WEGO, the leading travel metasearch site in the Asia Pacific and Middle East, has launched the world’s first dedicated flights and hotels travel metasearch mobile app in Arabic for iOS.
“The response from GCC countries to Wego’s fully Arabised site has been overwhelming,” says Mohamad Ibrahim Masri, managing director, Wego Middle East and North Africa. “This is particularly true of mobile and tablet users, so it made complete sense to invest in a fully localised version of our mobile app, especially where experts predict an almost 14-fold increase in Middle East and North Africa mobile data traffic by 2018.” “Wego was the first comprehensive travel metasearch site to be launched in the Middle East, also in Arabic, at www.wego.ae in 2012,” adds Masri. “We continue to build valuable partnerships with local travel tourism businesses in the region including Emirates, Qatar Airways, Etihad Airways, GulfAir, Musafir, ArabRooms and more to be announced shortly.” Tourism businesses can now also use their own branded version of Wego’s metasearch platform on mobile in Arabic, using Wego’s application programming interface (API) available through the Wego Affiliate Network (www.wan.travel).“We’ve had very positive reviews of the application so far and the download momentum is continuing to accelerate,” says Matthew Varley, Wego’s chief operating officer. “There were a number of challenges that we faced in developing an authentic user experience in Arabic that would meet the expectations of the local market,” Varley continued. “We spent a great deal of time consulting our Arabic speaking colleagues so that every minute detail was reviewed and verified. We paid careful attention to numbers, calendars, currencies and labels and the complexities of tools required for right to left translation, screen transition directions and swipe gestures were all a huge challenge.” The Wego iOS travel comparison app is available now for free download at the iTunes store.