Wego, the online travel marketplace with dual headquarters in Singapore and Dubai, is eyeing further expansion in the Middle East and North Africa region with the launch of its corporate travel unit, WegoPro.
Corporate travel sector is expected to reach $1.4 trillion worldwide in 2024, according to data by industry thinktank, the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA).
Wego CEO and Co-founder Ross Veitch told Zawya the MENA region currently accounts for 80% of the company’s business, which is currently active across 80 markets.
“The rollout of WegoPro in the GCC was a natural choice for us because the region is our core business, and the sort of countries that people from here tend to travel to has by extension become very big markets for us, which is why we have been focusing keenly on India, Pakistan, Turkey, and of course, Southeast Asia in our expansion drive,” he said.
The new platform offers a range of flight and hotel inventory to simplify the process of booking business travel. Advanced machine learning and AI-driven personalisation allows the platform to tailor experiences for companies and their employees.
WegoPro is the new identity of the Singapore-based corporate travel and expense management platform TravelStop, which Wego acquired in September last year. Financial details of the deal remain undisclosed.
The news came a year after Wego announced the acquisition of Cleartrip’s Middle East business and the Saudi Arabia-based Flyin.com, from Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart Group.
The strategic moves, Veitch said, have given the company a platform in creating a more diversified online travel company.
Asked if further acquisitions were in the pipeline for 2024, he said: “There is nothing I can talk about today, but as you know, we’ve done multiple acquisitions in the past few years, and always on the lookout for anything that might be additive, either in terms of talent, or technology or fit the sort of new vertical or a new geography we are expanding into.”
The company head also weighed in on the possibility of an initial public offering (IPO) in the future, without committing to a firm timeline.
Veitch also ruled out the immediate need to finance the company’s current expansion drive. “Wego is comfortably profitable. Pre-Covid, we were growing at a rate of 45% a year and last year, we hit well above those levels.
“We are one of the few online travel companies in this part of the world that have no compelling need for it currently. But obviously, to do a very large acquisition, we would need to finance it either through equity or the debt market,” he said.
Rise of business travel
The launch of Wego’s corporate travel unit across seven countries in the region, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Qatar, is likely to strengthen its grip further in a geographic area that the World Bank forecasts will experience economic growth of 3.5% over the next two years.
Veitch said they couldn’t have picked a more ideal time to launch a corporate travel solutions platform, with the Middle East and Africa region poised to return to pre-pandemic business travel spend by 2024.
According to GBTA, business travel spending in 2022 reached $933 billion globally, achieving 65% of the $1.4 trillion business pre-pandemic travel spend, with the MEA region accounting for $23 billion or approximately 2.5% of overall spending within the sector.
“With the global business travel market valued at $1.8 trillion by 2027, a significant part of that growth is expected to come from markets in Asia and the MENA region,” Veitch said.
He continued: “If we look at this region alone, our data shows 35 to 40% of total travel in MENA is business travel. That’s a large chunk of the pipe and we are hoping to expand our total addressable market to expand this to probably 50%.”
Wego is looking to expand its footprint in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially in concepts that allow AI to suggest and book itineraries for travellers, slipping into the role of digital personal assistants.
“One thing we are eagerly trying to build is layering AI into our existing mobile apps, basically creating a very intelligent travel assistant who can do anything a really good travel agent could, without the need to pick up the phone,” he said.
(Reporting by Bindu Rai, editing by Seban Scaria)