Customers on your heart and partners on your mind, the key to Skyscanner’s success

Scenario 1: The price of flight tickets from your regular airline is insanely crazy.

Scenario 2: You feel the travel bug, and you’re yearning to go somewhere, anywhere. But where?

If you’re familiar with at least one of these scenarios, you’ve definitely used Skyscanner. With more than 20 years in the hospitality industry, Mike Ferguson is the Director of Destinations and Brand Marketing at Skyscanner. With the changing needs and demands of travellers, Mike gives us insights on topics such as how Skyscanner has continued being one of the world’s leading travel search brands by focusing on the customer experience, how they can cross-benefit with their existing and new partnered destination marketing organisations (DMOs), how he hopes the future of AI may shape the future of travel, and many more!

Mike, you have been with Skyscanner for more than seven years now - a lot must have changed in that time. How has Skyscanner evolved and maintained its position as one of the world's leading travel search brands?

A lot has changed, both within the travel industry and Skyscanner itself! From an industry perspective, we have seen the rapid rise of low-cost carriers opening new routes, price points and destinations to travellers, the explosion of mobile first booking trends (especially in APAC) and a global pandemic.

Throughout this time Skyscanner has been laser-focused on several key areas:

• Putting travellers at the heart of everything we do and reaching them in new markets to grow our global audience to well over 100 million monthly users.
• Building innovative yet beautifully designed and simple-to-use products, powered by cutting edge technology and the expertise of talented teams from around the world.
• Significant investment in data, analytics, AI and machine learning to gain valuable insights into traveller behaviour, preferences and market trends.

All of this not only allows us to stay ahead of the curve, but most importantly, maintain our position as a trusted and preferred choice for our travellers and a partner of choice for businesses worldwide.

Can you tell us about the specifics of your role as brand and destination marketing director? What are you most excited about in terms of the technology supporting you to achieve your goals and what are you hoping to achieve this year?

I lead Skyscanner’s teams to focus on growing and deepening Skyscanner’s partnerships with destination marketing organisations (DMOs) worldwide. This involves helping these organisations market their destinations to the right travellers at the right time through a combination of brand and performance advertising both on and off Skyscanner’s platforms.

Right now, we are investing in our marketplace to build dynamic distribution, advertising, and data products. Recent examples include new data tools to analyse route and destination demand, as well as new ad products that enable real time optimisation of campaigns. The real-time optimisation aspect is particularly exciting as it will allow our partners to self-serve and adjust their ad spend to respond to changing market dynamics. From what I’ve seen so far, it is exceptionally effective and delivers strong results.

My aim for this year is to deepen our existing and establish new relationships with DMOs across APAC, and help them capitalise on the trends we are seeing, while being a trusted partner during the region’s recovery.

How can brands make an impression to be with travellers through the dreaming, planning, booking, and experiencing phase?

Planning and booking a trip can be a lengthy process, so it’s vitally important for brands to reach travellers during the dreaming phase when they are most open to inspiration. When it comes to travel search, not every traveller has a specific destination or dates in mind.

More than a half of Skyscanner users (56%) are using our platform to find inspiration for their next trip. In fact, one of our most popular search features is called ‘Explore Everywhere’, where travellers looking to be inspired can browse a curated list of destinations based on their preferences.

What stands out the most right now is the emphasis on emotional and experiential messaging. Brands understand the power of evoking feelings and memories associated with travel, and they are leveraging this to remind people of the joy and transformative experiences that it brings.

In your report - Skyscanner Horizons Q1 2023 - what did you find and how are you applying these findings to your strategy?

Our recent report (available here) reveals that travellers are looking East as global air connectivity, particularly long haul, is restored. At the same time booking windows are returning to pre-pandemic seasonal norms.

This is certainly the case in Europe, The Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and the Americas, though APAC is a little further behind owing to it being the region most recently re-opening.+90 day booking windows for long haul travel are up across all regions signalling both traveller confidence and demand, with search share moving in line with pre-pandemic trends.

Globally, from a destination perspective, we are seeing destinations such as Japan, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam trending, with surges in searches for travel over the next six months. Looking at APAC travellers, the trending destinations include Japan, Laos, and Taiwan, but we also see travellers in the region looking for inspiration via the ‘Everywhere’ search as well as some

European destinations such as Austria and Hungary owing to new routes. We share the report findings with our DMO and flights partners to help them understand current market dynamics and work collaboratively to put the right products, whether deals or destination inspiration, in front of travellers, at the right time.

Gathering heaps of data across multiple platforms is fantastic but how do you then use this data to inspire travellers and entice them to book?

We believe there is huge opportunity to tailor and personalise the search experience and offer based on traveller behaviour.

That doesn't require us to know who the actual individual is, but of course, the more we know the better. Individual travel personas are increasingly complex and blurred thanks the rise of trends such as ‘bleisure’ (business trips mixed with leisure trips). But we are investing in something we call ‘contextual co-horting' (grouping travellers together based on their preferences, expectations, and demands) to build high intent pools of travellers based on their preferences and micro signals on our platforms from search and redirect behaviour.

We infer travellers’ preferences by looking at past searches, categorising destinations into themes, and then recommending similar-themed destinations. Partners that work with us to target messages and deals to a specific audience are seeing great results.

What technologies do you predict will change the travel industry and the way people book their travel in the next 5 years?

The technology that is on the tip of everyone’s tongue right now is generative AI. We have been working with AI and machine learning models for several years now to supercharge the traveller experience and create better outcomes for our partners in areas such as increasing the speed of a flight search, to forecasting accurate prices, to providing personalised itinerary recommendations (deals, destinations).

However, what is exciting about the current wave of interest in AI is how travellers will be able to interact with the technology and the dramatic improvements it can bring in terms of natural language processing in search. For example, inferring search intent from unstructured queries.

Will the traditional search console of origin, destination and date be replaced with a chat experience? I think it’s far too early to tell right now, but it’s certainly a possibility!

What do you expect to get out of Digital Travel Asia? And can you give us a sneak peek at what you will share with the audience when you present?

First and foremost, I’m looking forward to coming back to Singapore where I have lived and worked for several years in my early Skyscanner days to reconnect with friends and colleagues. With the current trends we are seeing in the region and feedback from our APAC team, there is a real buzz about the resurgence of travel and the opportunities that comes with it.

I’m expecting to experience that buzz at Digital Travel Asia, meet, and exchange ideas, experiences and best practice with other leaders in the sector. I’ll be sharing some of the recent products and services we’ve launched, powered by Skyscanner’s proprietary data and technology, and talk about how we’re working with partners with these tools and others to help them meet their strategic objectives.

Why is Digital Travel Asia an event not to be missed?

It is my first time attending but I have only heard positive things as one of the leading digital travel events in Asia. The speaker line up looks fantastic and I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to listen to engaging insights from industry experts in the region.

Download the agenda to get a overview of this year's topics, speakers and more.