Martin Symes is the CEO of Singapore-based Wego, a travel search engine that simplifies your life when you’re looking for the best air, hotel and car prices online.

Just enter your destination, dates, length of stay into www.wego.com and watch Wego come up with the best deals. At its essence, it’s a price comparison website for the travel industry. Once you’ve narrowed your selection and made your choices, you book directly at the source.

Formerly known as Bezurk, in 2008 the name was changed to Wego. As much as Bezurk was reflective of how we felt when we were doing online searches for the best airline deals … that is, we went berserk … for many that name was impossible to spell or pronounce, especially in its target pan-Asian market. And thus the change to Wego … we go where?

Many moons ago, Martin worked in the airline industry, both for American Airlines and British Airways. When the online travel search industry started to take off in the early 2000’s he joined Zuji, where he gathered invaluable experience in the travel search engine industry as the Commercial Executive Director.

It was through Zuji that he met Craig Hewett, who in 2005 founded Bezurk. In 2006 he took up Craig’s offer to become CEO of the newly-formed Wego.

Basically, Wego is a vertical search engine, which introduces relevant sellers to relevant buyers. Once you enter information on your destination, it searches the travel universe in real time, so the information on air, hotel and car availability that you receive is as accurate as possible.

Of course there are discrepancies. How many of us have tried similar sites that advertise a price, and then when it links you to the supplier page and you want to make the booking, the price no longer exists. Martin assures us though, that for the most part, Wego is pretty accurate. However, guaranteeing the price is next to impossible, given the enormous number of databases accessed.

Interestingly enough, this is when the trade-off between speed and accuracy in the travel search engine world comes up. Most competitors, he states, have a primary focus on speed, which translates to you getting your results quick but perhaps not necessarily finding all the results.

Wego is perhaps a little bit slower, since it can only provide the results as quickly as it receives them from the supplier, but what they try to achieve is as comprehensive a result as possible.

If you imagine popular routes such as Sydney-London and think of all the possible flight/hotel/car combinations, the amount of data that needs to be processed is phenomenal. Thus there is always a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Martin believes that people don’t mind waiting as long as the results they get are relevant and accurate.

Then again, waiting a few extra seconds for your result to show up means more advertising space exposure for Wego. And since the business model of Wego is a cost-per-click model plus advertising with no other hidden fees, a few extra advertising seconds means extra advertising dollars.

Since Wego covers air, hotel and car searches, I asked Martin, which is the “weakest” link? Not surprisingly it was cars, given that it’s a smaller product line in this part of the world.

In terms of geographical coverage, Wego has global reach but the content base is strongest in AsiaPacific. What I found interesting though is that Wego also covers discount airlines, since they generally do not pay a referral fee thus a company like Wego essentially cannot make a profit from them.

So what does the future look like for Wego? Of course, constantly improving the search engine and improving content gaps. There is also a general trend towards exploring online/offline interaction which is especially relevant to the developing Asian markets such as Vietnam.

Wego is also about to launch a packages meta-search product. Let’s say you’ve got a budget of $400 and you’re looking to go somewhere for three nights, at a beach resort in South-East Asia. Wego will tell you what you can do for that amount and off you go.

This year, Martin will be one of the mentors and judges of the WITovation Entrepreneur Bootcamp. He will also be speaking at the WIT Conference. Alas, the multi-time winner of the Great WIT Debate will not be debating this year. Possibly, he feels he’s done enough debating and it’s time for others to take the limelight.

Finally, I asked him what he valued the most about the WIT experience. His answer – listening to some of the smarter and more senior people in the business, interacting with the delegates and students, networking, learning in a relaxed atmosphere and lastly, he says, at WIT nobody gets bored.

Featured image credit (Who What Where on Blackboard): Ockra/iStock