280 C H A P T E R 4    B u i l d i n g a n E - c o m m e r c e P r e s e n c e

4.8 CASE STUDY

S kyscan n er:
The One-Stop Travel Platform

F ounded in 2003 by three IT professionals, Gareth Williams, Barry Smith, and

Bonamy Grimes, Skyscanner is one of the world’s leading travel metasearch
platforms. Born as a result of Williams’s frustration over a search for cheap
flights, Skyscanner started its operation out of his spare bedroom as a site
to make traveling easy by simply listing all flight options in one place. A year later,
the company opened its first offices in Edinburgh, Scotland. Since then, Skyscanner
has become a notable platform for travel information aggregation services. In 2016,
Skyscanner was acquired by the Trip.com Group for £1.4 billion, making it the largest
acquisition in the travel technology space in Europe. By 2019, Skyscanner had over 100
million monthly users.
The company provides a one-stop platform where travelers can plan their flight,
hotel, and car hire through aggregation of information from different sources. In its

© Ilnur Khisamutdinov/Alamy Stock Photo

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initial stage, Skyscanner’s business model was based on its core service of providing
flight price aggregation to travelers and receiving commissions for bookings, but it soon
added hotel and car hire services and branched into providing travel data insights to
travel industry players like airports and airlines. Skyscanner’s business and revenue
models evolved over time to accommodate a two-side marketplace information aggre-
gation model—providing travel information to both customers and industry players.
To become a leader in the travel data aggregation industry, Skyscanner made three
key strategic decisions. First, it expanded its services to other countries like China, Sin-
gapore, Australia, and the United States through the launch of different international
websites. These websites provided support in over 30 languages, including French, Por-
tuguese, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and German. To support this expansion,
Skyscanner secured about £1.5 million in Series A funding from Scottish Equity Partners
and another £1 million in 2008.
Second, Skyscanner added hotel and car hire services to its travel planning offer-
ings. The travel booking process is often considered a booking funnel, which means that
people book flights first and then hotels, cars, and other ancillary services and products.
With the addition of the hotel booking and car hire services, Skyscanner offered its users
the convenience of looking for all information on flights, hotels, and car hire services
on the same website, without having to navigate several different sites. As Skyscanner’s
core service was flight information aggregation, it lacked the requisite partnerships to
effectively offer hotel and car hire services, so it acquired Spanish hotel comparison
business Fogg to leverage its resources to offer hotel and car hire services.
Lastly, Skyscanner launched an app, available for both Android and iOS mobile
devices, which combines Skyscanner’s three main services into one platform to enable
complete trip planning, irrespective of the user’s location. Besides providing price com-
parison of flights, hotels, and car hire services from different providers, the app also
furnishes information on available deals and suggests activities at the desired travel des-
tinations. Additionally, the Skyscanner app offers a “recent search” feature to allow users
to continue from where they left off on previous searches. The success of the app can be
attributed in large part to the acquisition of Distinction, an app development company,
and Twizoo, the world’s largest social media review and recommendation company.
Skyscanner also launched Travel Insight, a service that derives insights from travel-
ers’ flight searches and redirects data to provide information to airlines and airports to
optimize prices, plan routes, anticipate market trends, and learn more about travelers.
Skyscanner also added a direct booking service via its platform instead of redirecting
users to service providers.
While there are similar services like Kayak, Booking.com, Momondo, Trivago, and
Expedia in the travel price aggregation and metasearch industry, Skyscanner sets itself
apart from the competition with cheap prices, a user-friendly website and app, and the
two-side marketplace model that provides services to travelers and service providers.
Through integration with over 1,200 travel companies, Skyscanner is able to compare
options across a large number of websites and provide cheaper prices as well as price
deals and special offer alerts to its customers.
In a recent survey by Which? that asked over 2,200 travelers about their experience
of using popular holiday comparison sites, Skyscanner was voted the best travel compar-
ison platform, beating competitors like Trivago, Google Flights, Kayak, and TripAdvisor
282 C H A P T E R 4    B u i l d i n g a n E - c o m m e r c e P r e s e n c e

