Mobile visits exceed web for first time at Skyscanner

Mobile visits exceed web for first time at Skyscanner

Mobile visits to Skycanner have overtaken the web for the first time with 400% growth in the past year.

Mobile visits to Skycanner have overtaken the web for the first time with 400% growth in the past year.

The company’s flight search app has been downloaded more than 20 million times.

There have been over 250 million searches made since Skyscanner first launched its apps two years ago.

It was the number one free travel iPhone app in over 100 markets including the US during the busiest travel booking week in January, according to the company.

At the current rate, the app is downloaded somewhere in the world every second.

South Korea leads the way in mobile travel search, with 80% of all flight searches to the Skyscanner site now coming from mobile devices. Japan and India are also experiencing a rapid move towards planning and booking travel while on the move.

Travellers from Australia, Brazil, Canada and the US are now using mobile devices for over 70% of flight searches, compared with a global average of 53%.

Co-founder and chief strategy officer Bonamy Grimes said: “We’ve reached a clear tipping point for customers, particularly in the tech-savvy Far East, in the US and large emerging markets such as Brazil, who now want to plan and book their travel on the go.

“Yet we’re also seeing our app growth boosting web traffic as users move between platforms to plan and book their travel.

“It’s clear that online businesses need to be mobile to succeed over the coming years and we’ve very much reached this point.

“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 instance, 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.

“We’re continuing to build on our free text search and voice recognition technology to make the mobile travel booking process as intuitive as possible.”