Skyscanner hitting new benchmarks

Skyscanner has pumped its website with traffic in the last year, according to business development director Hugh Aitken.

Speaking to Travel Weekly last week, Aitken said the flight, hotel and hire car comparison site had recorded 35 million unique visitors last year, with 1 million of these coming from down under.

“Our revenue was at $93 million for 2014, which is a jump of 42% on the previous year,” Aitken said.

“Australia and New Zealand has also grown again, and revenue is twofold actually. We had about one million unique visitors from Australia last year.”

Skyscanner is what’s known as a “metasearch” site, which takes commissions when referring its users to outside online travel agents and wholesalers, and other airline and hotel websites to make bookings.

And while hotels and car hire features were added to the site last year, the main chunk of its business comes from its origin of flights.

“We’re growing very quickly with our skyscanner for business at the moment,” Aitken said, “And we see huge potential in it.”

“Each country uses Skyscanner in slightly different ways, and we design our sites to be very tailored for each of those nationalities.”

Aitken told TW he sees Skyscanner growing exponentially in the future, with its localised provisions part of its global appeal.

The personal travel assistant is another feature Aitken said was potentially in the pipeline for the future, as a way of slotting in to all aspects of the travel experience.

“It’s definitely something we’re working towards, integrating into other elements of the journey and helping users to use Skyscanner through the whole journey experience.”

But for now? Aitken says it’s all about getting the content right for its current babies; flights, hotels and hire cars.

“There will always be a huge and increasing demand for travel, and it’s just making sure you’ve got the content and offering and it right,” Aitken told TW.

“And because we’re global we can just adapt it to how the market is developing.”

Skyscanner for Business is another big focus for the company, with the website taking its data to countries like Japan, China, Germany, Australia and the UK to share comprehensive travel data and insights.

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

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