Veitch: Standards need to be developed and agreed on.
A game changer for meta-searches in Asia would be having standards for app-to-app deeplinking which would increase conversions and the industry needs to collaborate and agree on these standards, said Ross Veitch, CEO & co-founder of Wego.
“The mobile web booking experience and conversion rates for OTAs, airlines and hotels are typically much worse than for their mobile apps or desktop website. A rule of thumb from all the travel sites Wego works with is that mobile app sessions convert as well as or better than the desktop site but that the mobile web site converts at best 2/3 as well as the desktop website and quite often much worse.
“For the increasing number of people using the Wego mobile apps to search for flights and hotels, we’d much prefer to deeplink users into the mobile apps of our partners rather than to their mobile websites or desktop websites.”
This means “being able to construct a URI that opens the partner app and drops the user on the appropriate product or checkout page”, said Veitch, whose company pioneered the meta-search space in Asia.
“If the user doesn’t already have the app installed they would be taken through the download and install process, (for which a partner may even want to pay us a cost per install), and then taken to the relevant page to finish the booking. Unfortunately most travel apps don’t currently support app deeplinking, at least none that we’re aware of. A potential breakthrough for the online travel industry would be to agree and adopt standards for mobile app deeplinking.”
Photo credit: Shutterstock
In the absence of mobile app deeplinking, Veitch said there is possibly a role for what’s become known as “assisted booking” for metasearch in the mobile app context. “We may explore this but we would prefer to leave conversion to our partners and focus on providing the best possible travel search experience.”
Meanwhile, Wego’s current priority is building a brand “so we have more people coming to our site directly”, he said. “We don’t want to keep paying for the same users over and over again, we have to widen the audience.”
It recently launched a TV campaign in Indonesia, followed by the Middle East, two markets in which the pan-Asia meta-search is having local success. The Middle East commercials are based on the same idea as Indonesia’s – positioning Wego as the best place to search for prices – but localized to the Middle East.
Wego’s first TV campaign developed for the GCC and Pan-Arab markets aired on MBC’s Al Arabiya News channel the same day that Mamoun Hmedan, new general manager for Middle East & North Africa (MENA) was appointed. Said Hmedan, “Wego now attracts over two million visitors a month in MENA and our traffic is rapidly increasing. This TV campaign will introduce the Wego brand and product to a much wider audience.”
Veitch said the idea was to increase brand awareness and direct response. “We are measuring it very carefully and looking for spikes in the analytics and over time will adjust the media schedules. We’ve definitely seen spikes in mobile downloads in Indonesia and we hope to get it to a time when it pays for itself.”
He declined to disclose the investment cost but said, “with branding, you need to sustain it and we will budget accordingly. Obviously our amounts are modest compared to Emirates or Singapore Airlines.”
“We are using a calculated measured approach, a blend of math and mad. Mad men didn’t have the blessing of real time analytics. To create a new product that hits with people, sometimes it takes a data driven approach or you need a lot of intuition and instinct and you can’t really measure that.”
Wego’s brand building is obviously to fend off competition that’s coming in from foreign players. “We are the biggest of the regional players but global guys are beginning to come in and Trivago is making itself felt in Australia. TripAdvisor is taking interesting steps to turn on the meta model but I don’t think of TripAdvisor as the best place to shop but read reviews and their Instant Booking model puts them in direct conflict with their biggest clients, the OTAs.
“We are unique – flights and hotels in one place – one app – and we do a better job at localizing but yes, we are up against pretty formidable competitiors.”
With experimenting a part of its DNA, the company has tried packages, activities, car rentals and holiday rentals but “it got to the point that we felt if we couldn’t make it best in breed, we didn’t want to be doing it.”
One area it is seeing good growth is in its data-driven ad business where it takes user profiles and allows clients target advertising on Wego. “We always had a big ad business but now we have overlaid this data layer and plugged it into a trading desk in a big ad agency and getting them to buy it programmatically. It took a lot of wiring, 18 months of work, but once you get it connected, business keeps coming in.”
Overall, hotels remain the biggest revenue stream, followed by media and flights. With this shift in the business mix, Wego is rethinking internally how to organize itself and instead of having vertical teams, it is approaching the business with a client-driven approach.
Other than running Wego, Veitch is also an investor and he was one of the early stakeholders in Travelmob which sold 61% to HomeAway. “As an investor, I am looking for companies who are solving interesting problems in an area I know – online travel, mobile, ecommerce. I’ve learnt a lot of lessons the hard way and without it being too time consuming, if I can help someone from going down the wrong track, that’s a good feeling.”
Note: Ross Veitch will be speaking at the WIT Conference, Oct 27-29.
