They both looked surprisingly fresh, considering they have had 40 meetings in a week, and definitely upbeat with what they’ve achieved.

They told me they have had excellent interviews with potential recruits. “We were impressed with the people we’ve interviewed,” said Gray, who’s going to be heading up the Asian operation for the UK-based flight search site that is finally making the foray into Asia, after eight years in operation.

The newly-appointed regional director for Asia Pacific wasn’t divulging identities of course but he said most of the candidates were from outside travel.

“Travel experience is not that important, all of us were not for travel, what’s important is digital knowledge,” he said. “Travel you learn along the way.”

So they’ve been interviewing for a search expert – “we prefer to do our own search than hire a search agency” – and market development managers.

One of Skyscanner’s strengths, said Gray, is its localized model. In every market it goes into, it tries to hire locals to grow the respective market – which is how it says it has had success in Europe, which forms the bulk of the 130 million search sessions its gets a year.

“Not just Russian-speaking but a Russian – we find that works especially with developing local partnerships with airlines and OTAs,” said Gray. “We’ve never had a global model that we take into markets; we’ve always operated as local models.”

Markets it is expanding into in Asia are India, China, Philippines, Australia, Indonesis and Korea – so it is looking for market developments managers in each of those markets. Surprisingly, they’ve had the most difficulty hiring an Australian. “We thought that’d be the easiest but turned out to be the hardest,” said Skivington.

All things being equal, the new office in Singapore should be operational by September 2.

Gray said his first priorities are to ensure localization of its websites to make sure they work in respective markets and working on search to find the best formula to drive high quality traffic to the sites.

Globally the company spends about £3 million on SEM but Skivington says that accounts for only 20% of the traffic to its sites. The rest comes from organic and “our traffic is high quality with high conversion rates for our partners”, he said.

In Europe, because of the high credit card penetration, it works mainly on a CPA model, almost 90%, but Gray anticipates this might be difficult to achieve given the low credit card penetration in some markets.

“We might have to adjust our model as we go along – and perhaps offer CPC first while we grow the CPA,” he said. “We believe in testing and learning. We’ve made mistakes before and I am sure we will make more but we are committed to the longterm development of our brand in the Asian market.”

Skyscanner reported revenue of £15.2 million for the financial year ending May 31, 2011, an increase of 75% year-on-year. Search sessions for the year were 130 million, up 44%.

The search site is seeing “exceptionally strong growth” in Asia Pacific markets – Singapore, China, Indonesia, Japan, India and Malaysia are seeing yearly increases in traffic of up to 90% – hence its decision to open an Asian office.

Welcome to our neck of the woods, Skyscanner.