Skyscanner has developed a one-stop flight search service with Yahoo search that will enable Hong Kongers to simultaneously view flight details as they research a destination, introducing greater ease to their itinerary planning and budgeting.

The new service, currently only available in traditional Chinese, has been launched in Yahoo’s desktop and mobile website in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and is expected to be gradually rolled out across other regions.

Image source: Skift

The partnership will see Skyscanner flight search features embedded into Yahoo search pages on desktop and mobile devices. When users search with designated keywords on the page, flight search bars powered by Skyscanner will appear.

Users can then adjust a series of filters, such as round-trip or one-way flights, number of passengers, cabin class, origin city and destination, and trip dates.

Upon pressing the Search Flights button, they will be redirected to the Skyscanner website, where they can proceed with the booking.

Lorraine Cheung, head of audience at Yahoo, said the search engine will continue to explore adding more features to support travellers in different aspects of their trip planning.

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Earlier this month, Chinese OTA Ctrip acquired US startup Trip.com, a travel planning app and website. According to Trip.com, the metasearch site Skyscanner (also owned by Ctrip) will launch personalized travel recommendations powered by the former’s recommendations and reviews. Ctrip also ported the travel recommendation service it acquired to a new domain, www.trip.skyscanner.com, and turned Trip.com into an English-language version of Ctrip’s online travel agency content.

So, what drove Ctrip to bet on using the Trip.com domain to expand its online travel agency business? Travellers have different ways of shopping for the best travel deals. The key to monetize this traffic to your website is adding a layer of intelligence that can ascertain how they would like to travel, which is basically Trip.com’s specialization – algorithm-driven curation of travel recommendations. This was simply complementary to Ctrip’s brand outside of China, which is Skyscanner.

Trip.com uses its Tribes feature to offer results to each traveller to suit their style. The team has extensively worked on contextual recommendations, so when a user opens the Trip.com app, there is information about who the user is, their tribe, their location and other contextual details. This helps the app adapt the content in the form of recommendations, accordingly.

The race to reach and own the customer as early as possible in the booking funnel is one area that sees intense battles in the travel ecosystem. With the help of contextualisation, like in the case of Tribes, companies can easily target even anonymous visitors with content or recommendations. If it resonates with a traveller, it can also result in a conversion.

Ctrip CEO Jane Sun

The deal also means that Trip.com’s expertise would reach out at a global level via Skyscanner. This will lead to more refinement in algorithms, as people everywhere travel differently. This will help Ctrip gear up for personalisation for different markets across the world, thus capturing more consumers.

As the company goes deeper into its algorithms, it would soon be about strengthening the association across the booking funnel, and winning more customers, faster than competition.

The post How Ctrip might win the race to reach customers appeared first on TravHQ.

With eyes set on the global market, Ctrip has signed a definitive agreement with the majority shareholders of Skyscanner Holdings Limited to acquire Scotland based flight metasearch engine Skyscanner. The deal values Skyscanner at approximately £1.4 billion (USD 1.74 billion) and the acquisition consists primarily of cash along with Ctrip ordinary shares and loan notes. The transaction has been approached by the boards of directors of both the companies and is expected to close by the end of 2016.

However, the acquisition won’t affect the operations of Skyscanner and its current management team will continue to manage operations independently as part of Ctrip group. The news of acquisition comes not long after the flight metasearch raised USD 192 million valuing the firm at USD 1.6 billion to fuel expansion in new markets. It was also being reported that Skyscanner was planning an IPO in 2017 however this acquisition certainly eliminates that possibility.

“Skyscanner is one of the largest travel search platforms in the world,” said James Jianzhang Liang, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Ctrip. “We are excited to welcome Skyscanner into the Ctrip group. Ctrip and Skyscanner share the same passion and dedication in providing travellers around the world with better services. This acquisition will strengthen long-term growth drivers for both companies. Skyscanner will complement our positioning at a global scale, and we will leverage our experience, technology and booking capabilities to help Skyscanner.”

“Ctrip is the clear market leader in China and a company we can learn a huge amount from,” said Gareth Williams, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Skyscanner. “Today’s news takes Skyscanner one step closer to our goal of making travel search as simple as possible for travellers around the world. Ctrip and Skyscanner share a common view – that organizing travel has a long way to go to being solved. To do so requires powerful technology and a traveller-first approach. In taking the next step to achieving our goal, Skyscanner will remain operationally independent and our growing global team will continue to innovate and deliver the products travellers know and love. It’s an exciting time for our business, our partners and the travellers who use us.”

