Building the largest travel meta search engine in the Middle East, Wego, with founder Ross Veitch.

Intro: 0:21

Welcome to The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. This show will tell you how to get the recognition you and your business deserve. Our guests share their practical insights and tools, which you can use straight away. Your host is International Entrepreneur, Podcast Host, and Author, Jim James.

Jim James: 0:39

Welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, with me, Jim James. I'm here with Ross Veitch. Ross, fantastic to be here with you here in Singapore, the amazing "Wego Offices." Tell us just a little bit about "Wego."

Ross Veitch: 0:51

Sure. Great to have you back in Singapore, Jim. So "Wego" is an online travel company. You know, we have sort of dual headquartered Singapore, Dubai, we do a lot of our product tech, data science work out of Singapore. We run the commercial marketing side of business out of Dubai. We run a Meta search and an online travel agency model side-by-side. We also have a sort of a media advertising business. We're about 220 people worldwide. We've got offices apart from Singapore, Dubai, from west to east Cairo, Lahore, Bangalore, KL, and yeah, Singapore, Dubai.

Jim James: 1:30

So for those who that don't understand what a "Meta Search Engine" is, Ross.

Ross Veitch: 1:34

Yes sure.

Jim James: 1:35

Give us a quick guide of what it is. What does the company do? What do people get by working with Wego?

Ross Veitch: 1:40

Yeah, so we're a sort of, you know, B2C online travel company, meta search side of the business. So people come to us and they are comparing, they're shopping the market for flights and for hotels. We show them the price if they book direct with airlines and hotels. We also show them all the different online travel agency prices. The global guys, you know, the booking.com and Expedia's in the world through to the, you know, the local champions, those they've heard of us, they haven't heard of. And if they come to Wego, you know, they know they've exhaustively shopped, all shopped the market. We, you know, when we first launched back in 2005, long time ago.

Jim James: 2:16

A long time ago. Yeah. You don't know how to survive.

Ross Veitch: 2:18

Yeah. You know, it was a web game. Yeah. Mobile apps didn't exist at the time, you know. You know, we jumped on the mobile app opportunity pretty aggressively, relatively early, and most of the businesses now mobile apps. When we first started the business, geographically, you know, we saw ' Kayak' and 'Side-Set' with the same business model get started in the US. We saw 'Tuna' and you know, the guys up in China, and we sort of, "Yeah, that's a good idea. Somebody should bring that to the rest of the world." And, you know, by rest of the world, we originally were thinking about Southeast Asia because you know, Craig and I'm a Co-Founder. We were both based in Singapore. You know, I'd been working over at Yahoo, getting Southeast Asia up and running. He was within a continental hotel group on the e-commerce side and we thought, "You know, this 'meta search model,' it's great customer experience. You know, it's better mousetrap. The suppliers love it. They're throwing more money at it." So, this is sort of went to the top of my list of life after Yahoo Projects.

Jim James: 3:11

Yeah.

Ross Veitch: 3:12

And 2005, we kicked it off. The original geographic ambition was to, you know, bring it to Southeast Asia. We were a little bit early. You know, timing is everything. And rather than sit around and wait for the market to develop, you know, we looked further afield and realised there was a big untapped opportunity in the Middle East. And, you know, originally we sort of discovered that just by throwing a whole bunch of stuff against the wall and sort of seeing what stuck. You know, we started seeing sort of an exponential growth in traffic, a lot of it was originally organic. So then we started paying attention, so we properly localised the product. We properly localise the marketing, we build local team. And, you know, fast forward today, a decade later, we are the biggest you know, online travel app across the Middle East. As a brand we're as well known as booking.com, you know, good friends of ours, but you know, competitors too. Travel industry is kind of interesting in that everybody partners and competes with everybody else up and down the value chain. We're doing over a billion dollars a year in GMV going through the platform. And I'm happy to say that, you know, we survived COVID. It was a little bit touch and go there for a while, but, you know.

Jim James: 4:15

Yeah.

