“Will it also come with recommendations like Amazon does?”

“Yes,” says Williams excitedly as he doodles on the writing pad in front of him. Indeed, the first thing he reached out for when we sat down for the interview was the writing pad and pencil and I thought he was going to interview me.

He explains, “I’d like the flight search experience to be as natural as looking for a book (or many other products) on Amazon.

“However, from a supplier (airline vs publisher) perspective, I remain convinced that the airline wants to see the customer on the airline.com site and that suits users too.

“I see it primarily as problems of a) the cost of flight data (GDS) and b) the huge search space (10k airports, is 100m airport pairs, times by ½ * 365^2 date pairs and you aren’t even addressing individual flight counts yet..”

“Are you there yet?” I ask, having lost count by this stage.

“Not yet but we hope to get there before Google and ITA come out with their new product,” laughs Williams, who calls himself The Geek Motivator and claims to know 1,000 IATA airport codes. “I think we have good plans for addressing these problems.”

Williams is betting that Google and ITA Software will release “quite a good product, it will be in the US only because of the quality of their data and it will be free text”.

“It’s not an issue of UI but data – your ability to store data and re-use it. We will produce for Europe what Google is doing for the US,” he promises.

He speaks with the confidence of a man who knows how to fix such problems. In 2002, he was looking for flights from London to the French Alps to visit his brother and because there were five airports in both places, there was no way to do a single search.

So he spent two weeks building a tool to save 30 minutes of searching, He and his two partners, Barry Smith and Bonamy Grimes, decided to release it as a website and in the first month, recorded 150 visits and £46 of revenue.

It was only in 2005 that the three partners went into it fulltime and started growing the business. Today, Skyscanner gets 15+ million visits and 75 million searches a month and is available in 26 languages.

And it is now in Asia, which is why Williams is in Singapore – to attend the office opening party tonight.

Even as it expands into Asia, Skyscanner’s working on a couple of fronts to expand its business. It is moving into full travel search and will include hotels, car hire, insurance and airport parking.

It aims to become a service that will be delivered predominantly on mobile. Already there are 2.6 million Skyscanner apps installed and 20% of its traffic is via mobile.

The geographical spread is different between mobile and website and the company is expecting higher growth in mobile from Asia. “Longterm, we’re not sure the app model works but we will make it available on a dedicated browser site with apps,” said Williams.

Then it wants to expand flight coverage to cover long distance travel between any two cities and have every budget airline as well as scheduled airlines. Plus, it will also get into itinerary management, trip planning and social media.

With so much going on, is he concerned with losing focus on what is Skycanner’s main groove – “saving millions of people time and money with a comprehensive, intelligent and simple travel search experience”?

“We’re still focused on finding travel information. For the first three years, we only did budget airlines in Europe. Sorting out flight data has taken us longer than expected. Then you find that the GDS will charge and that’s probably killed thousands of start-ups with the data problem. But we are still constant to travel information, a true vertical.”

One lesson he learnt was “not to use Google to translate your site”. “When you are a techie, you don’t know what you don’t know.”

If he were to build a flight search now, how would he do it? He laughs, “I wouldn’t do it. I’d do hotel search instead because margins are bigger and data is smaller. And maybe I wouldn’t do it in the same way – we did everything ourselves, manage our own data, built a brand and built website functionality.

“In retrospect, we should have paid greater respect to the size of the problem that we had.”

Having said that, the company is profitable and I asked if he and his partners were planning an exit as ITA Software has done with Google and Qunar with Baidu. “It’s not a priority for the founders now. We want to get to 10 times the size we are now,” he says, “and a lot will depend on the success we have in Asia.”

The most likely route though would be an IPO and if that were the case, it’d most likely be in Asia. Having said that, he fears what that would mean. “I am not sure we would do well with adult supervision.”

What the company has done well in though is “persistence”.

“I used to think it was the quality of the idea but it’s persistence that gets you there. Boring but true,” says Williams.

By the way, this is one of Williams’ doodles and he has a plan to digitise them all. Who does it look like, you think?