UAE- Your travel plan is a click away

(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Ross Veitch, CEO of Wego Middle East, studied the travel metasearch pioneers in the US when he was in a regional product role at Yahoo! in Singapore. He thought that searching the entire online travel market on a single website or app was a cool idea, something he wanted to use for planning his own travels.
"At that point in time, the model didn't really exist outside of the US so I got thinking about introducing it to the rest of the world," Veitch explains.
"I discussed this new business model with my co-founder who was working on ecommerce with IHG, the global hotel chain. His US colleagues were already witnessing great results from early marketing investments that were made into these travel metasearch pioneers. There was a clear business opportunity to take travel metasearch beyond the US. So, we teamed up and did just that," he says.

Wego provides award-winning travel search websites and top ranked mobile apps for travellers living in the Asia Pacific and the Middle East. It harnesses powerful, yet simple to use technology that automates the process of searching and comparing results from hundreds of airline, hotel and online travel agency websites.

Wego presents an unbiased comparison of all travel products and prices offered in the marketplace by merchants, both local and global, and enables shoppers to quickly find the best deal and place to book whether it is directly from an airline or hotel or with a third-party aggregator website.

Wego was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Dubai and Singapore with regional operations in Bengaluru, Jakarta and Cairo.

"In 2011, we first localised Wego for Middle East users and into Arabic. We observed very strong organic growth almost immediately which was the first signal we got that Mena markets might present a big opportunity for Wego," Veitch says.

"In response to this we started to study the markets and make frequent visits to the region. I think I first attended the Arabian Travel Market in 2011 and it was that trip that really opened my eyes to the size of the Mena travel opportunity. At the time 90 per cent or more of travel business was being done offline but I could see that the conditions were right for the Gulf to move online very quickly and so it was a good time for us to invest," he adds.

"We opened our Dubai Internet City office in 2013 so this is our 7th year operating in the UAE. Today we operate a dual-HQ structure with some functions run out of Dubai and some from Singapore and a lot of Wego staff travelling back and forth. Fortunately, we have 5 direct flights a day to choose from on 2 of the world's best airlines in EK and SQ and 2 of the world's best airports in Dubai and Changi at each end so it works pretty well," he continues.

"Today Wego is the number one travel metasearch app across the Mena region with more than 15 million downloads and we are one of the most popular online travel services overall. In 2018, more than $1 billion worth of flight and hotel bookings were made by users on the Wego platform in the Mena region for the first time. That was quite the milestone for us," Veitch says.

Wego operates globally across six continents, 59 countries and in 22 languages.

"The parts of the world where we are most heavily focused are Mena and APAC where we aim to be the largest online travel marketplace and everybody's favourite online travel brand," he says.

"Within the Mena region our largest markets are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Egypt but we are also growing very fast across the rest of the GCC, North Africa, the Levant, Turkey and Pakistan," Veitch says.

Veitch says for now he is focused on growing Wego business, however, cannot rule out the options to go public in a few years.

"Most large online travel companies, even those based in India, China or Latin America are listed on the NYSE or Nasdaq so that's the most obvious place for Wego to list too. A dual-listing in the UAE might make sense though to take advantage of the retail investors who know the brand. We'll see, Veitch says.

Walid Mansour, partner and chief investment officer, MEVP, says he saw the potential and an opportunity for the online travel industry.

"We were the first in Mena to invest in Wego which is now the largest travel marketplace in this region. It is great to see the company record more than $1 billion booking per year and still growing at a fast pace, and we're proud to be part of such a growing travel marketplace," Mansour says.

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