About
Bezurk is a travel search engine. We are like a cross between an online travel agency (OTA) and a general search engine (such as Google). We look like an OTA, with flight/hotel tabs and search boxes. But we query a much wider variety of sources, bringing the user an unparalleled breadth of choices. This process is also called “travel metasearch”.
Bezurk operates in the travel industry, but with a media business model. It is mission-critical for us to have a world-class product delivering an outstanding user experience to travel customers – even though our service is free to them. Only when satisfied users click through and/or convert on the travel providers’ sites do we get paid.
The World in One Window
This outstanding user experience begins by aggregating the world of schedules, prices, availability, inventory, etc. across multiple product types, such as flights, hotels, packages, activities, cars, etc.
This is a fragmented world. Whereas in the US and Europe, virtually all commercial airline fares are published in one of the big-4 GDSs (global distribution systems), in Asia that is not the case. Each class of consolidator and travel agent negotiates their own fare levels, based on their size, clout and relationships. Furthermore the number of low-cost-carriers (LCCs) in Asia has risen rapidly, from 1 in 2000 to 16 in 2006. This is significant since LCCs tend to only allow booking on their own website.
On the hotel side, less than 10% of the available rooms are managed by chains. The balance is managed by independent hotels, leading to highly inconsistent distribution patterns and scattered inventory.
Tours and packages represent a very large segment of the industry in Asia, yet are often creations of independent travel agents, and not published in any central source. Most auto rental companies operate web sites, but it is still quite labor intensive shopping around for the best rate.
The User Experience
Bezurk aggregates a tremendous amount of content, and this amount increases daily as we acquire new content. To add speed and convenience for the user, results appear the instant they are ready. The user does not stare at an hourglass while waiting for the slowest result in the queue.
At the time of writing, a search for hotels in Bangkok yielded 424 results. A search for hotels in Bali yielded 599 results. Returning these results in a simple list (picture a Google results page) wouldn’t be very helpful – the choice would overwhelm the convenience. However, Bezurk results are easy to sort and filter.
The Bezurk user interface is simple and intuitive. Search results are displayed in an easy-to-read page. Single-click sorting tools “head” each column. Rich filtering tools line the left margin. These tools are quite powerful, but also easy to master – all are click or slider controlled. Uncheck a box, drag a slider … and the results adjust themselves immediately. Even a non-tech-newbie can quickly isolate the listings that interest them the most. Many of these tools are “AJAX”-based, meaning they combine multiple web technologies to provide extra speed, power and flexibility for the user.
Management Team
Our management team has over 30 years of experience in the travel and internet industry in Asia. CEO Martin Symes has over 14 years of travel industry experience. He was most recently Executive Director, Commercial at Zuji, and has also held senior commercial roles at British Airways and American Airlines. Founder and Chief Marketing Officer Craig Hewett has over 10 years of online travel experience. He was most recently Director of Ecommerce – Asia Pacific at Intercontinental Hotels Group, and is an expert on search engine marketing. Chief Product Officer Ross Veitch has over 10 years of internet production experience. He was most recently Head of Production for Yahoo! Southeast Asia, where he built the product from the ground up.
The real “Brains” behind Bezurk are our culturally diverse, web savvy developers & engineers whose expertise with web technologies and user behaviour give us an edge.
We are headquartered in Singapore in a Soho styled shophouse overlooking the wonderful view of Boat Quay.
Dyslexics usually misspell ‘bezurk’ as ‘bezerk’, ‘beserk’ and ‘berserk’
