10 ms·
Skyscanner acquired by Ctrip for $1.7B
- freddyc 10y agoLoved using Skyscanner when I lived in the UK - great news for them!
- jrcii 10y agoFuck the thought police liberal pieces of shit that run this website and tell people how to think.
- yomly 10y agoWhoa huge news - great bit of business for a UK tech company.
- dorianm 10y agoSkyscanner is so good, even travel agencies use it (source: a french travel agency).
- garagemc2 10y agoThis is great news for skyscanner. Unfortunately, the media in the UK will go all nativist and claim that Britain is being sold out to foreign countries, as they did with ARM.
- welly 10y agoYep. I can see it now... "Scottish technology firm Skyscanner sells out to foreign interests". vs. "British technology firm Skyscanner does something the media sees in a positive light"
- smcl 10y agoI don't think OP meant that this is the Failure=Scottish/Success=British terminology thing (which I'm not convinced exists), but more that the UK media will use this as a way to peddle their "Broken Britain" message. ARM's sale was seen in people like us in tech as just another huge acquisition, but the UK media portrayed it as evidence that the UK is "losing" and that something needs to be done about it.
- stewhuk 10y agoSkyscanner is based in Edinburgh, with another large office in Glasgow. This is huge news for the Scottish tech scene, and will hopefully bring much needed cash to help it thrive. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening here in all types of tech. Sadly Scotland's other unicorn, FanDuel, looks set to close its hq in Edinburgh after merging with draft kings. However, that will probably release a lot of talent to help smaller co's
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Finbarr 10y agoYes this really is phenomenal news for Scotland. Here's hoping they were generous with stock and we see a new wave of angel investors emerge. According to https://angel.co/skyscanner-2 https://angel.co/skyscanner-2 they last raised almost 200m at a 1.6b valuation. I wonder what kind of terms were attached to that. I'm guessing investors will have walked away with a pretty large chunk of the sale.
- tomhoward 10y agoThe founders have already taken some money off the table and made some angel investments. I'm sure that will accelerate now.
- yla92 10y agoThrough angel.co link, I realise that Sequoia Capital is major investor in them. I can't help but wonder how Sequoia Capital has a share in majority of exists/current "unicorn" companies.
- tomhoward 10y agoSequoia invested in Skyscanner after their earlier travel metasearch investment, Kayak, had been acquired by Priceline. I gather they observed that Skyscanner was positioning themselves to become a leader in the areas where Kayak wasn't, particularly in China, and felt that their investment could help Skyscanner win in those markets. Once again, it looks like Sequoia's judgement has been spot on.
- kowdermeister 10y agoI had to double check the number. Never thought that Skyscanner was this profitable.
- samsonradu 10y agoHell, me too! I use SkyScanner quite often and it's a great product, but the price still seems out of line. Maybe there's more to it than users see. How does it monetize its users?
- djmobley 10y agoAffiliate fees
- jpatokal 10y agoInteresting -- this may be the largest foreign acquisition by a Chinese internet company to date? Largest I'm aware of was Riot Games by Tencent, which was on the order of $400 million.
- tomhoward 10y agoThe company was formed in 2001 by three IT professionals, Gareth Williams, Barry Smith and Bonamy Grimes, after one of them was frustrated by the difficulties of finding cheap flights to ski resorts.[1] Lessons: scratching a trivial-seeming personal itch can pay off handsomely in the long term. And it takes a loooong time to make it big in travel. Like most travel startup founders who've attended industry events over the past few years, I've crossed paths with Gareth and Barry a few times, and found them to be thoroughly warm, supportive and decent people. This result is fully deserved. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscanner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscanner
- donw 10y agoDisclaimer: I'm the Engineering Director for Skyscanner's Japan office. During my interview process, I had an hour session with Gareth, and since joining the company in February, have had several opportunities to work with him directly. He is a very kind person, and works hard to take care of both his team and our travelers. It's actually a core part of how we do business: the needs of the traveler come first, and our profit metrics come second. I'm glad to see people like that be successful.
- scoot 10y ago> I'm the Engineering Director for Skyscanner's Japan office. Then you should probably learn the difference between a disclaimer and a disclosure. (Hint: when you disclose something, it's a disclosure.)
- robinduckett 10y agoThis is a bit more condescending than I would usually like to see on HN.
- dintech 10y agoWhat a sad little man you are.
- 10y ago
- toomuchstuff 10y agoCtrip, a Chinese corporation
- grzm 10y agoBusiness is increasingly global. Deals of this nature are not so surprising. Would you expand on your comment?
- toomuchstuff 10y agoSo if Twitter were bought by a Chinese company it would be the same as being bought by a British company?
- grzm 10y agoI have a hard time understanding what's implied by questions like this, particularly in online forums. I'd rather not assume, as that could easily lead to misunderstanding. In the interest of discussion, would you say what you mean rather than make me guess?
- tehwebguy 10y agoMy guess is they are implying that people here would not be stoked if a company based in a country whose government demands widespread censorship of some topics and criticisms of the same government, purchased a company that is/was to some extent a force for free speech.
- toomuchstuff 10y agoHard to believe you're so unaware about the world that you'd write that unironically.
- grzm 10y agoIt's more being very aware of the world and the varied perspectives of the people in it. Why is it hard for you to say what you mean instead of making snarky implications? Given your responses so far, I'm not hopeful that this thread is likely to be constructive. Be well.
- samfisher83 10y agoDo they use ITA as their back end software?
