“The corporate business has the potential to become as big as our consumer business eventually.”
Leading meta-search engine and largest online travel marketplace in the Middle East, North Africa & Asia Pacific, Wego, opened its new office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia earlier this week. Though Wego has had a presence in Kuala Lumpur for several years, the new office syncs-up with the company’s growing ambitions and is part of a broader strategy to expand Wego’s footprint across emerging markets.
Speaking to WiT during the opening ceremony, Wego CEO and co-founder, Ross Veitch, explained that the Kuala Lumpur office is now a hub for Wego’s global operations, housing core teams for its hotel business, engineering, and design teams. “We’re increasingly thinking of the Singapore and KL offices as linked, with people going back and forth,” Veitch said, highlighting Malaysia’s openness to foreign talent as an advantage. The long-anticipated high-speed rail link between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur is expected to strengthen this hybrid setup between the two hubs even further.
“The longer-term ambition is to be the leader in emerging markets worldwide, with the Middle East at the heart,” Veitch continued. “The Middle East is where we’re best known, we’ve spent years building the brand and we’re slowly expanding into adjacencies.”
Veitch emphasised, “Right now, Southeast Asia is a focus for our new corporate travel business. We’ve got a lot of clients across Southeast Asia and we’re making sure we’ve got best-in-class supply for them, both on the air and the hotel side. But as of today, this KL office is primarily focused on our global business. So, it’s not really geo-specific. It’s not really focused on the Malaysia market, per se. Our teams here, they’re plugged into our global teams.
We took a lot of the best ideas out of Navan and TravelPerk, and then we added some of our own and we’ve localised it for Asia and Middle East, the primary geographies that we’re going after,” Veitch said.
Ross Veitch (CEO, co-founder of Wego) officially opening the company’s new office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
“We’ve also set up a bed bank division, WegoBeds.” he continued. “We had a lot of our existing partners ask if they could use the same supply. So, we set that up as a proper business unit. We think that could grow to be quite substantial, too.”
Wego’s expansion in Southeast Asia comes at a time when the region’s corporate travel market is becoming a focal point. In 2023, Wego acquired Travelstop, a business travel platform, as part of its broader strategy to address the challenges businesses face in emerging markets. Veitch explained, “We rebranded Travelstop to WegoPro and have been integrating our supply partnerships. The corporate business has the potential to become as big as our consumer business eventually.”
Partnerships remain a key driver of Wego’s growth and, as Veitch says, the larger travel industry. In Malaysia, the company works closely with key players like Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, Firefly, and the Malaysian Tourism Board. Veitch shared details of a recent collaboration, saying, “At the MATTA fair, we had a ceremony with Malaysia Airlines, bringing them on as a full partner across the Wego marketplace.”
Of course, as Wego expands, it faces both challenges and opportunities. Competition remains fierce, but Veitch sees this as part of the territory. “There’s no shortage of competition in online travel, but it’s always been that way. We like that,” he said. Another challenge has been scaling the workforce, with the company recently surpassing 400 employees and expecting to reach 500 by the end of the year. “We’ve onboarded a lot of people in the last 12-18 months, and making sure they are integrated and aligned with the bigger mission is key,” Veitch added.
“There’s a lot of internal organisational stuff we need to attend to, especially with what’s going on with AI. It is very, very interesting. We’re spending a lot of time on that, [evaluating] opportunity and threat… it’s going to have a big impact on all industries. And travel won’t be excluded.”
Also read: Ross Veitch’s take on Apple Intelligence
As such, Veitch says a focus on AI is part of Wego’s growth, with employees now leveraging AI tools to enhance productivity. “Everybody at Wego now has access to a selection of AI tools. Most of our engineering team are using code assistance of one flavour or another, and we’re seeing some pretty good productivity increases from that. We’re thinking about how to best inject this extra layer of intelligence into our products.”
Ross Veitch will be speaking at WiT Singapore: Next Generation (Oct 14 – 16). Get your tickets now.
