TravelMole Interview: David Soskin & Liz Faherty, Cheapflights.co.uk

Cheapflights chief executive, David Soskin says the company is filling a big gap in the market by launching a website that allows consumers to compare the prices of package holidays. Cheapholidaydeals.co.uk, officially launched this weekend, allows consumers to search for package holidays and shortbreaks according to a number of criteria including destination, departure, type of holiday and travel date. Mr Soskin said the site already has 300,000 unique users per month. He said: “The package holiday market is the same size as the flights market in the UK. UK consumers were poorly served in terms of being offered a neutral price comparison of holidays. There are lots of successful holiday websites, but nobody is looking at the entire industry including the big four and smaller operators.” “To find out all this information on the internet by a viewer would take quite a considerable amount of time,” said director of business development, Liz Faherty. The company has been testing the appeal of holiday packages by displaying them on its flights website. Mr Soskin said: “We have hit the ground running with this because we’ve done a few weeks of tests, offering users the chance to search some holiday deals on our other sites.” The site works in the same way as Cheapflights.co.uk – it is free for operators and suppliers to make inventory available for search on the website, but a 20 pence charge is made when a user clicks on the offer. “It’s very expensive for agents to use traditional media to advertise, and the cost is not related to the performance of the advert” said Mr Soskin. But Cheapholidaydeals can’t guarantee availability. Mr Soskin said: “There is always a compromise between the availability of prices and the comprehensive range of product we offer to consumers.” Mr Soskins said he hoped to get a lot of traffic from search engines because of the descriptive website address, cheapholidaysdeals.co.uk. He says the company has been consistently profitable since 1996 despite never advertising. “We rely on word of mouth and repeat visitors,” he said. Cheapflights has had a busy year. It launched a US site in May 2003 (Cheapflights.com), which also now has about 300,000 unique US users a month, and launched an accommodation site in September 2003. Cheapflights also underwent a redesign in April 2003 as well as rebuilding the technology that supports the site.