Here is what Skyscanner CEO Gareth Williams had to say about this development.

Ctrip has been actively looking at markets outside China and earlier this year, the company spent USD 180 million to buy shares in MakeMyTrip. The acquisition of Skyscanner is yet another step for the Chinese firm to explore past the home borders.

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Booklogic, a hotel revenue management technology company has partnered with Skyscanner to expand its reach through the leading meta-search engine. This deal has come in the wake of helping its hotel clients outreach a wider market.

The meta-search would sell Booklogic’s customers’ available rooms while still processing the booking through the BookLogic booking engine. This has been settled with an agreement between BookLogic and its hotel clients by giving them a greater reach and marketing exposure via Skyscanner with no additional cost except for the fixed charge.

“Skyscanner will be immediately available to our clients, who will benefit from a greater sales network that will give them more flexibility in rate setting and distribution,” said Oral Yigitkus, chief executive, BookLogic.  Our hotel clients will benefit from maximised sales and exposure without suffering from increasing costs of distribution through our system. Skyscanner is a strong brand in the travel space that is helping to increase bookings from a wider traveller network.”

The properties subscribed to BookLogic’s technology would be benefitted from the engine’s CRS and facilitate to post room availability and rates to a wider network. Bookings would rise and so would the overall RevPAR through the current BookLogic system.

Nikhil Gupta, director of hotels at Skyscanner commented: “We are pleased to welcome BookLogic on board as a new partner. This partnership with BookLogic will allow millions of travellers who use Skyscanner to book directly with Hotels. Our Hotels product at Skyscanner continues to grow and develop, and we are constantly striving to work with the very best in the industry to deliver great services to travellers.”

All the customers have to do is to file a request to add the channel to its existing sales channels.

Source: Breaking Travel News

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All apps and websites have technical glitches and bugs! After-all, they are created for & by human-beings and if there were no bugs, there would be no complaints and scope for ORM (Online Reputation Management).

So what happens when a customer picks a screenshot and points a bug in your tool? Well most social media executives would say sorry with an apology to close the conversation. What Skyscanner’s executive Jen did with a recent comment by a user called James Llyod is a case-study on how to do Online Reputation Management the right way.

It all began with this comment from James Lloyd

As you can see, James was pointing out a bug in a quirky way.

The response was epic & unbelievable

At this point Jen an executive from Skyscanner’s social media executive team responded with an epic comment

The conversation continued as other fans joined in

The comments also drew inspiration from popular shows such as GoT

If you can be topical and bring in what the world follows, nothing better

The brand even incentivized its user

As they say, it all ended on a good note

Meanwhile Jen continues to draw a fan-following and build *The Clan of Jen*

The post Skyscanner’s Jen teaches ORM lessons to all Social Media Agencies appeared first on TravHQ.

Flight metasearch engine Skyscanner has always been quick to adopt new trends, be it is a new marketing channel or a new technology. Earlier Skyscanner had made headlines with their innovative 24 hour Periscope campaign when Periscope was relatively new and gaining traction among users. Now, only a few weeks after Facebook opened up the Messenger platform for third party developers, Skyscanner has introduced a chat bot which allows travellers to look up and book flights with ease without having to search through the website.

As of now, the bot only offers flight search services although Skyscanner’s app offerings also include hotel search and car rentals. The bot is available in English only for now and the currencies are limited depending on the language (English US or UK).

The bot would ask you to provide your destination, source and dates of travel, essentially the data you would enter while searching for your flight on their website, without visiting the website or downloading the app. The bot also carries the ‘search everywhere’ feature from the Skyscanner website, so it will also recommend destinations depending on your source airport.

The bot is quick to respond to queries however, you have to keep them simple. Precise responses which are the direct answers to the bot’s questions will take you to your desired flight results but the bot isn’t able to process detailed inputs very well. For instance, when we adhered to the one or two word inputs, the bot offered the desired search results but as soon as we tried using a complicated phrase, including the source, destination and travel date, the responses weren’t as expected. The bot follows a hierarchy and you have to adhere to that for now.

