Can you tell us how you started Wego?
Wego’s founding story is a combination of scratching a product itch and seeing a business opportunity.
I studied the early travel metasearch pioneers in the US when I was in a product role at Yahoo! based in Singapore. I thought to be able to search the entire travel market in one website or app, including all of the new low-cost carriers was a cool user proposition and it was something I wanted to use in my own life. This product didn’t exist outside the US, so I decided to set up a company and build it myself.
I discussed this new business model with my co-founder who was working on e-commerce with IHG, the global hotel chain. His colleagues were already seeing great results from marketing investments with these travel metasearch pioneers so it was clear to us that metasearch was also a great business opportunity and we decided to team up to establish Wego.
How do you see the demand for tourism in the region?
Wego has seen very strong growth in the number of travellers searching for destinations in the MENA region. We think with Dubai Expo 2020 on the horizon, the opening up of Saudi Arabia for tourism and Egypt bouncing back strongly from a few difficult years that the growth rate in tourism and travel more broadly to destinations in the MENA region is likely to accelerate over the next 12 months.
Sending travellers in both directions like this gives Wego a very good vantage point to observe and compare tourism trends and traveller preferences. We are operating at a scale now where that we believe the visitor flows that we see on Wego are a statistically significant indicator of what is happening across the entire tourism market now at least in terms of destination and brand market shares if not in terms of overall growth rates.
How do Middle Eastern users differ from users in the other regions?
Through our data, we have observed that over 70% of people in the MENA region book their flight and hotel stay using smartphones and we believe this trend will increase in the future.
Solos are keeping the tourism sector high with around 55% of the total share of MENA travellers. The remaining percentage is split between 23% of families and 22% of couples.
As the number of millennials and generation Z travelling for business in this region increases, we’re seeing “Bleisure” a growing trend. Business travellers are incorporating an element of leisure to their trips and extending their stays.
MENA traveller behaviours differ from those of the rest of the world.
Travellers from South East Asia tend to stay for four days or less and those from India travel for a week or so. The average length of the stay for MENA and European travellers is around 10 days.
Our data also shows that around 24% of MENA travellers book their holidays last minute compared to 27% of European travellers and 22% of South-East Asian travellers while 21% of Indian travellers tend to book last minute.
What are your plans for the coming years?
We have an exciting product roadmap of new features that extends many years into the future and an aggressive growth plan that will see us continuing to grow in MENA and beyond. We will continue to use technology, design and product innovation to help solve real-world pain points associated with booking travel and the experience of travelling.
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