HUGH AITKEN

“India has grown to be one of our top markets at Skyscanner. We have seen spectacular growth coming for both International and Domestic travel, with international bookings via Skyscanner +121 per cent ahead of 2019 levels and Domestic bookings +639% above 2019 levels. In the first week of January 2024 alone, India saw an increase of 35 per cent in searches when compared to the same period in 2023.

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VP, Strategic Relations & Development, Skyscanner

We have seen a strong demand for travel in the Indian market that is growing rapidly. Based on our data, searches from India have grown by over 55 per cent in 2023 compared to 2022,” Hugh Aitken.

In the Media Roundtable, Hugh Aitken, VP,Strategic Relations and Development, Skyscanner shares his views about Sky Scanner presence in India, the opportunities it sees in this market, role and value of meta search engines ,booking patterns across the region and relation with the partner community.

What are some of the opportunities that Skyscanner sees in the travel market and how it is catering to the need of Indian travelers?

Skyscanner is a global travel marketplace, where we have over 120 million unique visitors who come to us globally and then over 100 million downloads globally, about 100 million registered accounts of travellers who come back to us regularly as well. And, if I think about the flight searches, age group between 20 and 25 start their flight searches in Skyscanner.

Skyscanner is over 20 years old now, started in Edinburgh in Scotland, but very quickly started developing that footprint. A sizable part of our business is in Europe and Middle East and across APAC. We also have big presences in Japan and Korea and then of course we work across all the Americas.

In our global outlook on travel, India within that has grown really substantially over the last few years and it now one of our top five markets.We have grown 120 per cent growth internationally since 2019. We’ve seen 121% growth in people’s bookings that we’re doing on international in India, and 639 per cent growth in domestic searches in India. Comparing January 2024 with January 2023, we saw 35 per cent growth in searches which is a substantial growth in the Indian market.