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Skyscanner announced a growth rate of 2.3 times for the first quarter of 2010. Revenues totalled more than £2.5 million over the first three months of the year, with more than 50 million searches taking place on the international flight search site.
Much of the company’s growth is in Europe. While the UK remains Skyscanner’s largest market and is still growing strongly, 65% of traffic to the site now comes from overseas, with visitors from over 230 countries.
“Skyscanner is exceptionally strong in Europe, Barry Smitharticularly in Spain, Germany, France, Italy and Scandinavia” said , Skyscanner’s Market Development Director and company co-founder. “But we’re seeing huge uplift in traffic globally. The US market is growing fast, as is Russia, Japan and Australia.”
Skyscanner has been actively expanding its portfolio of local country sites over the last year. Last month’s launch of top level domains for Sweden, Austria and Switzerland is being followed this week with the launch of Skyscanner Finland, Hungary and Ukraine.
Skyscanner’s international market development team is also expanding. Two new country managers have also been appointed for Italy and France to support the company’s continued development of these markets. Both countries are among Skyscanner’s top ten markets – traffic from France has increased by more than 50%, while user numbers from Italy have more than doubled.
“The growth figures for the first quarter are very positive and we are pushing hard now to build on this success,” concluded Barry Smith.
“From the very beginning, Skyscanner was developed as an international site. The needs of our users in different countries have always been a major driver in our development of the site. It’s the cornerstone of our business development plan which is to develop further international markets and continue to grow traffic numbers until we are the number one flight search engine worldwide. To do that, the product has to be right and we are concentrating our efforts both on building user numbers and giving them the flight search site they want that works well in their countries.”
TravelDailyNews Asia-Pacific editorial team has an experience of over 35 years in B2B travel journalism as well as in tourism & hospitality marketing and communications.
