| URL | http://www.skyscanner.net |
|---|---|
| Type of site | Flight Search Engine |
| Registration | No |
| Owner | Skyscanner Ltd |
Skyscanner is a flight search engine that allows users to browse for flights via price and location. Additional tools such as fare graphs, allow users to compare flight prices of any given route over a month period, or the price of weekend flights from any given city.
The site is multilingual, offering flight searches in over 25 languages including Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Spanish and Japanese.
Skyscanner does not sell flights directly; instead, the site can be used to find the cheapest deal for a desired route after which users are automatically transferred to the airline or travel supplier’s website to make their booking directly.
Users can search for flights without having to enter specific dates or destinations, creating a very flexible flight search platform. Skyscanner’s proprietary indexing technology means that search results can be found much more quickly than with meta-search engines.
In addition to its flight search engine technology, Skyscanner also features regular news items from the travel and flight industry as well as travel tips for consumers.[1]
The company is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, and also has an office in Singapore.
Contents |
The company was formed in 2001 by three IT professionals, Gareth Williams, Barry Smith and Bonamy Grimes, after one of them was frustrated by the difficulties of finding cheap flights to ski resorts.[2]
Skyscanner version 1 was developed and released in 2002. In 2003, the first employee was taken on to assist with site development. In 2004 the Edinburgh office was opened and by 2011 the company employed over 100 staff.[3]
The site began life listing European budget airlines only, but has since expanded its search index to include most major European carriers, including BA, KLM and Virgin Atlantic Airways. It has also expanded its geographical reach to include carriers to, from and in the US, Canada, Asia and other parts of the world.
In 2011, Skyscanner acquired the door-to-door travel site Zoombu for an undisclosed sum.[4]
Skyscanner offers a suite of free online tools, collectively called 'Skytools' that allow users and webmasters to download and integrate Skyscanner flight information into their own website, personal page or desktop. These come in the form of a 'Flight Map' API (an interactive flash map displaying airports on a world map), a 'WhoFlies' API, which displays airlines for any given route and a 'Flight Search' API which gives live prices.[5]
Skyscanner currently receives over 14 million visitors per month and has an annual turnover in excess of £15million.[6] Skyscanner has won various awards including the Best Flight Comparison 2010 from Travolution.[7]
The site has been well received by the UK media; in an "Online Cheap Flight Finding Experiment" run by The Guardian newspaper, Skyscanner was praised for finding the lowest flight fares and for "beating much bigger operators such as Expedia and Travelocity".[8] The site was also listed in The Independent newspaper's articles - "The Ten Best: Travel Sites".[9] and "101 Really Useful Websites".[10] The Daily Telegraph named Skyscanner as one of the 9 best travel websites.[11]
The market has expanded and many other companies provide similar services (either competing or collaborating) like Kayak.com, Dohop, Travelocity, Orbitz, CheapOair, Mobissimo.