Ross Veitch: 4:16

You know, in March 2020, everything came to a screaming hole, you know, so over the space of two weeks we went, you know, our revenue run rate dropped to about, you know, 0.2% of what it had been, you know, the previous month.

Jim James: 4:30

Yeah, well, very few people that have survived in the way that you and Craig have done and, you know, these amazing offices down in Harbor Front. So you've built this, you know, amazing engine. And in having used Wego myself, you know, you can find both the bookings and comparisons for flights and accommodation and a plethora of other things. You know, with The UnNoticed Entrepreneur Show. Love to just find out about how you've got Wego noticed as a brand because obviously, you've got the technology dimension, you've got a lot of different aspects of this business. But I'd love to focus on, you know, how have you built the brand? How have you got people? Because you've gotta get consumers to come, but also presume you've gotta get partners to come and so on. So which one was the biggest problem and how did you solve it?

Ross Veitch: 5:12

Yeah, so back when we first started, we had a clue of a classic cold start marketplace problem, right? So at its heart, meta search is a two-sided marketplace. On one side you've got consumers looking to buy travel.

Jim James: 5:22

Yeah.

Ross Veitch: 5:22

Or search for travel. And on the other side you've got merchants looking to sell, travel, and in the absence of a large number of consumers, the merchants aren't interested in working with you, right? Because there's a cost to, you know, engaging and signing up and connecting. And we kind of got around that problem by white labeling our platform with Yahoo, with MSN, and a whole bunch of other big sort of horizontal portals that were significant drivers of traffic at the time.

Jim James: 5:51

Right.

Ross Veitch: 5:52

And a little bit of it was, you know, selling, convincing them to sign up for something and then scrambling to build it, you know?

Jim James: 5:58

Okay.

Ross Veitch: 5:58

Yeah. So we had to do a little bit tap dancing holidays, but, you know.

Jim James: 6:01

But you had a great reputation with your Yahoo days anyway, right? So you already had as an individual, an amazing track record,

Ross Veitch: 6:09

Yes.

Jim James: 6:09

In building out things that would work. So...

Ross Veitch: 6:11

Yes. So we leverage some of the relationships we have.

Jim James: 6:13

Yeah. Yeah.

Ross Veitch: 6:13

Sure. And yeah, once you get over that sort of chicken and egg problem, it becomes a bit of a flywheel. We think of ourselves as a primarily tech technology company that just happens to be operating in the travel industry. And you know, as such, we spend a lot of time using all the standard sort of digital marketing channels. So, you know, we did a lot of organic search optimisation, did a lot of paid search. We did a lot of, you know, display marketing across all the different publishers. Do a lot of PR.

Jim James: 6:40

Right. Do a lot of content marketing. A lot of influencer marketing. And the marketing mix has evolved. Originally, it was like pure digital and a lot of it, you know, just sort of performance driven. As we got bigger, we were, you know, we spent a lot of time actually building the brand and it's just different to a lot of online travel companies. A lot of, you know, really don't care. You know, they're happy to take the arbitrage. But you know, we sort of were thinking longer term. So. if you look at where we spend our money, it's roughly half on brand, half on sort of performance or tactical stuff. Okay.

Ross Veitch: 7:15

And on the brand side of the ledger, you know, we do TV. Good old fashioned TV.

Jim James: 7:20

Oh, you do? Okay.

Ross Veitch: 7:21

We try and do it in a sort of fairly, you know, scientific measured, you know, we sort of measure the direct response, we measure the uplift. We're try and to split testing wherever we can, but we do. You know, we find that works and we've got a, you know, a great strategic partner in the NBC group out of the Gulf who, you know, operate the biggest satellite TV, you know, network in the regions. So we do a lot with them. you know, we do a lot of YouTube, a lot of other digital video. We have a lot of marketing partners. So in the travel industry, there's a sort of an old-fashioned partnership model where the travel agent works with the national tourism organisation. So travel agent doesn't really care what they sell as long as they sell something. The tourism board obviously cares about their destination, right? So typically, it's sort of, you know, you both put some money into a pot and you promote the destination.

