The Wego Team
Management Team Standing (L-R): Gary Theis - Technical Director; Steven Gong - Director, Business Development; Gary Lipkowitz - Chief Operating Officer; Craig Hewett - Chief Commercial Officer; Martin Symes - Chief Executive Officer; Milton Smith - Director of Production; Cheah Chu Yeow - Software Architect; Ross Veitch - Chief Product Officer;
The whole team at Wego Headquarters
Martin Symes
Chief Executive Officer
Martin joined Bezurk (now wego.com) in March 2006. With nearly 15 years of travel industry experience, the last six focused on the online travel space, he is the veteran of the Bezurk team. (Though he doesn’t necessarily like being reminded of that!)
He was previously Executive Director, Commercial for ZUJI, where he was instrumental in establishing and building the business and brand to become Asia/Pacific's leading full service online travel retailer, with operations in six countries. Prior to ZUJI, he was a key member of the team involved in bringing Priceline's buyer-driven e-commerce model to Asia.
Martin has also held senior commercial roles at British Airways and American Airlines, where he was Managing Director, Asia Pacific from 1997-99.
Outside of the travel industry, Martin has significant experience in the financial services sector having held various positions with HSBC, Merrill Lynch and Fidelity Investments.
He has an MA degree in from Oxford University and an MBA from London Business School.
Martin is an avid traveller, having visited almost 100 countries, and a keen, but still-not-terribly-good, golfer. He is married and has a three-year-old son who has already been to 12 countries!
Craig Hewett
Founder and Chief Commercial Officer
Craig has over 10 years experience in the online travel distribution industry, starting out with Holiday Inn Worldwide (now known as InterContinental Hotels Group) back in 1995 when the company launched the world's first online booking engine. He left Holiday Inn Worldwide in 1999 to join the start up team for Priceline.com in Asia. He then joined the start up team for Zuji in Singapore where his tenure was cut short by the events of September 11th 2001.
Craig then rejoined InterContinental Hotels Group at the time when the company was ramping up its online technology investments across key Asia Pacific Markets. He developed the company's online strategy across the region with key local investments in China and Japan, successfully introducing local language capabilities into the group's global reservation system and marketing websites.
Realizing that travel and search engines are forever intertwined, Craig left InterContinental Hotels Group and founded Bezurk Travel Search (now wego.com) in late 2005.
Craig has lived and worked in Cape Town, Sydney, Hong Kong and Singapore and often gets too distracted with anything to do with visual design - sucker for logos and branding.
Ross Veitch
Chief Product Officer
Ross is a veteran of the Asian internet industry having established Yahoo!s South East Asian operations in Singapore back in 1998. For six years he led product development efforts across the region and managed the production, engineering, surfing and customer care teams. His successful product launches span the range of Yahoo!'s services including search, media, commerce, communications, mobile and community products all scaled to handle millions of users per day. He also played significant roles cutting deals with partners, crafting business strategy and shaping Yahoo!s global product strategies. Under his direction, Yahoo! has become the #1 Internet destination across the region.
Even before his involvement with Yahoo! Travel, Ross was no stranger to the travel industry. He joined the Australian Tourist Commission in Sydney in 1992 initially as a strategic analyst responsible for crunching data and writing intelligence reports on the world's travel markets. With the release of the Mosaic browser in 1993, Ross immediately saw the travel marketing potential of the Internet and drove efforts that led to the launch of the pioneering and multi-award winning australia.com destination marketing site.
Ross became one of the pioneers at Bezurk (now wego.com) in 2005. He has lived and worked in Sydney, London, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore and has travelled extensively. He enjoys getting off the beaten track with a backpack but also indulging in luxury travel of all descriptions.
Gary Lipkowitz
Chief Operating Officer
Gary joined Bezurk (now wego.com) in 2006, with over 12 years of media experience earned in the US and Asia. Most recently, he was Associate Director for Mediacorp Raintree Pictures, Singapore's feature film studio, concentrating on film financing and international sales. Prior to Raintree, he served as a strategy consultant with Yahoo! Southeast Asia, advising senior management on a variety of strategic, operational and financial issues.
Before moving to Asia, Gary was an award-winning corporate television writer/producer in Chicago and Austin. He also wrote, produced and directed the English-language adaptations of over 20 anime franchises for ADV Films, including both “fan titles” such as City Hunter, Legend of Crystania and Queen Emeraldas, and “crossover titles” such as Tekken and Sonic the Hedgehog.