Complicated phrases aren’t handled very well at this point

This could be because it is still a very young product and the functionality is limited at this point. Judging by how Skyscanner has previously embraced technology, we can safely assume that we will see lot more features being added to this Messenger bot. Skyscanner also offers hotels and car rentals and they might also offer these through the chat bot in near future.

Chat bots are being seen as the next big thing in travel industry, a fact that Skyscanner highlighted in their blog post. The recently introduced bot will not only open up a new sales channel for the brand but also help them position themselves as a tech savvy brand which is ready to adapt quickly to serve the customers better.

Apps were the hottest topic of conversation in the tech industry until a few years back but over time, the average number of apps an individual uses didn’t rise considerably. According to the data shared by Lee McCabe, Global Head of Travel, Facebook during Phocuswright India, the average time spent by users per month on apps increased significantly from around 23 hours to 37 hours from 2012 to 2014 but the average number of apps used continued to be almost the same. Most of the time is spent between a handful of apps, primarily social media apps and messaging services and that is where the brands want to be visible. With 900 million monthly active users on Messenger, it offers wide reach and unlike an app, a bot is available for use immediately without the time or storage requirement.

The Skyscanner bot is easily accessible through their Facebook account. You can head to m.me/skyscanner to take the bot for a spin.

Also read: Should travel brands start exploring chat bots immediately

The post How good is Skyscanner’s Facebook Messenger chat bot? appeared first on TravHQ.

Ever since Instagram came into existence, it allowed its users and brands to engage using the power of visuals. It has been continuously experiencing impressive growth and with its simple approach, one of the most engaging as well. Even before Instagram decided to include ads on the platform, many brands have been using the platform to spread the word.

We recently dicussed about why Indian OTAs shouldn’t miss out on Instagram. Not just the Online Travel Agencies but many other B2C travel businesses can benefit from this platform. So we have compiled a list of dos and don’ts for using this platform for brand promotion.

Dos

Use the power of Hashtags

Hashtags help your visuals get noticed among the millions of photos that are being shared on Instagram everyday. Most of the brands use three or four hashtags but it won’t hurt to use few more if they are relevant to the post. Some hashtags related to travel commonly used on Instagram are #ttot, #igtravel, #instatravel and #travelgram. You can include such tags in the mix to gain instant visibility.

It is also very important to promote a branded hashtag that will be used on all the posts. Even when you are using a specific hashtag for the duration of a contest, use it with the brand hashtag. This would encourage your followers to use the hashtag as well. Not only will it help you crowdsource content but would also help you keep track of the content being shared around your brand.

Crowdsource

Once you have started engaging your audience, you can use Instagram to crowdsource images. People love interacting with the brands they like and reposting fan photos will motivate even more of them to follow and share the pictures with you. Skyscanner, the global travel search engine asks people to use the hashtag #letsgoeverywhere to share their adventures and a large number of their posts are stunning photos shared by people all over the world. This reduces the effort of generating content and brings in a variety of content which won’t be possible otherwise.

Make sure people know about your unique hashtag

Contests and Insta-Takeovers

Instagram is a good platform for hosting contests similar to Twitter. Tourism Malaysia recently launched the #BeautifulMalaysia campaign which is attracting a large number of entries. NatGeo India organises photowalks through contests on Instagram and these are just few examples.

Brands can rope in influencers to take over their Instagram account and manage it for a few days. This works in favour of both the brand and influencers as both of them are able to connect with each other’s audience while adding a new flavour to the brand account.

Include real people

Sure the beach photos and sand dunes look great on a brand Instagram profile but they can be even better if you include people. Of course this can be achieved easily if you are taking care of the first two points i.e. hashtags and crowdsourcing. A photo of kids beating the heat at a splash pool might just work a little better than the photo of just the pool.

A group of boys playing in the #YamunaRiver with the #TajMahal in the background. Congratulations Achal Mishra on winning the best image during the first week of #LPCoverImage (theme: Friendship Day) A big thank you to all who participated. More themes to come Next up: Independence Day theme. T&Cs: bit.ly/LPCoverImage_Terms More about the contest here: on.fb.me/1lVet3g #LonelyPlanetIndia #LPI #LPIndia #ContestAlert #contest #LPCoverImage

A photo posted by Lonely Planet India (@lonelyplanetindia) on Aug 10, 2015 at 11:33pm PDT

Don’ts

Lack strategy

It is very important to have a character, whether it is your personal account or the brand account. Which means you need to define your niche and plan accordingly. It is okay to move away for a few posts but on the whole, your brand account should have a character & reflect what you are doing and should be built around it.

