Popagandhi

Devoted readers of Popagandhi.com will pick up several things: over the last couple of years this blog has taken various different slants; and in recent years a sharp focus on travel, because I am doing a fair bit of travelling — but as a keen traveller and gadget girl, I rely almost completely on the Internet for my travel-related activities. I own no guidebooks (not even the Lonely Planet, not a single volume), have not gone to a travel agent in years, and am generally of the opinion that anything I need to do… I can do it on the Internet. I’m the sort of traveller who spends 80% of her life on the Web, most of it on acquiring travel information regardless of whether I really need to know about bus routes between Vientiane, Laos and Mengla, China. My head seems to think I’ll need to know how to get to Irkutsk by train someday, so it might as well be now.

For years I’ve found myself finding sites like Kayak.com and Sidestep.com incredibly cool, but as they had a US-focus, they didn’t work for a traveller from this side of the world. The prices were in USD or EUR, the sites they searched were mostly US-based, so routes not originating from North America weren’t competitively priced. I wanted a smart travel search engine that wasn’t bent on selling me tickets or hotels, like so many ‘travel sites’ from my part of the world tended to be, but one that could help speed up my frequent wanderlust by being smart enough, and extensive enough, for even a well-worn internet roadwarrior like myself and the people I know. At a price point competitive enough with that of a regular travel agent, or even better.

In planning for my vacation to Europe (a delayed ‘grad trip’, if you will) the single issue of the air ticket was a constant preoccupation. I’m based out of Singapore, mostly, but wasn’t entirely sure where I would fly out of — you see I call Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok ‘home’, too, and flying out of either city is always a possibility, sometimes even a necessity. This time it was a necessity. I was facing what I call a delicious dilemma: I had to be in a small town on the Costa Brava, Spain, on 4 June because six months ago I secured a reservation to dine at the world famous El Bulli. The dilemma: I had to be in a jungle in Borneo until 2 June for an assignment. Obviously, a Kuching-Singapore-Barcelona flight wasn’t going to work, with connections to East Malaysia being so stupidly priced. Besides, I already had a ticket back to Kuala Lumpur. Flip flopping between flying out of Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, I was flipping from the Singaporean, Malaysian and Thai editions of British Airways, Air France, KLM, Malaysian Airlines, working out impossible flight connections and being discouraged by the prices first, and the tedium second.

A traveller better tuned to the travel and Web industry than I (yes, there are such people..) showed me a new website and I’m now convinced I have found the tool I’ve wanted for ages, and then some. Wego.com is a new service operating out of Singapore that lets you search airfares and hotels and compare prices across thousands of booking sites, with phenomenal ease-of-use. They really ‘grok’ the web, which is a breath of fresh air. Clean, and works the way it should: atypical of a travel website from this part of the world (airfares.com.sg and your terrible flights ‘menu’, I’m looking at you…). Not surprising — Cheah Chu Yeow is the Chief Software Architect there. Great.

With one week to go before my departure, no airticket in sight, mostly fussing over my other trip to Borneo, I plugged in a preliminary search for a flight that most Kuala Lumpur travel agents quoted me at least 5500 Malaysian ringgit for: Kuala Lumpur to Barcelona. The search immediately gave me a fare on KLM for 4373 Malaysian ringgit, with taxes in. It’s refreshing to see that there actually are ‘travel outfits’ out there who give you the before-tax and all-in prices in a single screen. With three tabs open in Safari, searching side by side for Singapore-Barcelona and KL-Barcelona and Bangkok-Barcelona, I found (1) I don’t actually save that much flying out of either Singapore or Barcelona and (2) the KLM flight out of Kuala Lumpur gets me to Barcelona quickest, at 9 am in the morning with just a 1h 15 min layover, leaving me plenty of time to get to the small town I need to appear in on a certain date in June. As a travel search engine, not a booking site, instead of being bent on selling you tickets, WeGo.com seems more concerned with transparency in prices, ease of use, and usefulness. What I like especially is how they clearly highlight the layover time (which means I know I’m spending 3h 35min at Schipol tomorrow morning… sigh). I like.

If this service is in beta — I think flight and hotel search, and maybe even bookings, from our part of the world has a clear winner. As a geeky, penny-pinching, know-it-all traveller, I’m rarely convinced. I’m usually of the opinion I can find it cheaper on my own: except in this case, I’m no longer travelling to Cambodia or Laos where I can quite reasonably expect to jump into a flight to Bangkok and make it to these countries by road (cost savings: about $20, seeing a lot more: priceless). But in planning for a trip to Europe, I was stuck, and in the process shed enough geek tears being upset about the terrible usability at several airlines’ online booking sites — all of them are terrible to use, with terrible prices to match. So for the first time, I surprised myself and bought a long-haul ticket through a travel search engine… and I may be a fan. Give it a shot.