The travel search engine Wego, which opened an office in Jakarta recently, has finally launched its Indonesian site. With the huge potential demand for local and global travel by Indonesians, the company is seizing the moment with the localization of its site.
Other than having an office and a site in the local language, it also has some new features which will help users get the best prices. The first of the new features is DateWise, which will identify the lowest fares on any day you want to travel, and for all local carriers, such as Garuda Indonesia, Tiger Airways and Valuair. A bonus is that it was coded in Asia – that’s an industry first in this region.
The next feature is ‘popular’ search on Wego.co.id, which will be able to track the pages viewed by people across the archipelago to allow users to see what’s trending and interesting – whether destinations or hotels – on the site. This is perhaps a valuable feature for first-time travelers. Hotel reviews, an important aspect of any travel recommendation site, are also aggregated from a number of sources to give a balanced perspective of any given venue.
Graham Hills, Wego’s GM for Indonesia, explained in the press release:
Users just need to indicate they have flexible dates and choose a month to see the cheapest fares from across the entire market for that period. Getting the same information by any other means would take days, but you see it graphically in seconds. It is all part of Wego’s mission to ensure travellers save time planning, pay less and travel more.
This is a first for Indonesia. Travel is indeed a booming industry wherever we are and there are more and more startups trying to solve some problems regarding the use of the Internet as a part of traveling. With Wego and recently soft-launched Tiket it’s interesting to see how much more startups will appear targeting this industry, especially from Indonesia.