With its aim of becoming a global travel brand, Wego has announced global expansion plans with the launch of 34 new country sites in 20 different languages, targeting almost all developed or emerging travel markets worldwide.

The company soft launched these 34 country sites, including Singapore, in December 2011. Since then, traffic has been up 22% till January 2012, despite the typically lull periods of Christmas and Chinese New Year.

Localisation of the new websites include elements such as language; default currency reflected; priority for local airlines, travel agents and hotel chains; and sorting of search results by local relevancy.

Wego has attributed the company's success to the ‘radical' redesign and the introduction of several new features on the website:

Hotels Popular Search

Based on a 12-month historical data mining exercise, the company found that users preferences can be geographically differentiated. Now, as its default, Wego sorts hotels in a given location based on how popular they are with local users. For example, in Singapore, users pay more attention to hotels that are popular with other Singaporeans.

DateWise™ Fare Finder:

The most frequently requested feature from users is a tool to help those with flexible travel schedules to identify the cheapest dates to fly. Users get to see a graphical illustration of the various flight prices for any given month. This is done across all single or return flights – for all carriers, including budget airlines.

Flight Schedules:

Typically affecting business travellers, the timing of flights is the most critical factor in flight selection. Wego's new tool shows the schedules for all direct flights worldwide, optionally including codesharing details and, even, listing the aircraft type for each flight.

Full story:

www.webintravel.com//news/wego-goes-global--34-new-country-sites-launched_3020