Skyscanner in major expansion into hotel market

Skyscanner is taking another step towards becoming a more comprehensive travel search engine by launching a hotel channel for the first time, Travolution can reveal. The new accommodation search facility – released to the site this week – follows just a few months after the Edinburgh-based meta search engine unveiled car hire tools to go…

Skyscanner is taking another step towards becoming a more comprehensive travel search engine by launching a hotel channel for the first time, Travolution can reveal.


The new accommodation search facility – released to the site this week – follows just a few months after the Edinburgh-based meta search engine unveiled car hire tools to go alongside its successful and original flight product.


The hotel channel will be powered existing accommodation meta search engine HotelsCombined, giving Skyscanner access to 200,000 hotels in 195 countries around the world.


The car hire search tool is currently run by Dublin-based CarTrawler.


HotelsCombined uses product lines from the likes of booking.com, Expedia, hotels.com, gtahotels.com and LateRooms.


Skyscanner will roll out the hotel search facilities across sites in 20 markets during July, using a combination of the existing currency switch tools available through HotelsCombined.


Search results will also include the HotelsCombined property reviews, photos, maps and facility guides.


Co-founder and director of business development, Barry Smith, told Travolution: “This puts us right into the wider travel search service as well as flights.”


The next part of the project will be to integrate selected hotel results alongside relevant flight searches, Smith said.


The new hotels product will be backed by SEM and SEO marketing techniques to attract new users as well as a traditional PR offensive over the next few weeks.