Jim James: 8:09

Yeah.

Ross Veitch: 8:09

So we do this with, you know, several dozen different tourism boards, you know, over the year. And this is, you know, it significantly augments our own marketing budget.

Jim James: 8:19

Okay.

Ross Veitch: 8:20

So we do a lot of that. We've got some good partnerships with some of the people who make mobile phones. So, you know, we work with...

Jim James: 8:24

How does that work?

Ross Veitch: 8:25

With, you know, Xiaomi and Samsung and Huawei. So we find ways to preload our app onto their phones, so that when you buy your shiny new phone and you first boot it up, you know, we're already there.

Jim James: 8:38

So, how does that deal work? What's in it for them?

Ross Veitch: 8:41

So they like to associate themselves with big brands in each market.

Jim James: 8:45

Right.

Ross Veitch: 8:45

And in the markets where we do these deals, we're sort of a big brand. And you know, there's obviously a commercial element to it as well.

Jim James: 8:51

Yes, I see.

Ross Veitch: 8:51

And that takes several different flavors.

Jim James: 8:53

Oh, that's really smart. You get to be pre-installed. I guess that was the whole thing about with Netscape and Microsoft Windows Explorer, wasn't it? That the windows were pre-loaded. Netscape couldn't get on. So smart that you're playing that card. Can we also just look at the kind of content that you created? Because you mentioned quite a few different things. One, about sort of destinations but also about the Wego Brand. And I know that you've talked about 'Influencers.' Do you want to just break down for us, you know, what role those different kinds of content play, if you can? Or how do you get them to somehow be unified around the Wego brand? Because you've got so many channels and so many content types.

Ross Veitch: 9:32

Yeah.

Jim James: 9:34

Potentially, it could run away and not all reinforce the brand. So how do you do that?

Ross Veitch: 9:39

Yeah, so importantly, it's all directed by our VP brand marketing out of Dubai. And, you know, she looks after what you would traditionally think of as "Brand Marketing," but also all of the, sort of newer manifestations of that. So you know, the social media, the influencers.

Jim James: 9:56

Right.

Ross Veitch: 9:56

And you know, there's sort of a like a brand. You know, set of brand guidelines and there's sort of creative templates we try and stick to, and there's messaging we try and stick to. And then on the, you know, with respect to 'content marketing' specifically, this is something we've always done a little bit of it, but during COVID we really cranked it up to 11. So we sort of made a decision, you know, when COVID hit to keep going with all of the unpaid channels. Like, we obviously zeroed out all the paid marketing.

Jim James: 10:27

Yes.

Ross Veitch: 10:28

But, you know, we kept going with the content marketing, with the social media, with the PR to keep the brand in people's mind. But also to be helpful, right? So if you did any travel during COVID, you would know what a sort of logistical nightmare it was. So, pre-COVID we used to do a lot of content marketing around inspiration. So trying to inspire you to go places, give you new ideas. We kind of flipped the script a little bit and just tried to be practical, you know. So if you need to get from Hong Kong to Singapore, or from Dubai to London, you know, sort of tell you what the COVID travel requirements. Were on the... You know, at the time. Because they were shifting target, right?

Jim James: 11:04

Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's why I was interested in how you've managed the content.

Ross Veitch: 11:09

Yeah.

Jim James: 11:09

Because content generation is, if you like the 'strategy.' But I'm interested also the content type: what's the messaging that you've been using for the audiences?

Ross Veitch: 11:17

Yeah, so a lot of that was just trying to be helpful. But you know, in, by doing so, we keep the brand sort of top of mind. And what we found is as COVID sort of disappeared into the rear view mirror and the travel restrictions were lifted, and people were able to travel again. We found our business basically came back, you know. We're above our pre-COVID levels now. Without us having to crank up the paid marketing.

Jim James: 11:38

How interesting.

Ross Veitch: 11:38

Just came back. Yeah. Which is awesome.

