
Skyscanner acquired by Ctrip for $1.7B - muratmutlu
http://ir.ctrip.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=148903&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2225618
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stewhuk
Skyscanner 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

~~~
dvdhnt
> happening here

Does that mean you're living there? I'm curious what the prospects are like
there.

There's been more discussion lately about us Americans looking for work
abroad. My wife is finally on board with making a move out of the US as a
family, so I'm glad it's being discussed more.

~~~
cmdkeen
On the more corporate end of the market in Edinburgh there is a definite
shortage of tech talent. Pay isn't at American levels but Edinburgh is the
best city in the UK in terms of average disposable income - an average £800
per month compared to London's £300. Job security is also pretty rock solid.
It's also a World Heritage site, has pretty good transport links to the rest
of Europe and you can easily spend weekends in the country/Highlands.

It's not London but then a developer up here should have no problem owning a
house, raising a family and having a decent quality of life. All while working
a 35 hour week so you actually have time to enjoy living here.

~~~
mdekkers
Edinburgh is hands-down one of my favorite places on Earth. If it wasn't for
the really shitty weather, I'd be living there.

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tomhoward
_The 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
Disclaimer: 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.

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contingencies
From 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.

~~~
paradite
What do you think of the current competitors like Tuniu.com and Qunar.com?

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contingencies
Qunar was a travel meta-search engine in those days; we used to pay them to
list our inventory. Their API was quite shoddy. We stopped paying them,
because it didn't make sense (we paid more for less business in return than
was profitable). They then turned around and started offering the same
services other companies used to offer and advertise through them... after
they'd taken everyone's listing and price data. I personally find that a
questionable change of model which would have caused legal havoc in a western
context, not so in China. Tuniu I am unfamiliar with.

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Fifer82
Well 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?

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johnnyfaehell
> 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.

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Fifer82
Unregulated 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.

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garagemc2
This 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.

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welly
Yep. 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
I 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.

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kowdermeister
I had to double check the number. Never thought that Skyscanner was this
profitable.

~~~
samsonradu
Hell, 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?

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djmobley
Affiliate fees

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dorianm
Skyscanner is so good, even travel agencies use it (source: a french travel
agency).

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jpatokal
Interesting -- 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.

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jonknee
Tencent also bought Supercell for $8.6 billion.

~~~
jpatokal
Yes, but they bought it from Japan's Softbank, which had purchased it
previously.

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ben_utzer
No 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.

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yomly
Whoa huge news - great bit of business for a UK tech company.

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kleiba
Question: 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?

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whistleblowr786
Wouldnt 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.

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robk
CoI to whom? Ctrip I assume? I don't think China really recognizes that
concept in business from what I've been able to ascertain.

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kilroy123
As an American, I find there are better tools for finding domestic flights.
However, for international flights, Skyscanner is always my go to tool.

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JoshTriplett
I 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?

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dageshi
My 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.

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samfisher83
Do they use ITA as their back end software?

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benjaminRRR
SkyScanner is not an agency, they use other players to provide the content and
fulfil the product so they'd have no use for ITA.

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diakritikal
My understanding is there's a heavy amount of scraping involved.

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freddyc
Loved using Skyscanner when I lived in the UK - great news for them!

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amelius
Any people here who know how Skyscanner compares to Google Flights?

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Marazan
Well, that's a surprise

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JamiePrentice
Congrats Skyscanner!

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toomuchstuff
Ctrip, a Chinese corporation

~~~
grzm
Business is increasingly global. Deals of this nature are not so surprising.
Would you expand on your comment?

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toomuchstuff
So if Twitter were bought by a Chinese company it would be the same as being
bought by a British company?

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grzm
I 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?

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tehwebguy
My 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.

