The world’s travel search engine.
Skyscanner is a leading global travel search site offering a comprehensive and free flight search service as well as online comparisons for hotels and car hire.
Skyscanner’s Chairman and co-founder Gareth Williams became fascinated with computers as a teenager. Pursuing his love of code, he went on to study Mathematics and Computing at Manchester University. After university, Gareth worked as a ‘programmer for hire’, and as a keen skier would regularly escape to the slopes between contracts. However, Gareth soon became frustrated with the difficult and tedious process of searching multiple airline and travel agent websites to find the best flight prices.
Gareth envisioned a solution: a single website that could collect, collate and compare prices for every commercial flight in the world. A pub brainstorming session with friends and co-founders Barry Smith and Bonamy Grimes followed, and from a single excel spreadsheet, Skyscanner was born.
Skyscanner initially grew by word of mouth and, when thousands of people were using the prototype site every day, the three founders quit their day jobs. They opened an office in Edinburgh, and officially launched the Skyscanner site in 2003.
Now, with over 900 employees and ten offices across the world, Skyscanner is a leading global travel search site, offering not only flight search, but hotel and car hire comparison too.
What do we do?
Flights, hotel and car hire comparison, available on your desktop, tablet or phone, so you can plan travel whenever you want, to wherever you want to go.
Need a comment, travel data or insight into a travel trend?
As the world’s travel search engine, we can quickly find data to support a story you’re planning, whether it’s where consumers are planning to visit next, to when is the best time to book your flight to save the most money.
We can also help by sharing our latest trends on how consumers use mobile devices to plan and book their travel. Our database holds a wealth of information on when and how people search for flights and we’re always happy to run a quick search for you.
Key Stats.
- Founded in 2003
- Over 1000 employees across the world
- 11 global offices – Barcelona, Beijing, Budapest, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Miami, Palo Alto, Shenzhen, Singapore and Sofia
- Average 70m unique monthly visitors
- Over 70m app downloads
- Available in over 30 languages
- 1,200 global partners
- $11.2bn gross bookings in 2015
- £120m revenue in 2015
- Part of the Ctrip group
Skyscanner Flights
Skyscanner’s comprehensive and free flight search includes clever features to help travellers make smart decisions.
- Filter by airline, flight duration, number of stops and time, or set up a price alert to track prices for a particular route.
- Take some inspiration: use our ‘everywhere’ feature to see all the possibilities from your local airport, filtered by price.
- Or, why not select ‘nearby airports’ to widen your search, or view prices across a whole month or even a year to compare prices and find the cheapest times to travel.
Skyscanner Hotels
Hotel search made simple, with millions of rooms worldwide, from 5-star to boutique and budget options.
- Find your perfect hotel: filter results by price, location, points of interest, amenities and user ratings.
- Easy to browse, easy to share: bookmark favourite hotels, send to friends, or swipe through images without leaving the main results page. You can even view results on maps that toggle between the location of a specific hotel and the pricing of hotels nearby.
Skyscanner Car Hire
Easily compare thousands of destinations and thousands of car hire deals.
- With global and local car hire providers in over 200 countries across the world, you’ll find the perfect deal for your trip.
- Results are sorted by price and selected car size, with features including ‘downtown pickup’ and a ‘fair fuel’ policy. Or, filter by pick-up at the airport terminal, car type, price range or star rating.
- Send yourself an email quote, or sign up to a car hire booking reminder email shortly before you travel.
Skyscanner Partners Brand
The world’s leading travel distribution platform
- More than $11.2 billion ticket sales in 2015
- First meta to adopt the NDC standard; leading the way for distribution through Direct Booking
- Pioneer of new bot technology as first meta to develop Alexa voice service, Facebook Messenger and Skype bots
- Most advanced partner data analytics suite offered globally through Connect and Travel Insight
- Over 1,000 API and White Label partnerships
With over 50 million monthly visitors, upwards of $11.2 billion in ticket sales last year and 40% year on year growth, Skyscanner is the world’s leading travel distribution platform.
Our partners’ success is our success. That’s why we’re constantly developing industry pioneering technology to enable high quality travel ticket sales and drive brilliant results for our partners.
From being the first travel search engine to adopt IATA’s NDC standard into our platform, to building chat bots and developing new conversational ways for users to search for travel, through to our advanced data analytics suites – we are committed to being at the very forefront of travel technology.
The travel industry is evolving rapidly and we are committed to leading and delivering success for our partners so that they can capitalize in the fast-paced digital travel environment and thrive in the evolving traveller eco-system.
