International expansion sees Skyscanner figures fly

Global expansion has seen revenues at flight search company Skyscanner grow to more than £2.5 million in the first three months of the year.

This represents a growth rate of 2.3 times with more than 50 million searches taking place.

While the UK remains the Edinburgh-based company’s largest market, 65% of traffic to the site now comes from overseas, with visitors from more than 230 countries.

Company co-founder and market development director Barry Smith said: “The growth figures for the first quarter are very positive and we are pushing hard now to build on this success.”

Spain, Germany, France, Italy and Scandinavia are strong markets.

“But we’re seeing huge uplift in traffic globally. The US market is growing fast, as is Russia, Japan and Australia,” said Smith.

The introduction of top level domains for Sweden, Austria and Switzerland last month is being followed with the launch of Skyscanner Finland, Hungary and Ukraine.

Country managers have been appointed for Italy and France to support the company’s continued development. Both countries are among the top ten markets – traffic from France has increased by more than 50%, while user numbers from Italy have more than doubled.

Smith said: “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.”