Jim James: 11:40

So you kind of, by embedding yourself and I guess becoming a more trusted Advisor beyond just a sort of a portal to buy, as a brand for consumers.

Ross Veitch: 11:51

Yeah. So a lot of trouble brands went dark during COVID. They just disappeared. But a lot of travel companies also sacked half their team, which is kind of one of the reasons they went out.

Jim James: 12:01

Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Ross Veitch: 12:01

Yeah. We trimmed around the edges, but we made a, you know, with the support of my board, we sort of decided that, you know, we would keep the team intact. You know, we spent years building it. Building up the team, hiring them, training and meshing them together. And so, you know, during COVID we kind of doubled down on product development, built a lot of stuff that, you know, we've recently released. You know, and we kept the foot down on all the unpaid marketing channels and that's sort of paid-off risk big time now. So we're seeing market share gain and, you know.

Jim James: 12:30

Okay, that's wonderful. So as crisis often requires a greater cadence of communication, not a lower one. Which of those channels have you found most effective, when you talk about content marketing? Is it the sort of TikTok's, or the YouTube's, or the Instagram's, or the Facebook's? Can you give us any indication of which ones have generated the most for you or?

Ross Veitch: 12:58

So if you're talking about pure content marketing, right? So stuff that we are writing and pushing out, our own blog has actually worked the hardest for us.

Jim James: 13:07

Very interesting.

Ross Veitch: 13:08

Yeah, and we obviously syndicate that and make sure it's picked up by, you know, Google News and, you know, some other republishers. But you know, we spend a lot of time, yeah, responding. So we've got sort of a rapid response team. So anything that's trending and travel, you know, we make sure we hit it pretty quickly and exhaustively.

Jim James: 13:26

Yeah.

Ross Veitch: 13:26

So that's worked well.

Jim James: 13:27

What sort of content are you putting on the blog? And where is the blog? Is it on the homepage for someone that's looking? Or is there a separate place for the blog?

Ross Veitch: 13:35

Yeah. Sort of exists in the website, exists within the app. And that's served us well. More broadly, it's the mobile app install base, which is sort of the most powerful channel for us.

Jim James: 13:47

Right.

Ross Veitch: 13:47

You know, if you think back to the web before apps, you know, basically, Google was kind of acting as a toll keeper one way or another.

Jim James: 13:55

Yes.

Ross Veitch: 13:55

For pretty much, you know, all businesses, unless they're really strongly branded. It's kind of changed a little bit with mobile apps, right? So once you have your app installed, you're able to push message to a user, to remind them you exist to, you know, incentivise them with a coupon or a new idea or with some information that might be useful to them.

Jim James: 14:13

That's quite powerful.

Ross Veitch: 14:14

Yeah. Also, I think once somebody has gone to the trouble of installing your app, you know, there's already a sort of a strong relationship between the brand and the consumer. So yeah, we've spent a lot of time building up that app and install base over the years and that's sort of one of the major assets we have.

Jim James: 14:29

Okay. Oh, and you mentioned before about, you know, the "Cold Start" and that you've got the vendor part of the industry. You know, Travel Authorities, like Singapore Tourism Board, for example. Airlines. What do you do in terms of partnering with them? I mean, you mentioned they might give you funds, but do you just want to give us a little bit of what might be a sort of a package or how might you engage them?

Ross Veitch: 14:54

Yeah, I mean it's, so kind of two sets. So for the people that are selling travel, so the airlines, the hotel chains, and the online travel agencies, sort of the Expedia are go is booking.com. So we are driving business to them. And yeah, we take a clip of the ticket.

Jim James: 15:09

Right.

Ross Veitch: 15:10

For the Tourism Boards we're typically, you know, putting cash or cash and services into a pool, and then we go out and market the destination together. And, yeah, we drive people into Wego to convert.

Jim James: 15:23

And that'll be what maybe if you like an influencer going to a destination, enjoying a holiday, taking pictures of themselves, showing what they're doing, that kind of content?

