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.

Wego Hotels Guest Satisfaction Index To help users decide which hotel to book we recently added a Wego Guest Satisfaction score for each hotel that we search. This score is calculated based on semantic and sentiment analysis of hotel reviews and opinions from across the web. That is, we analyze what a user is talking about in their comments, how strongly the sentiments are expressed and then we roll it all up statistically into the one number. We have some very cool new features in the pipeline that further extend these concepts.

BL: How does wego.com deliver value to the consumers who are interested to source for travel deals?
Ross Veitch: Wego helps users save time, save money and make smarter decisions when shopping for travel.

BL: There are both direct and indirect competitors, for e.g. travel search engines which focuses on large domestic markets in China and India or indirect competitors like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. How does wego distinguish itself from them?
Ross Veitch: Wego actually powers travel search services for both Yahoo! and Microsoft in Asia and as you would imagine, they are very important partners for us. We also have a healthy relationship with Google to whom we provide travel feeds that they use to enhance their Maps and Local products.

There is a basic chicken and egg issue involved in getting a travel meta-search business off the ground. You need content partnerships with all the big travel companies to offer users a compelling product but to get the travel companies interested you need a critical mass of users in markets that the travel companies want to reach. Our solution to this dilemma has been to partner with the large portals in order to bring the critical mass of traffic and to adopt a multi-market regional approach such that we can always offer a travel company an audience that is attractive to them. This strategy has worked quite nicely so far.

BL: How does wego.com generate revenues to sustain itself?
Ross Veitch: Wego’s primary business model is very similar to that of Google’s search business in that we get paid referral fees, a ‘Cost-per-Click’ (CPC), by the travel suppliers that we refer users to.

You will also see display advertising placed throughout our site which we sell primarily to the larger travel brands but also to an increasing number of non-travel advertisers such as banks, credit card companies and luxury goods marketers, who are wanting to reach an online savvy audience with high disposable income.

Like many consumer web sites we’re also plugged into the Google ecosystem with an additional source of revenue coming from their Adsense for Search program which places relevant text ads next to our organic search results.

Finally we also get paid by licensing and integration fees by companies and organizations who license our travel search platform and have it customized so it can be offered to their own users as part of their own website.

BL: What are the major challenges that you have encountered while you were writing the story for wego.com for the past few years?
Ross Veitch: Start-ups are messy by their nature and this is particularly true when it’s your first starup as this was for both Craig and I. Without getting into all the details it’s fair to say we made more than our fair share of mistakes early on that ended up costing us a lot of time, money and effort to resolve later on.

Due to the time it took us to clean up some of the early mistakes eluded to above, we ended up having to personally fund the business for a lot longer than we had originally planned before going out to raise external funding. This put considerable pressure on Craig, Martin and I as we had a staff of about 20 by then. This was a very stressful period but in retrospect was beneficial in that the business was a lot more mature by the time we eventually did our investor roadshow and as a result we were able to secure a higher valuation and better quality of investor than we probably would have if we’d gone out earlier. It all got a bit touch and go there for a while though!

BL: What are the three most important traits of an entrepreneur?
Ross Veitch: It sounds cliché but determination to succeed (however you personally measure that) and a genuine passion for whatever it is you are trying to do are what I think are probably the most important traits for an entrepreneur to have.

Without the determination to keep going and stay focused there are no shortage of obstacles, set-backs or distractions that will prevent you from achieving whatever it is you originally set out to do.

Having a passion for what you are doing makes doing it day after day a whole easier than if it’s just a job. That’s not to say that it’s any easier just that it’s a lot more interesting and sometimes fun. Most importantly if you don’t have passion for what you’re doing then you’re unlikely to inspire the best people to work for you, to partner with you or purchase from you. Passion is infectious and is critical ingredient for any startup.

Of course being smart, having a good idea, a well developed network, ready access to funding and supply of talented employees don’t hurt either but I suspect these are all of only secondary importance in determing the ultimate success or failure of a venture.

As a final thought I recommend that any tech entrepreneurs check out the writings of Paul Graham, Guy Kawasaki and Marc Cuban, all of whom offer great advice for anybody contemplating a startup.

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