Gary holds a BA in Economics & Psychology (magna cum laude) from New York University, an MFA in Radio/TV/Film from Northwestern University, and an MBA (with distinction) from INSEAD. He is an avid beach volleyball player, has a growing interest in Balinese art and is frantically trying to get his CounterStrike skills up to the level of the wego.com development team.
Steven Gong
Director, Business Development
With several years of management consulting experience, Steven joined Wego in 2006. As a management consultant Steven worked on various strategic projects including growth strategy development, cost reduction and process redesign for clients in Australia, South Korea and Malaysia. He advised leading corporations across multiple sectors including consumer products, financial services, agrichemicals and public services. With a very strong passion to work in the online space, Steven made the jump from management consulting to internet start-up.
Steven holds a BSc (Information Systems) from the University of New South Wales and continues to expand his education through reading the valuable insights on the bottom of Snapple bottle caps.
With a fascination for anything ending with a dot-com, Steven enjoys observing the industry and new business models (he can't let go of his consulting background). He also enjoys traveling and discovering new cities, cultures and hotels.
Gary Theis
Technical Director
Our ex-"Only Yank and/or Gary on the team", Gary Theis has over 15 years experience in software development and internet consulting. He has worked in a variety of environments ranging from the Bangor nuclear submarine base in Washington to Los Alamos National Labs to Cape Canaveral Florida. Most recently, he has worked for a variety of technical startups in Asia including Icon MediaLab, Spike, and now Wego.
Having worked in Japan and Singapore for the last 7 years, he brings a background in internationalization and web development to Wego's internet presence, and a keen understanding of the rigors of development under the resource and time constraints of the usual process of starting up on the internet.
A rabid computer gamer, he logs far more hours than his wife can stand clobbering orcs online, but occasionally surfaces to spend time with his two children (with the long term goal of teaching them to farm gold for his nefarious exploits, of course). Gary also fancies himself a adequate badminton player, but can't be bothered to fetch anything beyond his reach and so is relegated to the less-flashy doubles game.
Cheah Chu Yeow
Chief Software Architect
A web developer who has found his home with Ruby, Chu Yeow is also the author of Firefox Secrets (a book about Mozilla Firefox, the Web browser).
Most recently employed as your run-of-the-mill monkey coder over at Singapore Computer Systems, Chu Yeow also spent a short stint as Web Developer/Architect over at muvee Technologies, where he handled the company's Web initiatives.
Chu Yeow also has a huge (some might say, "unhealthy") obsession for anime and animated shows like Lucky ☆ Star, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Last EXILE, Futurama, and Family Guy. Sometimes when he's bored, he contributes to Open Source projects like Ruby on Rails. He also is obsessed with lolcats and is rather disappointed that he couldn't write this profile in lolcats.
He keeps a blog at http://blog.codefront.net/ where he writes about Rails, Firefox and Anime (no surprises there).
- What's New
- Wego Research let's you search the best travel magazines, guide books, industry news and more!
Try it » - Search or browse flight schedules for every route on earth. Includes the best connections, e.g. SYD-MEL
- Wego Flights now shows you TOTAL price for airfares, inclusive of fees, taxes & surcharges. Know the real price before you book!
- Wego Airfares shows at a glance the best fares we've found for each city-pair, e.g. SIN-HKG
- Wego Flights now has aircraft type filters to help you find that A380 flight or to avoid older model aircraft.
- Try the Wego Hotels instant confirmation filter. For those times you need a confirmed hotel booking, right now!
- Business & First Class airfares. Search for discounted fares up the front end of the plane on Wego Flights.
- Which airlines fly to French Polynesia, Moscow or Krabi? Look it up on the Wego Airports Guide.
- Which destinations does Tiger Airways, Singapore Airlines, or Qantas fly to? Look it up in the Wego Airlines Guide.
- What's New
- Wego Research let's you search the best travel magazines, guide books, industry news and more!
Try it » - Search or browse flight schedules for every route on earth. Includes the best connections, e.g. SYD-MEL
- Wego Flights now shows you TOTAL price for airfares, inclusive of fees, taxes & surcharges. Know the real price before you book!
- Wego Airfares shows at a glance the best fares we've found for each city-pair, e.g. SIN-HKG
- Wego Flights now has aircraft type filters to help you find that A380 flight or to avoid older model aircraft.
- Try the Wego Hotels instant confirmation filter. For those times you need a confirmed hotel booking, right now!
- Business & First Class airfares. Search for discounted fares up the front end of the plane on Wego Flights.
- Which airlines fly to French Polynesia, Moscow or Krabi? Look it up on the Wego Airports Guide.
- Which destinations does Tiger Airways, Singapore Airlines, or Qantas fly to? Look it up in the Wego Airlines Guide.