WINGIE WINGS ITS WAY TO GLOBAL EXPANSION WITH TRAVELPORT
Wingie Enuygun Group (WEG), the fastest-growing online travel marketplace in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia has extended its partnership with Travelport to expand in the region and beyond. This follows on from a successful technology collaboration that unlocked huge new potential and more earning opportunities for WEG. What’s their next move? Expansion into new markets, enabled by modern retailing strategy.
First stop: MENA. Next stop: the World.
In just 3 years, the online travel marketplace has rapidly scaled, now processing over six million flight bookings annually. Wingie Enuygun has continuously innovated, with standout projects like its virtual interlining system, LogiConnect, and the launch of WingieBot, the world’s first AI Flight Search Assistant powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Currently, WEG is the fastest-growing online travel marketplace in the region, with a strong presence in both the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) and Central Asia regions. After three years of consistent and substantial growth, driven by its partnership with Travelport, WEG now draws over 22 million monthly website visits and has been downloaded by more than 12 million users. With an ambitious goal of ranking among the world’s top 5 travel marketplaces by 2028, WEG is well on its way, already being listed among the World’s 20 Largest Travel Sites in 2017.
Building on the success of its existing partnership, WEG recently engaged Travelport as a strategic partner to gain access to new consumer bases in the Middle East — in particular Saudi Arabia and the UAE — plus Africa and North and South America. At Wingie Enuygun, we are pioneering innovative, AI-driven solutions that have never been seen in the industry, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive. Our advanced technology allows us to establish operations in new countries within just 48 hours.
As we expand, Travelport supports our growth in global markets. With a significant physical presence in the Middle East, Travelport is helping us execute our fast and scalable growth strategy. With the help of Travelport, we aim to double our booking volumes each year”
A multi-source content strategy for global expansion
The competition among OTAs is fierce. Therefore, WEG (operating under multiple consumer brands) needs access to a wide range of content from multiple sources. As part of the new extended agreement, WEG will continue to use the Travelport+ platform to get the choice it needs to drive global expansion, including flights and ancillaries from over 478 airlines, including 18 NDC airlines currently live with more to come in 2024.
More content choice typically means more technical complexity, but WEG saves time and energy on development through Travelport’s retail-ready content offering. Because the data is aggregated, normalized, and enriched in advance by Travelport+, multiple sources can be shown, side by side, including NDC. This means WEG can get richer, more flexible travel content (including Branded Fares), which aligns with evolving consumer preferences, which is better for the booker.
AI-powered search results
But with a wide range of content comes an additional need: the ability to quickly and accurately return relevant results. This is critical to conversion and revenue growth, and so WEG sought Travelport’s help to win the search speed race. How? Via Travelport’s new Content Curation Layer.
These AI-powered search controls make searches faster and more accurate, by de-duplicating content that appears on screen, something that’s typically a challenge when dealing with NDC content. And working with Travelport, Wingie has achieved a lightning-fast search time of under 1.5 seconds.
Lightweight, microservices API
The online travel marketplace uses Travelport’s lightweight, microservices API to improve the accuracy of results, by running pre-search filtering and optimization scripts in the background to make sure the content delivered is the right fit for the searcher. And it now can combine return and one-way options into a single response, reducing the number of transactions and processing costs.
This is something that sets Travelport apart — many technology providers and aggregators typically cannot match the level of content depth and filtration capabilities that enable WEG to operate much more efficiently. All this helps keep customers moving quickly throughout the search/booking funnel, maintaining their focus and driving conversions.
Çağlar Erol says “Travelport+ provides the retail-ready content and capabilities we need to create a modern consumer experience on our travel marketplace. It’s agile, fast, and lets us offer everything from self-service tools to faster search responses powered by AI.”
Great retailing = global growth
Today, Wingie Enuygun has over 165 million annual visitors, and as it enters new markets, it intends to keep growing that number. Knowing that customers have plenty of sites to choose from, WEG is strategically prioritizing building loyalty through retailing excellence. It focuses on two key areas in that regard: user experience and customer service. That starts with continuously improving the website and booking experience and continues through to its online post-booking services.
All of this naturally hinges hugely on technology, which is where this extended partnership comes in. Working with Travelport, Wingie Enuygun has been able to significantly reduce the pressure on its customer services, using automation tools on Travelport+. Travelport will continue to provide technical assistance, system stability, and operational efficiency, letting the business cater to the needs of its user base, growing conversions, and providing easier servicing for customers.
Going forward, the business will also focus on adding more value to its flight upsells, creating an even greater customer experience, and expanding beyond flights into hotel retailing — something that is already underway.
