Skyscanner is based in Edinburgh, with another large office in Glasgow. This is huge news for the Scottish tech scene, and will hopefully bring much needed cash to help it thrive. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening here in all types of tech.<p>Sadly Scotland's other unicorn, FanDuel, looks set to close its hq in Edinburgh after merging with draft kings. However, that will probably release a lot of talent to help smaller co's
<i>The company was formed in 2001 by three IT professionals, Gareth Williams, Barry Smith and Bonamy Grimes, after one of them was frustrated by the difficulties of finding cheap flights to ski resorts.</i>[1]<p>Lessons: scratching a trivial-seeming personal itch can pay off handsomely in the long term. And it takes a loooong time to make it big in travel.<p>Like most travel startup founders who've attended industry events over the past few years, I've crossed paths with Gareth and Barry a few times, and found them to be thoroughly warm, supportive and decent people.<p>This result is fully deserved.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscanner" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscanner</a>
From about 2005-2009 I founded a hotel reservation platform in direct competition to CTrip and ELong, both of whom were already Nasdaq listed with deep pockets. I successfully grew the business to the same network size as the competitors on a shoestring budget through automation, undercutting them on almost every property, and even offered services in six human languages (they almost managed 2). We received rave reviews from users, most of whom were local. The problem was, I didn't have the capital for a marketing budget, every advertising channel we tried had very low returns, and I was not confident enough to seek capital domestically. I still think there is loads of room for alternative booking platforms here in China, but the up-front capital costs to buy in to a large enough audience remain fairly significant.
Well done SkyScanner! I live 20 minutes from Edinburgh, and I don't really see what others are saying here. I am in a very flexible but really lame paid role, I have friends who have offered me a job in England twice. In Edinburgh though, it is either corporate jobs (demand), low paid hacky jobs for media agencies (pays in peanuts), and everything else is 50k jobs paying 28k via a recruitment agency who skims all the cream... ie: You need to be a mug.<p>Otherwise where are people seeing all the tech jobs?
This is great news for skyscanner. Unfortunately, the media in the UK will go all nativist and claim that Britain is being sold out to foreign countries, as they did with ARM.
Interesting -- this may be the largest foreign acquisition by a Chinese internet company to date? Largest I'm aware of was Riot Games by Tencent, which was on the order of $400 million.
No mentions of Kayak? I use kayak because they seems to be more up to date. Sometimes other players don't have the special offers that kayak already shows. Sometimes kayak is also slow to update.<p>I tried also other metasearches, but they mostly have offers from rubbish sites that show good prices and then you get a huge CC bill.
Wouldnt it be considered a conflict of interest if the original founder of Ctrip Neil Shen, later invests in Skyscanner as a Sequoia VC-raises its valuation and then gets it acquired by Ctrip.