A plane ticket to Thailand or search elsewhere and book on your smartphone? More and more travelers are doing it.
Skyscanner, which claims to be the world's fastest growing flight search engine, has seen usage of its app launched in 2011 grow by 400% over the past year. The app has been downloaded more than 20 million times and usage exceeds website usage for the first time.
The app is currently being downloaded every second somewhere in the world and there have been more than 250 million searches since the app launched in 2011. During the most booking week in January, the Skyscanner app was the number 1 free travel app for the iPhone in over 100 countries including the United States.
South Korea market leader
South Korea is the market leader in mobile travel search. There, more than 80% of searches come from the mobile app. Japan and India are also ahead in terms of booking via the app, but this trend can also be observed outside Asia. 70% of travelers from Australia, Brazil, Canada and the US also use an app to search or book flights. In the Netherlands this is 53%, which is equal to the global average.
“We have reached a clear tipping point,” said Bonamy Grimes, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Skyscanner, particularly in the tech-advanced Far East, the US and major emerging markets such as Brazil, where consumers are looking to plan and books while on the go. We also see that the enormous growth of the app stimulates visits to the website, because users switch between the platforms.
Platform technology
“It is clear that online businesses need to be mobile to be successful in this day and age. The focus of our mobile strategy is on making the most of each platform's technology, rather than replicating the site on a smaller screen. That is much more user-friendly and we see that reflected in the use. For example, Android and Windows users have the option to put an active live tile on their home page to monitor flight price changes, while BlackBerry users can share and chat about their searches using BBM technology. We will continue to develop free search and speech recognition technology to make using the app as innovative and user-friendly as possible.”
Skyscanner launched the first highly rated flight search app in February 2011. The app is now available in 30 languages on iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone, Windows 8 and BlackBerry, including a new release for BlackBerry 10.