The Skyscanner Story

Skyscanner’s CEO Gareth Williams became obsessed with computers as a teenager. Pursuing his love of code, he went on to study mathematics and computing at Manchester University. On his first day of the course he met ‘fellow geek’ Bonamy Grimes (who went on to become a Skyscanner co-founder) and they bonded over music and computer code.

Graduating and going on to work as a ‘programmer for hire’, Gareth became frustrated with the difficult and tedious process of having to search multiple airline and travel agent websites to find the best flights to visit his brother who was living in France.

Gareth had a vision for a single website that could collect, collate and compare prices for every commercial flight in the world. At a pub brainstorming session of IT contractors, Gareth and Bonamy met physics graduate Barry Smith (who went on to become the third co-founder) who liked the idea. From a simple excel spreadsheet, Skyscanner was born.

The project grew by word of mouth and when thousands of people were using the prototype Skyscanner site every day, the three founders realised they were on to something and gave up the day jobs. Opening an office in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Skyscanner site was officially launched in 2001.

The company grew to become the number one flight search engine in Europe, and in 2011 a Singapore office was opened to help grow Skyscanner in the Asia-Pacific market.

Now offering flight searches in more than 27 different languages including Thai, Japanese and Russian, Skyscanner is the travel site of choice for independent travellers all over the world.

Skyscanner continues to grow by listening to its users and giving them what they want; a travel website that is fast, flexible and finds the cheapest flights, hotels, holidays and car hire – with no added fees and no fuss.