In 3 words, Wego is a travel search engine. Think of Wego as a price comparison website that helps you find the perfect flight, hotel, or travel package for your specific needs. Instead of having to trawl through many different travel sites, Wego provides the information you need to find your perfect travel purchase, be it airline tickets to Phuket, a hotel room for 2 in Bangkok, or activities you can experience while in Tokyo, all on a single site: Wego.com.
Some of you may be familiar with the term travel meta-search engine, which better describes what we really are. Some other oft-bandied terms are "vertical search engine", or "domain-specific search engine".
So how does it all work? Well, when you do a search (flights, hotels, activities, whatever) on Wego, we go ("we-go", get it?) search dozens of travel sites all around the world, and then present the results for you in a practical interface that lets you make sense of the huge amount of options available after we've collated the results. The travel sites we integrate consist of online travel agencies (also known as OTAs, like Zuji), consolidators (like Orbitz), airline websites, and hotel websites. We even show airline tickets for low-cost carriers (such as Jetstar and AirAsia), something you don't often see on the websites of online travel agencies since they often only sell tickets from which they would make a profit.
Imagine you had an army of 42 monkeys squatting in front of 42 computers searching 42 different travel sites for that perfect hotel room in Hawaii. Eventually they'll probably find that perfect hotel room for you (the theory behind how this works is not dissimilar to the infinite monkey theorem). Well, with Wego, instead of having to own those monkeys yourselves, we provide the monkeys.
What's so practical about the Wego interface you ask? Well, there're filters that allow you to limit the search results to fit into your budget, and you can even say that you want to fly between 1123pm and 1155pm next Saturday. Perhaps you only want to fly on Singapore Airlines, or you want to fly on the Airbus A380 (well, when it does finally start flying), or you want a 3-star hotel room on the cheap - just use the filters to show only the results that meet your needs. Of course, you can sort the results by price, by star rating (for hotels), and even by the duration of the flight.
Once you've narrowed your selection and made your choices, we link you directly to the travel sites to make your purchase. From this point on, you're dealing directly with the travel site. There're no hidden fees - you'd fine the exact same airfare, hotel room rate, or package deal for the same prices just as if you'd searched for it on the travel site itself.
Wego is not an online travel agency nor a travel agent. We don't sell you anything since we have nothing to sell (well, that's not exactly true, since we do sell ad space). We do not have any airline tickets, hotel rooms, nor travel packages to sell you, but the travel sites we search most definitely do (we unabashedly suggest you check out what they have to offer whenever you are in need of any travel-related products by searching with Wego). Search with Wego, book with those other friendly people (who are not Wego).
Wego's raison d'être is to simplify and improve the way you (yes, that's you, you sexy thing sitting in front of the computer) search for and purchase airline tickets, hotel room reservations, and travel packages on the web. We want to provide you as many travel options as we can without any bias so you can make an informed decision on your purchase.
We're tempted to say things like "Wego provides value add to your online travel experience", or "Wego delivers comprehensive access to the region's best deals through alliances with online travel agencies, hotel aggregators, hotel and airline and companies", and even throw in some travel industry jargon like how we provide "access to low-cost carrier inventory". But really, we're just trying to make the process of buying airline tickets, booking hotel rooms, and planning our vacations and business trips as painless as possible. We travel a lot ourselves so we've experienced firsthand the trials and tribulations of making travel purchases - we decided to solve those problems with Wego.
Wego is managed and run by well-known industry experts which includes former senior management from Expedia, InterContinental Hotels Group, Fairfax Digital, Priceline, chinadotcom and Yahoo!. A handful of software developers (you can reach us at ) and a single Web designer form up our technology team. And everyone in the office adores our 42 monkeys. Wego has its finger on the pulse of the travel and technology industry in the Asia Pacific.
We used to be called "Bezurk" which, strangely enough, we thought was a good idea for naming a travel search engine at the time ("Bezurk" is a wordplay on how most of us were going "berserk" trying to book airline tickets and hotel rooms the old-school way).
We're among the world's hottest startups outside the US according to Business 2.0 (see the full article and blog entry).