When users head to Oway’s website to book travel in and out of Myanmar, they arrive at an easy-to-use portal where planning a trip end-to-end is within a few clicks. Much like U.S.-based Expedia, the 8-year-old startup offers up flight, hotel, car, and activity options for anyone wanting to get away. That said, the road to building and launching such a platform in Myanmar, a country of over 50 million where less than 1% of the population has a credit card, was far from easy, says CTO Tun Tun Linn.
“One of the many unique issues we ran into while getting Oway off the ground was accepting payments online when a large majority of our customer base did not even have a bank account,” says Linn. “We had to get creative, leaning on partnerships with new mobile wallet companies that had become very popular to make it easy for our target market to transact with us.” And that’s just one example of the ingenuity employed by the Oway team to build what they hope will be an all-in-one travel platform, encompassing everything from flights to fleet management and ride hailing.