As a leader heading an OTA inside the storm of the Middle East conflict, Ross Veitch, co-founder and CEO of Wego, finds himself caught between two emotional states.
“One gives me anxiety,” he said, when asked what was keeping him awake – the geopolitical instability reshaping the Middle East, or the AI revolution reshaping his industry. “The other gives me excitement. They kind of bounce off each other.”
Yet it is often said that in moments of such schizophrenic tension, great leaders and businesses are forged.
Wego’s booking data, which he shared on stage at WiT Phocuswright Middle East in Barcelona this week, told the story of the conflict’s impact. The company had entered 2025 growing at around 30%, a strong start with momentum building. Then February 28th arrived, airspace across the Gulf effectively closed, flights were cancelled en masse, and bookings fell off a cliff. At its worst, Wego was down approximately 50%.
The recovery has been partial and uneven. Inbound tourism to the region – the visitors from Europe, Asia and the Americas who would normally fill Dubai’s hotels and fill Emirates’ long-haul cabins – remains sluggish.
“It’s really noticeable, the absence of tourists in Dubai,” Veitch said. “It’s actually probably the best time to visit as a traveller right now. Traffic is down; hotels want to welcome you.”
The two markets that held up best, both as origins and destinations, were Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a data point that will shape Wego’s near-term strategy as it looks for ground that still holds firm.
Airfares told their own story. Fares into and out of the Gulf are running 50 to 60% above pre-conflict levels at their peak, now settling at 10 to 20% above. The one exception: connecting traffic through the Gulf, where carriers have been putting up aggressively attractive fares to keep hub volumes moving.
Testing realities while keeping an eye on the long term
During COVID, Wego avoided layoffs, something Veitch had been proud of. This time, he made a 20% cut.
“My working assumption is this political instability is going to persist,” he said. “It’s not going to be resolved next weekend. What’s been happening between the US and Israel has thrown all the pieces on the chessboard up in the air. A lot of the power relationships in the Gulf are never going to be the same again.”
The cuts, in his framing, were not retreat. They were the price of resilience, getting financially fit to weather something that may last years, not months. “This gives us the financial resilience to weather whatever comes down.”
His long-term view on the region has not shifted. He remains bullish on the structural fundamentals: young, fast-growing populations, sovereign wealth funds deploying hundreds of billions into tourism infrastructure, and a strategic imperative shared by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar to become the world’s travel hub. “The macro stuff is still strong. This washes across eventually.”
Acceleration in product, putting agents to work
When the discussion turned to AI, something Veitch believes will fundamentally transform the industry, he spoke of an acceleration at Wego that might otherwise have taken a year to implement.
When Iranian strikes targeted data centres in the UAE, they knocked offline the third-party customer service tool Wego relied on, hosted entirely in the UAE, with no multi-regional redundancy. At exactly the moment tens of thousands of passengers were calling to cancel or rebook flights, the phone system, ticketing platform and case management system all went dark simultaneously.
“I took my entire engineering team and compressed our entire automation roadmap into a couple of weeks just to manage the crisis.”
The result: approximately 60 to 70% of customer service issues are now resolved without a human touching them.
Beyond customer service, Wego made a more sweeping structural decision: at the start of Q2, the company flipped to 100% agentic engineering. “There’s no more manual coding going on. The engineers are now overseeing fleets of agents – a pretty dramatic speedup in the amount of stuff getting done.”
From there, the logic is extending through the rest of the organisation: virtual employees being plugged into finance teams, data and intelligence teams, progressively automating coordination functions that middle management has traditionally performed.
His mental model for where this leads is stark. The hierarchical organisation – one manager, ten reports, primary function being to pass instructions down and information up – becomes redundant when AI takes over the coordination and messaging function. “You move to a world where you’re either directing something or executing something. All those players in the middle, you can slim those down.”
Asked whether the ultimate goal was a digital twin of himself, so that the team could consult his AI proxy while he takes holidays, Veitch laughed, then said that perhaps that day wasn’t that far off.
The ChatGPT experiment
Wego has had a ChatGPT plugin live for three to four months. The early learnings were not what Veitch expected.
The audience coming through ChatGPT is completely different from Wego’s normal user base – heavily North American, European and Indian, reflecting ChatGPT’s global user demographics rather than Wego’s Middle Eastern core. Thus, a new distribution channel reaching new customers.
But the volumes are, at the moment, underwhelming. The reason, Veitch argued, is a discovery problem rather than a demand problem. “Unless you go hunting through your user preferences and the directory to choose to install a plugin, ChatGPT is not contextually suggesting which third-party services might be useful.”
He expects a paid placement model to emerge eventually – “if I were there, I would build one” – but until it does, organic traffic from AI platforms is running roughly 100 times higher than traffic from the actual plugin.
The traffic that does arrive, however, converts exceptionally well. “It comes at extremely high quality.”
The moat for regional players
Given the resources global OTAs are investing into AI, how does a regional OTA like Wego compete?
While he conceded that size is an advantage, he said, “Being nimble and being able to move quickly, being small is also an advantage right now. One smart person who knows their way around AI tools can get an incredible amount done. You don’t need 100,000 people to compete.”
The moat, as he sees it, is not scale – it is knowledge. Customer relationships, supplier relationships, understanding of how to recover from disruption, deep expertise in the specific corridors and markets where Wego operates. None of that is replicable by a model that arrived last quarter.
“If you can’t make something work now, wait three to six months and the technology will likely catch up. Just because it doesn’t work today doesn’t mean it won’t.”
He cited Wego’s early voice experiments five years ago —–clunky, slow, stumbling over dialects – and the same capability today, trivially easy to execute.
Recovery, perception and the long view
The perception problem – that things are worse than they really are on the ground – is a challenge, Veitch admits, when it comes to encouraging the return of inbound travellers to the region.
At the same time, government-issued travel advisories are not helping, as are corporate travel policies which prohibit it.
“The biggest perception issues are from the source markets,” Veitch said. “Most of Europe has travel advisories suggesting people do not go to the Gulf. I’m hoping those get revised quickly.”
Twenty years from now, how will he look back at this period?
Veitch answered without hesitation. “We’re going to look back and see this as the start of the AI era, more than the Middle East market disruption. This is the very early stages of something like the singularity, where AI starts developing AI and it all starts going very fast. That’s going to have more impact on us than this little kerfuffle.”
