Skyscanner, available via multilingual apps, PC sites and mobile sites, searches through thousands of airlines, hotels and car-rental suppliers to find the best travel options for customers, for free. However, when Skyscanner’s millions of mobile users click through to the travel suppliers from its apps/site, they find that only 38 percent of the travel operators’ sites are mobile-friendly.
Ewan Gray heads Skyscanner’s rapidly expanding Asia Pacific operation, based in Singapore. mobiThinking caught up with him to find out more about how Skyscanner is riding the mobile wave.
Q1. What proportion of Skyscanner’s business is in Asia?
Since Skyscanner established its business in APAC 18 months ago, it has grown over 400 percent. Asia now accounts for 20 percent of our total business, which is up from 7 percent when we arrived.
Q2. What’s the difference between Asia and your home market?
The Skyscanner head office is in Edinburgh in the UK, although rapid expansion overseas means that the UK now accounts for less than 20 percent of our business and Skyscanner is now very much a global business.
Skyscanner is targeting the Asian markets by employing local talent and expertise for each country to work with commercial partners and localize the site to offer the best possible experience to users in that country. Each Asian market is different with its own set of challenges, such as low Internet and credit-card penetration. Perhaps the most significant difference, we are seeing at Skyscanner is the rate at which mobile use is growing. There is significant use of Skyscanner’s mobile apps globally but, particularly in tech-savvy Asia, which is reaching a clear tipping point for customers, who now want to plan and book their travel on the go.
Q3. What proportion of Skyscanner’s Asia business is mobile? How does that compare to your home market?
Overall 64 percent of the Asia business is mobile, but it varies from country to country. In China, for example, mobile accounts for 37 percent of our business, but in South Korea it’s 79 percent – South Korea, it should be noted, has the highest proportion of mobile to desktop users for Skyscanner of any country worldwide.
Q4. Which countries are delivering the best business today via mobile; which show the best potential for the future?
South Korea and Singapore are leading the way in Asia with their many tech-savvy travellers, but across the majority of markets Skyscanner is starting to see browsing via apps growing as well as actual bookings. Both are well-connected countries, where consumers are getting used to booking by mobile. For the future, you have to look to the markets with high populations such as India, China and Indonesia – in these three markets for many consumers their first access to the Internet will be through a mobile device.
Q5. Why is/what makes mobile a critical channel for air travel research/purchase?
Mobile devices have become a research tool for all areas of e-commerce – it’s important to get in front of people while they are researching and not just at the time of purchase. Purchase times are not the same on mobile as desktop – peak usage of our mobile apps is Sunday evening at 9pm, while peak booking times are on a desktop on Monday and Tuesday lunchtimes and just after 6pm.
Q6. What proportion of airlines you deal with are mobile friendly? How many of them have mobile-friendly sites? How many of them allow m-commerce?
Skyscanner indicates which airlines and online travel agents have mobile-optimized sites, so that the user can choose to select these if they prefer. 38 percent of referrals from our apps are to mobile-optimized sites.
Q7. How else do airlines/should airlines use mobile? E.g. for pre/post sales/service/check-in/ticketing?
Airlines are using apps for both pre and post sales activity including price search, ticketing, check-in, flight status, baggage status and for regular flyers to manage their frequent-flyer programs. The important thing here, though, is customer loyalty. The airlines’ loyal and high-value customers will download their apps, but people who fly infrequently or rarely use the same airline are unlikely to download an app for each airline. For these, a travel search provider gives greater flexibility in terms of choice.
Q8. When people search for flights in your mobile app then they click through to a Website (rather than to another app), so wouldn’t it be better for you and your mobile customers if all airlines, hotels etc had Web-enabled sites?
Mobile sites are important, too, I don’t see it as one or the other. However, if you are developing an app there are some major advantages of going native. Native Apps are usually better than HTML5-wrapped apps, but that is different from mobile-optimized sites.
Q9. What are the pros and cons of native v Web apps?
Notably Web-based apps are easier and cheaper to develop and are right for some businesses. However Skyscanner always develops native apps: not only do these often work faster over lower bandwidths – which is important in Asia – but more importantly the user experience is usually better because you can tap in to some the functionality that is unique to the device. We’ve focused our mobile strategy on making the most of the technology on each platform rather than replicating our site on a smaller screen. It’s far more consumer friendly and we’re seeing our users respond. For example, Android and Windows users can pin live tiles to the homepage to keep an eye on flight price changes, while BlackBerry users can share and chat about a search using BBM technology.
Q10. Do customers who are searching for the best flight/flight price care whether it’s a mobile Web/native app?
Customers do care about user experience, and Skyscanner believes a better experience can be delivered through a native app – you only have to read the reviews in app stores to see how much users care about functionality and experience.
Q11. What proportion of airline customers are using mobile? What are they using it for…research/purchase/check info/engage with airlines?
That would be one for the airlines to respond to: we have a wealth of data on how our own customers use our mobile apps and this is a vital part of our ongoing development to make sure we’re continuing to develop functionality our users want.
Q12. What tips do you have for companies in the travel business that are looking to expand their mobile business?
1) Go native, if you are developing an app.
2) An app doesn’t replace the need for a mobile-optimized site.
3) Make sure you build in flexibility to adapt and change quickly because the market moves very fast.
4) Get on with it.
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