their work trips with personal days to enjoy local experiences and make the most of their time on the road. At Agoda, we're focused on making it easy for travelers to seamlessly plan both the business and leisure parts of their journey, all in one place and at great rates."
Whether booking a hotel near the convention center or extending a stay to explore local attractions, Agoda's platform offers over 6 million holiday properties, more than 130,000 flight routes and over 300,000 activities that can all be combined in the same booking. Travelers can seamlessly plan both the business and leisure portions of their trip with great value deals at agoda.com or Agoda's mobile app.
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
Agoda's 2026 Travel Outlook Report Reveals Bleisure is on Travelers Minds Across Asia-Pacific
Agoda's 2026 Travel Outlook Report Reveals Bleisure is on Travelers Minds Across Asia-Pacific
HANGZHOU, China, April 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- A team led by principal investigators Bobo Dang and Ting Zhou at Westlake University/Westlake Laboratory reported in Science a high-throughput platform for engineering fast-acting covalent protein therapeutics. Their work, titled "A high-throughput selection system for fast-acting covalent protein drugs," opens new avenues for next-generation biologics.
Covalent small-molecule drugs have shown great success in cancer therapy by forming irreversible bonds with their targets. This has inspired efforts to extend covalent strategies to protein therapeutics, especially engineered miniproteins. However, their development is limited by a kinetic mismatch: Miniproteins are rapidly cleared in vivo, whereas covalent bond formation is typically slow. In addition, high-throughput platforms for systematically optimizing covalent protein reactivity have been lacking.
To address this challenge, the researchers proposed that precise spatial positioning of chemical warheads within protein scaffolds could enable molecular preorganization, thereby accelerating covalent bond formation without increasing intrinsic reactivity (Fig. 1).
Based on this concept, the team developed a high-throughput platform that combines yeast surface display with chemoselective protein modification to screen diverse crosslinkers and millions of protein variants. By optimizing warhead placement and the local chemical environment, the platform enables rapid and irreversible target engagement.
Using this platform, the researchers developed a covalent antagonist targeting PD-L1, termed IB101. Structural analysis revealed that IB101 forms a defined binding pocket that precisely positions the warhead in a reactive conformation, greatly accelerating covalent bond formation. Functionally, IB101 effectively blocks the PD-1/PD-L1 immune checkpoint pathway and demonstrates strong antitumor activity in mouse models. Notably, despite its short in vivo half-life, IB101 achieves durable target engagement and tumor suppression, outperforming conventional antibody-based therapies under comparable conditions.
The platform was further applied to cytokine engineering, leading to the development of a covalent IL-18 variant, IB201. This engineered cytokine rapidly forms a covalent interaction with its receptor, enhancing signaling strength and duration. In vivo studies showed that IB201 induces potent antitumor immune responses without detectable systemic toxicity. These results highlight the potential of covalent engineering to improve the efficacy and safety of cytokine-based therapies.
Beyond immunotherapy targets, the platform was also applied to develop a covalent inhibitor targeting the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2. This molecule achieves durable viral neutralization, demonstrating the versatility of the approach across different therapeutic modalities.
This study establishes a general strategy for engineering fast-acting covalent protein therapeutics. By enabling covalent bond formation on timescales compatible with rapid in vivo clearance, the platform overcomes a fundamental limitation in the field.
These findings provide a new framework for designing biologics with both rapid kinetics and sustained target engagement, with broad implications for cancer immunotherapy, antiviral therapy, and beyond.
Media Contact:
Chi Zhang
media@westlake.edu.cn
+86-15659837873
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Fast-Acting Covalent Protein Drugs From a New High-Throughput Platform
