Skyscanner, VP Commercial, Hugh Aitken, at the CAPA Australia Pacific Aviation Summit 2022
Hugh is VP of Flights at Skyscanner. In his role, he oversees the whole of the flights experience on Skyscanner platforms, from search to check-out, as well as spearheading the evolution of Skyscanner’s flights marketplace. Hugh stepped into this role at the beginning of 2020, building on his previous work leading global strategic partnerships with airlines and the broader industry. Since joining Skyscanner, Hugh has also led our B2B commercial teams, forging relationships with the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo! And Secret Escapes, enabling them to offer global flight content to their users. Hugh regularly represents Skyscanner at an industry level, as well as promoting our data products, used by a variety of partners to provide unique insights into global travel demand. Prior to joining Skyscanner, Hugh spent four years at the European low-cost airline, easyJet, where he looked after the commercial performance and market strategy for the airline across London, Scotland the North East of England, as well as the Middle East and Iceland. Hugh spent 13 years at UK airport operator, BAA, where he held a number of senior commercial roles.
Transcript
Hugh:So at Skyscanner, we're servicing nearly over 90 million travelers, unique visitors, every single month. Before the pandemic, we were about 110 million. So we're almost back to the level we were at before the pandemic versus aviation capacity, which is, you know, 60-70% back to where it was pre-pandemic. So if I break it down by the regions, Generally, we're seeing EMEA back to 2019 levels. In some markets, we're well above 2019 levels in terms of search. A lot of that still is more for short-haul travel, but long-haul is picking up as well. The Americas is still slightly behind. Now, the domestic market is very much back to where it was before the pandemic in North America. The international market is still a bit slow for a couple of reasons. I think That's a market which takes longer to plan and book than other segments, particularly kind of the short-haul LCC-type market. But also the capacity is not there, so a lot of, you know, particularly US airlines have put their capacity onto Caribbean and domestic flows versus Asia because the borders are only now starting to reopen. And so that'll start to pick up. LATAM is different actually, you know, we've definitely seen LATAM pick up quickly going back into, you know, Europe as well. Asia is a slower market to pick up just because of the borders reopening more slowly. But, you know, we look at it and even in just the last very recent past, we've seen very rapid pickups in some markets. And some markets have stayed strong throughout, for example India, that's because it's got a big domestic market. But particularly, you know, if you look at our Japans and Korea, which for Skyscanner are major markets for us that we operate in, and they're picking up very, very quickly now. So we saw a big pickup a few weeks ago with Japan starting to ease restrictions, indicate that they were going to be reopening borders more freely. So I think that all points to there's just huge demand out there for travel. So whenever we see restrictions ease, we do see that demand really pick up quickly. We'll always see our daily— as all you can imagine, like any internet site, it waves and falls at times during time of day. So we definitely see that. In general, the trends are building up to towards where they were in 2019. For example, in Australia, we're now back to 2019 levels, if not slightly ahead, which is incredible for searches. So that's people who are looking now. We see bookings still lagging a little bit, and I think there's a whole bunch of factors. I think people have— there's still a little bit of apprehension about booking because there's still a bit of an element of unpredictability there in the market. And I think time will be the best sense of that, that borders will not close, hopefully again, and travelers will be reassured book. The other thing is, you know, we still know that there's not the capacity of a lot of airlines to put it particularly into the long-haul market. Short-haul capacity is very much there, particularly in Europe, but long-haul has lagged because it's just a much more complex network to restore. So if you look at Australia, there's just not the long-haul capacity that there was pre-pandemic yet, but it will come back in time. I think also travelers are probably— they're still in that dreaming and discovering phase for long-haul, so we would expect it to start booking over the next few months. The other challenge is just, you know, the prices are higher, and that's not a criticism, it's just more an observation of, you know, there's less capacity and there's demand so that the price curve goes up.
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