Compromise on quality

Instagram is an endless stream of photos on a single page. Most people keep scrolling down until they spot something that stands out. Usually you have a fraction of a second to grab the attention and send your message. Even when exploring through hashtags, there are eight other photos along the same theme.

Overdo or Use wrong hashtags

Although this one goes without saying, we are going to mention it anyway. Never use irrelevant hashtags on your posts as this will bring down your credibility and paint a negative picture of your brand. Another thing to keep in mind is that while Instagram allows upto 30 hashtags, avoid putting them all in the caption. Instead put them in the comments after you have posted the picture with a caption.

If you are just starting out on Instagram, you can take a look at accounts like Lonely Planet India or Nat Geo Traveller India. Destination marketers can look at Goa Tourism among domestic and Tourism Australia among international destinations for some inspiration.

Join the discussions on travel marketing and get inputs from the topic experts here.

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In India, Cricket is a religion and Travel is a passion. When you create a fusion of the two, the result is a cracking campaign like Skyscanner Smartsters.

Skyscanner is a really cool mobile app for frequent flyers and essentially helps you to find the cheapest fares while flying abroad to a destination of your choice. It compares flight-fares from a bunch of websites and aggregates the results in a simple & intuitive interface. Last year, Skyscanner had also launched a hotel only app which works on a similar model as their flights’ app. In India, Skyscanner has been very aggressive since the last year and has primarily been focussing on the rising number of outbound travellers.

Skyscanner has also been the official travel partner of Delhi Daredevils for the second year in running. To promote the entire association for IPL 2015 with Delhi Daredevils, they launched #SkyscannerSmartsters, a campaign where fans were invited to give tips to players on playing smart cricket and travelling smart. The whole idea was driven by the insight that most fans have a fine understanding of the nuances of the game and know how to really travel in style.

What did we really love about Skyscanner Smartsters?

Leverage Cross-Platforms – The campaign was executed across all the key platforms – Skyscanner India Website, Skyscanner India Facebook Page, YouTube channel and Twitter handle making it a truly integrated digital campaign. Learning: Doing a campaign across channels helps you to instantly connect with your community. More importantly, if the proposition is different across channels it gives a fresh perspective to your fans giving them an added incentive to follow you on multiple channels.

Dedicated campaign centric landing page on the Skyscanner India website

Localisation Wins: The whole idea of using #chatpaticommentary and comparing it with Delhi’s local lingo brought an instant connect with Skyscanner’s fans. Similarly asking your team players to speak in Hindi over the more preferred choice of English was a welcome change.

Graphic from Skyscanner India’s twitter feed which shows how they used hindi lingo such as Tadka and Masaledaar to engage with fan-community.

Dynamic & Fresh Content: The problem with most campaigns which span across long duration is fatigue. #SkyscannerSmartsters addressed that challenge in an adept manner by throwing a new question to its fans with on a new match-day of Delhi Daredevils. It kept the fans hooked to the community as they waited for a new question with a new match.

On their Facebook page, Skyscanner India posted fresh questions to engage with their community of fans.

The questions were themed around the travel quotient and linked with the cities where Delhi Daredevils team was playing its matches.

Influencers to Amplify Conversations: Tapping influencers by a brand to amplify the reach of message is not new, but if you get the right mix who can connect with your brand’s overall messaging proposition, the impact it can create is huge. Skyscanner partnered with celebrities and social media influencers who extended the reach of their campaign to new heights.

Skyscanner roped in popular cricket presenter Gautam Bhimani in #ChatpatiCommentary campaign.

It will take some lusty blows & a bit of #ChatpatiCommentary to win the match & to win some @DelhiDaredevils merchandise with @SkyscannerIN

— Gautam Bhimani (@gbhimani) May 9, 2015

Ex-Indian cricketer and popular TV commentator Aakash Chopra also joined the #chatpaticommentary campaign.

Dilliboys! Abhi to party shuru hui hai, thand rakho thand! I am confident that aaj tum aag laga doge #ChatpatiCommentary @SkyscannerIN

— Aakash Chopra (@cricketaakash) April 12, 2015

Did you spot other travel brands engaging with their fan community during major sports events? Do share with us, and we will be happy to feature the best examples.

