Interview with Ross Veitch, co-founder of wego.com

If you walk past the lane opposite Boat Quay in Singapore and look, you will see that one of the shophouses there displayed a logo called “Wego.com”. Wego is the name of a travel search portal made in Singapore and used to run by the name of Bezurk. In fact, if you talk to a lot of frequent business travelers, they will frequently refer you to this site to find hotels, flights and even good deals on travel. Ross Veitch and Craig Hewett started this enterprise some years back and brought Martin Symes, an experienced veteran into the company as CEO. They have been featured on the press from WSJ to many travel magazines such as Expat Living and Time Out Singapore. What’s the story behind Wego.com? So, we brought in Ross Veitch, one of the co-founders to share their story with us.

BL: Hi Ross, great to have you here on SGE. Tell us about your background. What did you do before setting up wego.com?
Ross Veitch: Thanks Bernard for the opportunity to talk with you.

As a kid growing up in Bendigo, Australia I was a bit of geek with an early interest in computers and bulletin boards. At age 18 I went off traveling and ended up in London working in factories and bars until I realized that my old computer skills were enough to land a series of jobs in the trading rooms of London banks. Back in Sydney a couple years later I worked at Tourism Australia, initially as a number crunching Strategic Analyst/Planner and then as Internet Strategist where I worked on the first australia.com site. In 1998 Yahoo! hired me to come to Singapore to setup operations for Yahoo! Southeast Asia and to manage the production and engineering teams which I did for 6 years until 2003.

During my time at Yahoo! I was exposed to the travel meta-search business through Yahoo!’s acquisition of two companies in the space; FareChase in the US and Kelkoo in Europe. I thought the product was extremely compelling from a consumers point of view and that Asia was well suited to the price comparison model because of the highly fragmented nature of most Asia-Pacific travel markets compared to those in the US or Europe. Bringing travel meta-search to Asia was one of several ideas I had on a list of possible “Life after Yahoo!” projects.

Around the same time my present day business partner, Craig Hewett was working at InterContinental Hotels Group running eCommerce for Asia-Pacific and through his exposure to the fast growing US meta-searchers was having much the same idea as I was. I mutual friend who knew we were both thinking about the space brought us together. At the time I was in the middle of taking a year off to travel, trying to get fit and lying on the couch reading. Craig talked me into getting off the couch and to getting involved with him in what became Bezurk.com. Some time later when Craig and I realised we needed adult supervision we were fortunate to have Martin Symes who had extensive experience in online travel and with building organizations, join us as CEO.

BL: Before wego.com, we understand that it was called Bezurk.com, how did the name change come about?
Ross Veitch: Bezurk as a brand had a number of challenges associated with it, not least of which was that most people had trouble remembering how to spell it. Also, if english is not your first language, as is the case for a large majority of our target audience, then it is difficult to remember at all because the word probably doesn’t mean anything to you.

Because of these difficulties we decided to rebrand prior to kicking off our consumer marking efforts. The calculus was basically that it would cost way more to build up ‘Bezurk’ as a brand than it would to acquire the domain wego.com, rebrand, and market “Wego” as a brand. So we switched from Bezurk.com to Wego.com

BL: Can you briefly tell us about wego.com and what does it do for the consumers?
Ross Veitch: Wego.com is an online comparison shopping service for flights, hotels, rental cars, packages and other travel products. We help consumers save both time and money when booking travel by quickly searching 100+ different travel websites on behalf of the user and showing the prices available at each so the user can find the best possible deal. Importantly we show both the supplier direct pricing from the airlines and hotel chains as well as the best deals you can get via a travel agent or aggregator website. We’re sometimes referred to as a travel meta-search engine and sometimes as a travel search engine (TSE).

BL: What are the three most interesting features on wego.com that you like users to know about?
Ross Veitch: Real-time filters and sliders. After searching 100+ websites for a given query it’s not uncommon for us to return thousands of different products and price points which would normally be completely unmanageable. Fortunately Wego provides a set of filters and sort options that let you quickly zoom in of the best flight or hotel option. e.g. You can adjust a price slider to show only hotel rooms between S$100-$200 or only flights departing before 12noon or only hotels where you will get Starwood Rewards Points. These handy tools are all built with AJAX so the results set can be quickly manipulated in the browser without having to refresh the whole page each click.

Hot Deals Newsletter Singapore readers should check out and subscribe to our weekly newsletter which is a compilation of all the best travel deals that we’ve seen each week. Because we work with all the major players in the Asian travel industry and spend all day searching their websites for deals we are in a very good position to know about hot deals the minute they break. Our weekly newsletter actually started life as an occasionally email we’d circulate internally and to friends and family to alert them to particularly good deals.