The UK-based travel meta-search site reported that its revenues totalled more than £2.5 million over the first three months of the year, with more than 50 million searches taking place on the international flight search site.

While much of the company’s growth is in Europe – the UK remains Skyscanner’s largest market and is still growing strongly – 65% of traffic to the site now comes from overseas, with visitors from over 230 countries.

Barry Smith (left), Skyscanner’s market development director and company co-founder, said it was seeing “huge uplift in traffic globally. The US market is growing fast, as is Russia, Japan and Australia.”

He told WIT that Australian visits grew by 76% year on year, while Japanese visits more than doubled, jumping seven places to 15th position in the country ranking of number of visits.

Asked the reasons for the growth in these two markets, he said, “Population size, popularity of social networking sites and a high propensity to travel are major factors of our growth in various markets, and this is particularly true of Japan.

“We have a very good reputation in Australia and our growth here is also buoyed by word of mouth recommendations, as was the case when we first developed the UK market.”

While the UK accounts for around a third of all searches, he said visits from Asian markets make up around 7% of visits from countries outside the UK.

The company has begun expanding in Asia, he said. Skyscanner’s website is currently available in Chinese, Mandarin, Korean and Japanese versions and the company in the process of developing key commercial partnerships in these countries already. It is definitely a market we have targeted for further growth going forward.”

Asked if Skyscanner would expand beyond the search model to social search, for example, Smith said, “We are always looking ahead at new ideas but our main objective is to make sure we are doing what we do very well, make sure the site is easy to use and has comprehensive information.

“We need to innovate in the right way. Users like the simplicity of our site, so adding “bells and whistles” indiscriminately is not the way forward. We have to concentrate on making our core offering brilliant and keeping the interface simple.”

In Europe, March’s launch of top level domains for Sweden, Austria and Switzerland has been followed by the launch of Skyscanner Finland, Hungary and Ukraine.
 


Skyscanner’s international market development team is also expanding.

“The growth figures for the first quarter are very positive and we are pushing hard now to build on this success,” said Smith.