The post Skyscanner Engages with Indian Cricket Fans & Travellers appeared first on TravHQ.

Periscope, the live streaming app by Twitter is causing bit of a stir all over the globe. It has acquired an impressive number of users already and is receiving love from brands & celebrities alike. Skyscanner recently chose this platform to do a campaign which was received well by the masses. We downloaded the app, broadcasted some weird streams from around our office and discussed on what this platform holds for the travel industry.

My day started with a beautiful view from someone’s balcony in turkey, then I watched U2 perform live in California, some supercars on the streets of Dubai, travelled in a subway to some place I don’t remember the name of and then finally watched a British guy play ‘Sweet child of mine’ on his guitar. I would have explored more but then I ran out of battery on my phone.

(Image: Twitter’s Periscope App by quintanomedia/ CC BY 2.0)

There has been lot of buzz around this new app called Periscope. Five days after its launch, Skyscanner got around two dozen travel bloggers from around the world on-board for the #24hPeriscope campaign showcasing the best their respective cities have to offer. Not only were they taking the viewers for a tour around the cities but were also receiving (and following) suggestions from viewers.

Down in Taiwan, tech blogger Sascha Pallenberg has been using the Periscope app to create awareness about Taiwan as a travel destination. His periscope streams have been fairly popular with viewers expressing great interest in knowing more about the destination.

Popular Techblogger Sascha Pallenberg conducted a fun evening walk on the streets of Taiwnan via Periscope. The walk turned out to be quite a popular one!

So what is this app anyway?

Periscope allows the user to live broadcast a video stream to his or her followers (and non followers too if they choose to). The viewers can interact with the broadcaster by typing in comments or tapping on the screen to like the stream.

Any platform that depends on high volume of visuals can be a great tool for travel industry. Instagram, Pinterest, Vine and YouTube accounts of travel brands like Lonely Planet, Disney World Resorts and Travel Channel are good example of the potential these platforms hold. With Periscope entering the picture, brands might have to consider the option of reallocating their resources on social media because this platform is growing really fast. It managed to attract 1 million in the first 10 days (Source: Mashable) and those were the initial days when Android users were left out.

We have seen many video streaming services in the past like Twitch and Ustream among others, some of them caught up well, some even failed to get noticed. The reason apps like Snapchat, Meerkat and Periscope are suddenly getting everyone’s attention is because these services rely on mobile phones. Sitting back in a chair while talking live to your audience is a different thing and taking them around for a walk in your local street market is an entirely different experience. The possibilities are endless and as the content is shared live, there is no post processing to deter people who aren’t good with it.

What is in it for the brands?

Obviously after playing around with the app, we got back to business. What could be the possible use cases of this new platform, and more importantly, what the travel industry can get out of it? Skyscanner has already demonstrated that the platform holds potential and with the use of good content and some spontaneity, can yield good results.

At this moment the Periscope app has minor issues. It is hard to discover streams, there are no filters for language and you either get notifications for all people you follow or for none of them. But these are minor issues that they will iron out going forward.

You can always find someone broadcasting interesting content on Periscope

Periscope in more of an ‘in the moment’ platform. People can comment during the stream and send out hearts. Brands have been hosting Twitter chats and Google Hangout sessions. Now they can invite people to join them on Periscope and send out questions via comments.

Destination marketers can join hands with travellers or video bloggers to give their audience Periscope tours of the attractions. Of course we haven’t seen many examples of brands doing the same yet but someone surely will. #24hPeriscope was something of this sort and earned Skyscanner many well deserved hearts.

Browsing through the streams, I found someone providing cooking lessons over Periscope. This is something restaurants and hotels can do. Take people for a tour into their kitchen, showcase the preparation of cuisines or maybe show off the skills of their bartender.

Forget its use by brands. Hotels are a safer bet compared to vacations rentals and many people are sceptical about booking with Airbnb and similar platforms and many of them complain that what you see in pictures is very different from what you get in reality. Airbnb hosts can use Periscope to showcase their property to boost travellers’ confidence to book.

The platform is still at nascent stage and we are yet to see how far it can go. It does have limitations for instance, you can’t embed a periscope stream on a website and the video is only available for limited number of hours. The creative brains of travel marketers will surely come up with innovative uses of Periscope. We are keeping an eye out for them for some inspiration. If your brand is doing a campaign on Periscope, do let us know. We would love to tell our readers about it.

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