- benjaminRRR 10y agoSkyScanner is not an agency, they use other players to provide the content and fulfil the product so they'd have no use for ITA.
- diakritikal 10y agoMy understanding is there's a heavy amount of scraping involved.
- Torn 10y agoNope, it's currently a meta-search that owns its own data layer. As to what the future will bring let's see!
- kilroy123 10y agoAs an American, I find there are better tools for finding domestic flights. However, for international flights, Skyscanner is always my go to tool.
- batiudrami 10y agoYeah SkyScanner is easily the best for international flights. Obviously in most countries a locally based competitor is going to be better for domestic flights.
- tiatia 10y agoReally? I always was not impressed. I use vayama.com and dohop.com
- smnscu 10y agoI've been using Google Flights exclusively since it was released, I love the UX.
- switch007 10y agoJust FYI, it's good for finding routes/times and indicative pricing, but sometimes going to the airline's website can yield savings of hundreds of £s (I've personally encountered this >10 times this year on non-LCC long haul routes).
- JoshTriplett 10y agoI tend to use Hipmunk for both domestic and international flights; I haven't seen anything that comes close to Hipmunk's UI for presenting flights. What's the main advantage of Skyscanner?
- dageshi 10y agoMy impression is coverage, skyscanner appears to have pricing from a huge number of sites/resellers which is important because in my experience the same flights from different sites can have significant discounts over each other. I've tried using other sites before and while the UI on hipmunk is nice my experience was that skyscanner normally found options which were cheaper or didn't show up at all. But I live in the UK and typically I'm booking long haul to Asia, I don't know if the situation is different elsewhere in the world or if perhaps skyscanner is concentrating on the UK market as its home market to an extent.
- contingencies 10y agoFrom about 2005-2009 I founded a hotel reservation platform in direct competition to CTrip and ELong, both of whom were already Nasdaq listed with deep pockets. I successfully grew the business to the same network size as the competitors on a shoestring budget through automation, undercutting them on almost every property, and even offered services in six human languages (they almost managed 2). We received rave reviews from users, most of whom were local. The problem was, I didn't have the capital for a marketing budget, every advertising channel we tried had very low returns, and I was not confident enough to seek capital domestically. I still think there is loads of room for alternative booking platforms here in China, but the up-front capital costs to buy in to a large enough audience remain fairly significant.
- fatman13gg 10y ago> From about 2005-2009 I founded a hotel reservation platform in direct competition to CTrip and ELong So it's hotels only? No flights, cars etc?
- contingencies 10y agoYep. Flights in China are routed through a single government clearing house not multiple commercial systems as per the west. In addition, at that time tickets still required physical delivery to the customer. Therefore, we considered it was too much hassle to go through the government approvals in order to compete with established local providers, a market which remains very fragmented. Car rental is beginning to take off now, but was exceptionally rare at that time.
- ck425 10y agoSee comments: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/24/skyscanner-sold-to-chinas-ctrip-in-14bn-deal https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/24/skyscanner-...
- contingencies 10y ago
- ben_utzer 10y agoNo mentions of Kayak? I use kayak because they seems to be more up to date. Sometimes other players don't have the special offers that kayak already shows. Sometimes kayak is also slow to update. I tried also other metasearches, but they mostly have offers from rubbish sites that show good prices and then you get a huge CC bill.
- Marazan 10y agoWell, that's a surprise
- JamiePrentice 10y agoCongrats Skyscanner!
- amelius 10y agoAny people here who know how Skyscanner compares to Google Flights?
- whistleblowr786 10y agoWouldnt it be considered a conflict of interest if the original founder of Ctrip Neil Shen, later invests in Skyscanner as a Sequoia VC-raises its valuation and then gets it acquired by Ctrip.
- robk 10y agoCoI to whom? Ctrip I assume? I don't think China really recognizes that concept in business from what I've been able to ascertain.
- Fifer82 10y agoWell done SkyScanner! I live 20 minutes from Edinburgh, and I don't really see what others are saying here. I am in a very flexible but really lame paid role, I have friends who have offered me a job in England twice. In Edinburgh though, it is either corporate jobs (demand), low paid hacky jobs for media agencies (pays in peanuts), and everything else is 50k jobs paying 28k via a recruitment agency who skims all the cream... ie: You need to be a mug. Otherwise where are people seeing all the tech jobs?
- nemesisj 10y agoWell, my company Administrate is hiring in Edinburgh and we are still a fairly early stage (~50 people) startup. We pay pretty well. Check out www.getadministrate.com
- Fifer82 10y agoAwesome mate! Unfortunately, I wouldn't be much good for your available roles, but great to see another successful local company going strong. All the best with going forward.
- johnnyfaehell 10y ago> everything else is 50k jobs paying 28k via a recruitment I have no idea how that even works. Every time I got a job from a recruiter in the UK I got 100% of the month. Recruiters get paid on top of what you get paid, not you paying them.
- Fifer82 10y agoUnregulated Middlemen. My best friend is a successful IT Recruiter in Glasgow picking up 6 figures this year, and the amount of perks he gets from the company is almost unbelievable. Good on him! However, that kind of wealth isn't coming from a 2% fee like a 1998 high street office worker agency. It is coming from somewhere, and that somewhere is your pocket.
- dajohnson89 10y agoYour point is valid, but consider that recruitment is a labour cost either way. It will eat into the salary.
- kleiba 10y agoQuestion: what's going to happen to the personal data of previous customers? Can they easily (read: legally) be moved out of the EU to China?