Skyscanner’s global and mobile growth accelerates in 2015

Skyscanner, the global travel search engine, announced its financial results for the year ending 31 December 2015.

· Revenues were £120 million ($183 million), up 28 percent compared to the prior year.
· Excluding the unfavourable impact of currency exchange rates, revenues grew 34 percent, gaining momentum in the second half of the year in which they grew 36 percent.
· Normalised EBITDA before statutory adjustments was £22 million ($34 million), up 5 percent compared to last year.
· Gross bookings for the year were $11.2 billion, up 49 percent compared to the prior year.

“2015 was another strong year for Skyscanner, showing solid progress in our strategy of expansion beyond our home market, into mobile and beyond flights,” said Gareth Williams, Skyscanner CEO and co-founder. “Our first-half focus on investing in our product drove momentum for the business in the second half. We also saw excellent growth in travellers planning their trips on Skyscanner all around the world, especially on mobile and in the important regions of Asia Pacific and the Americas. Skyscanner’s global coverage, our direct relationships with partners and travellers and the self-built technology that underpins our success, account for our solid performance in 2015.”

Key milestones in 2015 included:
· Visitors to Skyscanner in 2015 grew 48 percent over the prior year, with a record 50 million monthly visitors. Mobile visitors grew 60 percent and now represent 59 percent of total visitors, up seven percentage points in just twelve months. Increasingly, travellers are looking not just to plan, but also to book from a Skyscanner mobile platform – mobile web bookings grew by 24% year on year, comprising 42% of all conversions.

· The Asia Pacific region continued to show strong growth, with visitors increasing 48 percent last year. Mobile visitors grew 62 percent year over year. This includes Japan, the third largest travel market in the world where Skyscanner and Yahoo! JAPAN established a new joint venture, Skyscanner Japan, in July.

· In China, a focus for Skyscanner since the acquisition of Youbibi in 2014, visitors grew 67 percent and mobile visitors nearly doubled.

· The Americas region saw 55 percent growth in visitors last year, more than doubling in the U.S. Mobile visitors in the region nearly doubled. The company also launched in Mexico.

· Visitors in Europe grew 42 percent, with mobile visitors growing 55 percent.

· Skyscanner's award-winning apps downloaded more than 40 million times in total.

· Beyond Skyscanner’s Flights business, Skyscanner for Business, the company’s B2B arm, saw revenue double. During the year, Skyscanner for Business launched its own Car Hire white label product and increased partners 75 percent to 400, including major brands such as MSN. Revenue from Skyscanner’s Car Hire product grew by 71 percent in 2015.

Skyscanner took important steps in 2015 to improve its product for travellers and partners and to bolster further the pool of talent that builds the product and takes it to market. Skyscanner opened two new offices last year, engineering hubs in London and Sofia, in addition to the expansion of existing spaces in Budapest and Miami. The company took on over 280 new hires in 2015 – technical talent now makes up half of Skyscanner’s 770 strong team across the world.

Skyscanner also marked up several industry firsts for the company in 2015, including an artificial intelligence voice search tool for Amazon’s Alexa and the first ticket sold using new NDC capabilities with British Airways. The company also introduced a facilitated booking service with a number of partners, including Air Canada.

sourced:traveldailynews.asia