Wego is seeing UAE travellers taking control of their own itineraries as they realise the savings they could make by using metasearch technology, a trend similar to the early adoption of travel sites in Asia.
Acting on trending data the travel metasearch company launched a dedicated UAE site, wego.ae in both Arabic and English earlier this year.The result has been a dramatic rise in traffic and transactions.
Ross Veitch, Wego’s CEO and co-founder (pictured left) said the company saw expatriates using wego.com first, both for business and leisure travel, and then it tracked foreign workers searching for the cheapest flights back to their home countries.
“With wego.ae live in Arabic we have noticed a surge in local hotel searches and interest in a much wider mix of international flights and accommodation to over 600 destinations. The site is working as intended to help local residents save time and pay less.”
Searches by local users for flights from Abu Dhabi have increased 120% ear-on-year, and from Dubai by 106%. Flight searches to neighbouring Qatar have doubled and to Saudi Arabia risen by 76%, with Jeddah topping the list.
Residents are also looking at more accommodation, with hotel searches up 121% year-on-year. Singapore, Manila and Bangkok, along with the best of Asia’s leisure destinations, continue to score highly for hotels.
The focus is, however, much more local. One in every eight searches for Dubai and Abu Dhabi accommodation are made by people who live there. Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah and Al Ain are also being more regularly and thoroughly checked online.
Wego credits the proprietary algorithm, which ranks the properties according to their popularity with local users, for the growing use of the hotel search function. They also serve as a measure of perceived quality alongside the hotel reviews.
The rankings are dynamic, adjusting constantly with users’ choices to reflect the sentiment nationally. For example, the top ranked Dubai hotel for residents using wego.ae is the Shangri-La Hotel Dubai.
The popular rankings for Dubai from the many other Wego sites, however, produce very different results. For Australians and Americans, the current favourite is the Jumeirah Beach Hotel, but for Malaysians it is The Address Downtown. Singaporeans are looking more at the Ibis Al Rigga.
Middle East representative for Wego, Mohamad Masri of BizGate, said Arabs are becoming more internet savvy and as more travellers shared their experiences of shopping online this form of ecommerce would become mainstream.”
Veitch is confident that traffic to wego.ae will triple again before the end of this year, as the vertical rapidly expands.
