Malaysia - Malaysia's own Wego

Singapore-based regional travel search engine Wego has launched Malaysia's own dedicated site to provide local travellers with faster and cheaper travel options and packages.

Wego.com.my is touted to provide travellers with the ultimate search experience as it employs metasearch technology which gives users an effective platform to compare over 150 travel sites, 350,000 hotels and over 500 airlines.

With this metasearch facility, travellers can actually check multi-search sites for flights and hotels in a single search.

To illustrate, if you enter "Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok", you can compare all flight options including the low cost carriers, or if you are looking for hotels you can choose from the inventory of the major online travel agents, hotel chains and independent properties. By using Wego for comparison shopping, you can enjoy substantial savings both on the rates and fares.

Currently, the site is in English, Chinese and Bahasa Malaysia and in the future, Tamil will be on the cards, says Wego chief product officer Ross Veitch.

"We want to offer a better way to shop online by helping travellers save time and money to come up with their vacation deals," he explains.

Wego.com.my includes the DateWise Fare Finder tool that allows users to choose a destination, indicate flexibility in dates of travel, and then produces a graphic calendar displaying the lowest fares over a month for all carriers, including budget airlines such as AirAsia, Firefly, Tiger Airways and Jetstar Asia.

For example, during the recent busy Chinese New Year period, by identifying flights from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, the fare finder was able to suggest departure dates with fares under RM60 (S$25).

Once a selection is made, Wego connects users directly to the site to make a booking.

"We are neutral and it is up to the users to make their own choices," he says, adding that Wego does a lot of data mining which provides interesting trends and popularity rankings of hotels, destinations and airlines favoured by Malaysians.

Users of wego.com.my will find the Popular Search feature, which ranks properties according to their popularity - those that are considered convenient and well-priced by other users.

This is especially useful for first time travellers who can make use of the Popular With Malaysians rankings as a yardstick for their decision-making.

Veitch says based on a complex algorithm that tracks the data trails of Malaysian travellers, the popular search results are accurate and real-time.

Wego's network currently covers 34 countries and is available in 20 languages, with Indonesia being its largest market.

Teresa Yong, 

New Straits Times

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