Skyscanner Update

Transcript

Hugh AitkenSkyscanner acquired Trip.com for a couple reasons but the main one is Trip.com have got a really unique community where their users talk about what kind of traveler they are, whether they're a solo female traveler, whether they're a business traveler, whether they're LGBT, whether they're traveling with their family. Based on that it gives them recommendations of what to do, where to go. That's incredible personalization which we're really keen to develop into Skyscanner and give us that ability to talk to users when they're in the inspiration and research part of travel or even in when they're in the travel phase, when they're in a destination give them recommendations saying 'hey we know you're in Houston. These are the kind of restaurants people like you go to. This is the kind of things people like you do in Houston.'

For us that's a really important step forward for Skyscanner in terms of adding personalization and adding that real content to the type of offer that we give our global users. Skyscanner now has over 65 million unique visitors coming to search for flights. We're really keen to develop the ability for those users to see more and to use Skyscanner for more, be that booking hotels as well as flights or be that using us for the content that we have through the trip integration.

So emerging technology, it's an interesting one because I think payments and the whole of airline distribution is complex. It's built up on legacy system on top of legacy system. I think in picking a lot of that is taking IATA through NDC and all of those, a lot of brain power and also a lot of time. I think payment comes into that is very interesting. I think what we are seeing is the emergence of hugely differential payment methods across the globe. So in China online payments, QR codes, all of those is much more prominent than it is in the US or even Europe. Even in India payment methods are very, very different. There's huge diversions in how people are paying for things these days. We as an industry need to respond to that.

I think we in Skyscanner have the ability for our airlines to offer direct booking on Skyscanner and we use a third party to facilitate the booking within that. That means that they have the full ability to transact and pay in different ways that suit the local circumstances. The challenge for all airlines and all of us in travel is how do we provide our product to be localized for that market. That's payment, language, currency, etc. all the way through. As I said earlier, we're seeing much more variation in payment and how consumers are paying for things these days wherever they are in the world.

Is it right that they should be doing it? Absolutely they should be processing it fast. I think there is technology out there that is. We in Skyscanner, we can quite often be calling 15 or 20 plus different APIs in different airlines and online travel agents to produce one set of results for a user. We already do that very, very quickly. There's a lot more that we can do. I think it goes back to quite often where an airline and distribution partners like ourselves, we're still hampered with technology that's quite old now. We have to absolutely speed that up because consumers are demanding faster access to data and they're used to it on sites like Amazon or Google or wherever they are in their lives so we have to respond to that.

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