In a country where ‘cheap’ has become the word of the day for the past decade or so, a No.1 European website sets its heart, soul and apps to help the ever willing traveller among the Indians. For a country obsessed with the two golden words- ‘low cost’- this truly is a breath of fresh air. We talk to Ewan Gray, Skyscanner’s director for Asia Pacific to understand the logic behind the simplicity.
In just over a decade you have moved on from concentrating on Europe to coming to Asia, you set up operation in Singapore and now in India? How big is India for you as a market?
We got to number one in Europe and before that we started operations in the UK and then we wanted to expand in the European markets. At this point in time we recruited a lot of locals from every country as marketing managers. So we recruited a Russian guy, Italian, Spanish, French, German and Turkish at our head office in Edinburgh and their job was to localize our website and make it more user-friendly and relevant to their country.
Simple and Crisp, you can associate these two things with Sky Scanner. Is there any India specific innovation you’ll be working on?
I think we are not there yet. There is more work to be done on our site and still a lot of developments that have to take place. But we do show a very unique set of travel agents within the Indian market than we show elsewhere. They differ in a lot of ways and the consumers get to see local agents who we have uniquely helped them identify through our website. There are some problems that we face though when it comes to India. Things like rail travel, though we have added that in Europe, it can’t be added in the same way in India, because it’s a different permutation. It will be unrealistic to compare the rail travel say between Delhi and Mumbai to air travel here, since there is a significant difference in price and though we are able show this rail and air fare comparison in Europe, it is a different ball game in India. Hence we focus on localizing the website and in particularly getting things like holidays and preferred destinations, which are more India specific. That process has already been started and the content will be more inclined to features and destination guides, which will focus on Indian travel.
You’ve retained the website-like consumer friendly comparisons on your app as well, though it is concise. Tell us about your tech team back in UK?
We have been going ten years now and we have developed this over a period of time. It’s always been a work in progress. The company was founded by three techies who have a very clear vision of what they want to achieve like things need to be lightning fast. Now with over 110 members in the team, technology development is 2/3rd’s of our business and the concentration is more on how to make things like browsing through flights and comparing their prices a faster process. It’s the mobile apps that are very important because not everywhere do we find networks with 3G or 4G capabilities. Mobile apps are the most important of all in this day and age and it’s the tech team that makes the magic of making it concise, faster and user friendly. We have a very close relationship with the Universities in UK and we hire lot of graduates from there and over the year we have been able to position ourselves as the preferred employer not only in UK but also overseas.
You have established yourself practically in every continent, what more are you looking to conquer?
It is indeed very humbling to see the kind of progress we have made in the past decade and we hope to continue on the same path but we do face challenges. One among them is marketing ourselves. We are not a company that comes into India with 100 million dollars to spend on advertising; it’s unrealistic for us as we do not sell the tickets but only direct the consumer to the right website. Therefore, we focus on user experience. If the user has had a good experience on our website or application he is likely to return and it is this kind of consumer that will spread the word about our website. This does not mean that we do not advertise at all. We do have ads going up on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, but then again we work on tight budgets. We are No.1 in Europe and we want to be at the top in the other continents as well and that’s what we at Skyscanner strive for.
Write your Comment