Ross Veitch: 15:32

Yes. So we use a whole bunch of different channels. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, it involves influencers. Sometimes, you know, it involves, you know, we got big campaign going on at the moment, "Visit Britain if you go to Dubai or Riyadh you'll find, you know, taxis wrapped with, you know, "Wego and visit Britain, you know, book on Wego."

Jim James: 15:51

Nice.

Ross Veitch: 15:52

Okay. You go to the cinema, you'll see, you know, joint promotions. You go to YouTube, you'll see joint promotions. So we use both the offline and the digital channels, and we try and sync them up.

Jim James: 16:01

And I think it's a really important point. You know, we only have 20 minutes, we're nearly done. As an Entrepreneur yourself, do you have your own brand strategy, Ross Veitch, Founder and CEO? Well, it's an interesting question because I'm finding some CEOs have like a 'dual brand strategy,' haven't personal brand and a company brand. They run side-by-side. So just wondering what's been your approach to that?

Ross Veitch: 16:24

Yeah, honestly, I should, but I don't, Jim. I'm, by nature I'm rather private.

Jim James: 16:28

Yeah.

Ross Veitch: 16:29

And I'd be quite happy you never to have to appear in public.

Jim James: 16:34

Yeah. Ross has kindly granted me this interview because we know each other so long.

Ross Veitch: 16:38

You know, I have a brand, social media PR team who do most of the heavy lifting. I'm fine to sort of disappear into the background.

Jim James: 16:46

Okay.

Ross Veitch: 16:46

But you know, I do Public Speaking when it's helpful, but if you've got Richard Branson or Elon Musk on one side of the spectrum, I'm way over the other side of the spectrum. Quite happy to be in the background. And frankly, there's people in the company who do it, you know, better than me or as well. And we also operate in a part of the world where, you know, English is spoken, but Arabic is the primary language. And, you know, not one of my...

Jim James: 17:11

No. Not really a strong. No. Okay. Well, I think I'd be with you on that as well. So, Ross, if there's one tip that you can give my fellow unnoticed Entrepreneurs, and I know you're noticed but you like to be very discreet, but as a company, what would you say is the one thing that you've done that you'd say to other unnoticed Entrepreneurs are building a business, if you've got one thing to do this, to move the needle.

Ross Veitch: 17:35

So, what's happening at the moment with AI is a sort of like a, you know, once in a generation inflection point in technology. You know, you and I lived through the creation of the internet and we saw how that revolutionised life and business.

Jim James: 17:56

Yes.

Ross Veitch: 17:56

And, you know, impacted everything, right?

Jim James: 17:57

Yeah.

Ross Veitch: 17:58

I think what's happening with AI now is going to be as big, if not bigger. So if you're not already paying attention, I highly recommend you do. It is literally gonna, you know, reshape every industry. It's going to impact an overwhelming majority of, you know, white collar workers. And you want to be early, you really don't want to be late. And you know, it's gonna change companies, but it's also gonna change, you know, the way individuals work. So yeah, lots of different ways to dig in and figure out what's going on. But if you're not already paying attention, you know, now is the time to do so.

Jim James: 18:40

Sage words and coming from you as an Innovator and a Visionary on both in the internet and now as well with the travel business. Ross, people wanna find out more about you and Wego, where can they go?

Ross Veitch: 18:52

wego.com is the website. look for, Wego in the Android or iOS, App store, ross@wego.com if you want to get in touch.

Jim James: 19:01

Ross, thank you for letting me come to the amazing offices you've got down here in the Harbor Front in Singapore, to join me on The UnNoticed Entrepreneur interview today. Thank you so much.

Ross Veitch: 19:10

It's an honor. Thanks Jim.

Jim James: 19:11

Thank you. So you've been to Ross Veitch and I talking about how he's built Wego from really, you know, humble beginnings into a billion dollar business that's leading the travel business in the Middle East and also leading it in Southeast Asia. So if you've enjoyed this do please review it, but also most importantly, share it with a fellow unnoticed Entrepreneur. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating. Thanks for listening.