in ease of research and booking of flights and hotels. It was also voted best in terms of
pricing, user experiences, search relevance, and market coverage. This industry lead has
reflected in Skyscanner’s performance over the years as well; the company’s revenue
continues to rise year on year, and in 2019, Skyscanner reported $4.5 billion in revenue,
which was comparably higher than that of its competitors.
Skyscanner is also playing a pivotal role in leading the global transformation to
sustainable travel. Skyscanner has gone beyond its competitors by analyzing aircraft
models and calculating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to identify eco-friendly flights,
enabling travelers to make an informed decision about their carbon footprint. Initia-
tives like this make travelers and airlines more conscious about the impact of their travel
on climate change and encourage them to take steps to reduce their carbon footprints.
Through the “greener choices” campaign, Skyscanner has helped over 10 million cus-
tomers select low-emissions flights.
Behind the technology used by Skyscanner are hundreds of engineers working to
develop fast, affordable, and user-friendly software. To sustain its dominance in its field,
Skyscanner needs to maintain the most modern technology infrastructure. The com-
pany thus evolved its core technology from Microsoft Excel to a web-based platform
and mobile application.
Skyscanner’s technology runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), an on-demand
cloud computing infrastructure that provides a host of tools, technologies, and support
services. AWS optimizes the performance of Skyscanner’s platforms by automatically
reducing and expanding infrastructure requirements based on Internet traffic. With
support from AWS, Skyscanner has migrated its entire infrastructure to the cloud to
ensure better performance and cost optimization. As such, Skyscanner is able to provide
services to over 100 million customers across the world every month.
SOURCES: “Customer Story—
Skyscanner also switched to GitHub enterprise services in 2018 for its technology
Skyscanner & GitHub,” Github. development needs. As Skyscanner added new services and functionalities, its codebase
com, accessed October 18, 2020;
(collection of source code) grew as well. Hence, there was a need for a robust develop-
“Telling the Skyscanner Story,”
Skyscanner.net, accessed October ment platform that supports faster source code deployment and version control that
15, 2020; “Why Skyscanner?” involves support for concurrent work on the same source code as well as easy mainte-
Skyscanner.net, accessed October
10, 2020; “Skyscanner Case nance. As GitHub’s enterprise platform offers increased development speed, automated
Study—AWS Support,” Aws. workflows of software development, and open collaboration between different software
amazon.com, accessed October 10,
2020; “Go Compare Elsewhere: programmers, it aligns perfectly with Skyscanner’s requirements. GitHub has become
Which? Reveals Best & Worst the development platform used by every Skyscanner engineer, who makes about 100
Travel Comparison Sites,” Press.
which.co.uk, December 2, 2019;
to 200 source code deployments every day. A few months after switching to GitHub,
“Skyscanner: Globalising a Skyscanner reported low operational overheads as engineers did not need to spend a lot
Business Model,” by Richard
of time maintaining the development platform while dealing with source code version
Raymond Smith and Adina Wong,
Asian Management Insights, control. More time is now dedicated to developing business logic and improving their
4(1), 48–52, Ink.library.smu. service offerings.
edu.sg, 2017; “The Spreadsheet
Maker Who Created Scotland’s Moreover, through GitHub, Skyscanner has been able to integrate with and use
Flying Unicorn,” by Mure third-party apps like Snyk and Check. Snyk, for instance, scans login tokens to detect and
Dickie and Madhumita Murgia,
Financial Times, November 25, prevent unauthorized access to its source code. Through GitHub, Skyscanner is also able
2016; “Chinese Online Travel to access and use new industry technologies and tools to build its solutions, enabling
Company Buys Skyscanner for
£1.4bn,” by Peter Wells, Financial
it to stay ahead of the competition. As such, GitHub has become a critical component
Times, November 24, 2016. of Skyscanner’s overall infrastructure, providing an integrated and low-maintenance
 Review  283

home for all of Skyscanner’s code. For now, Skyscanner hopes to keep improving its core
technologies to offer better value to its customers.

Case Study Questions

1. Why did Skyscanner adopt Amazon Web Services for its information technology
infrastructure?
2. What strategic decisions enabled Skyscanner to become a leader in its industry?
3. What are the primary benefits of Skyscanner’s mobile app?
4. How did Skyscanner ensure that users could use its services in different
countries?
5. How has Skyscanner managed to outperform its competitors?

Case contributed by PK Senyo, University of Southampton

4.9 REVIEW

KEY CONCEPTS

Understand the questions you must ask and answer, and the steps you should take, in developing an e-commerce
presence.
• Questions you must ask and answer when developing an e-commerce presence include:
• What is your vision and how do you hope to accomplish it?
• What is your business and revenue model?
• Who and where is the target audience?
• What are the characteristics of the marketplace?
• Where is the content coming from?
• Conduct a SWOT analysis.
• Develop an e-commerce presence map.
• Develop a timeline.
• Develop a detailed budget.

Explain the process that should be followed in building an e-commerce presence.

• Factors you must consider when building an e-commerce site include hardware, software, telecommunica-
tions capacity, website and mobile platform design, human resources, and organizational capabilities.
• The systems development life cycle (a methodology for understanding the business objectives of a system
and designing an appropriate solution) for building an e-commerce website involves five major steps:
• Identify the specific business objectives for the site, and then develop a list of system functionalities
and information requirements.
• Develop a system design specification (both logical design and physical design).

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