The first thing Gareth Williams, CEO & co-founder of Skyscanner, says to me with a grin when I caught up with him yesterday evening was, “I deny all rumours that I was offered the Uber job.”
Wishing Dara Khosrowshahi well (the Expedia Inc CEO has indicated he will accept the job as Uber CEO), Williams said, “It’s interesting, these horizontals which are getting into travel. Their job is to serve the full extent of what people want to use them for – and they have advantages, captive audiences.
“We approach that by being better – more focused. And we have our B2B offering that allows us to integrate our services into platforms like Alexa, or we power horizontal search engines like Yahoo Japan, for example.”
It’s nice to see that the new billion dollar man in travel, who built Skyscanner with two friends into a Scottish unicorn and a global business bought by Ctrip for US$1.7b in November 2016, hasn’t changed much. The humour is still there as is the humility – “I am not a chief executive by nature,” he said.
“The consumer in Asia is the leading indicator of how people book travel – in terms of app usage, frictionless payments and expectations around customer support”
How the relationship with Ctrip started
Other than taking a few more holidays – he’s just been diving in North Sulawesi and plans to take a one-month break next year – Williams is still very much the leader of the travel search business that’s now out to grow even faster in Asia, particularly outside China.
Williams has always been an advocate of Asia. He recalled attending his first WIT conference in Singapore in 2006 when Skyscanner was still trying to figure out its destiny. And since then, the company has pursued a solid, consistent growth strategy in Asia.
And indeed, you could say that its decision to set up an office in Singapore eventually led to the acquisition by Ctrip. At a fireside chat to a room of startups held at The Working Capitol, he said Skyscanner started building knowledge and trust with Ctrip four to five years ago.
“It came about because we set up an office in Singapore when we wanted to expand from being a low cost carrier flight search in Europe to worldwide flights.”
And it looks like Asia will continue to influence its future. Said Williams, “Asia is the world’s biggest travel market. The consumer in Asia is the leading indicator of how people book travel – in terms of app usage, frictionless payments and expectations around customer support. Apps are clearly the way to book travel – this is clear to us but not necessarily clear to the rest of the industry.”
Indeed, that was the first lesson he took from Ctrip. “It was clearly app first with them – up to 80% of transactions are happening within the app. Now is that an outlier or leading indicator? We believe it’s a leading indicator.”
Yet if you look at the world’s most used apps, travel is not among the top 10 – with its infrequency, travel has always struggled to be a daily use app with consumers. Williams said, “Everybody thinks of travel as just the booking but even if someone travels once a year, people still want to dream and be inspired. Travel supplements are published every week – that’s 50x more frequent than many travel websites that might be used once a year.”
Multiple squads dedicated to building out its app strategy.
I reminded him of a conversation we had once about his dream to be like the Facebook of travel where people log into the app several times a day. “We would never aim to get to the frequency of Facebook or Instagram or Twitter but we can have some progress increasing the frequency where we add value. For example, flight alerts – that’s no monetisation value but it’s of value of the traveller.”
Skyscanner now has multiple squads dedicated to its app strategy.
The early days and what Skyscanner did right at the start
This is also a man who doesn’t forget his roots and humble beginnings. Asked if he ever dreamt when he was building the Skyscanner prototype in 2001/2002 that he would sell to a Chinese dragon, he said, “No, I didn’t.”
He added, “One of the things we did well at the beginning was we concentrated on hard but tangible goals, it wasn’t to beat the world, it was to be the best low cost carrier search engine in Europe. Later we extended to all flights worldwide and now we are starting to add hotels, car hire, trips and adjusting to the changes in the market.”
It was a lesson he learnt from his early days “when we would develop widgets thinking it would change the world and we’d set unrealistic goals and got quite disillusioned when it didn’t work. At Skyscanner, we tried to achieve something more modest and work on something we cared about and set ourselves modest goals.”
He spoke of the early days during the fireside chat. “It was three years after the dot.com bust. There were no funding problems because there was no funding.”
It was two years before they earned their first revenue and the first month’s revenue was £46. “Yes, I miss those days but it’s easy to forget the struggles. There’s a lot I don’t miss. We always felt we weren’t doing well enough.”
Clearly though, it’s done well enough to interest a company like Ctrip. Williams said that things have been really good professionally since the acquisition. “We discussed, prior to the deal, that we’d be able to execute on our strategy, preserve our culture and keep our autonomy.”
Personally, he said, “It’s a time to mark the progress we’ve made, celebrate with some very longterm employees and team members who were there right from the start. The next phase is x100 – that’s really exciting and it feels like it’s the start of another segment of the trip for me.”
And while some people might argue that the founder who starts a business may not be the right person to take the same business 100x, Williams said, “For as long as the team believes I’m doing a good job and I am enjoying my job, it works.
“Yes, it could be a big disadvantage that I’ve never done it at a scale like this before – I’m a first-time CEO and I’m learning and that’s also an advantage. I think I have a lot to offer in terms of where we can and should be in the future, to give it continuity over the next 5-10 years and keep our core values.
“Let’s say I serve at the team’s pleasure.”
Customer retention, proprietary distribution channels and new tech
Undoubtedly the business Skyscanner is now is very different from what it was. “App usage is climbing – we are not yet 50% in app usage, but we will head in that direction and head to 80% like Ctrip,” said Williams.
Customer retention remains the key metric – it was the very first metric – and for the future, Skyscanner is exploring the possibility of proprietary distribution platforms, he said, citing Skype and Paypal “where you are in control”.
Its ability to test, fail and learn is now at a different scale. “Three years ago, we had a release every 6 weeks, now we have 100s of releases everyday. As an internet company, we are way better off now than we were before.”
A product man at heart, Williams is fueled by a natural curiosity to learn and fix things but he’s aware that strength can be a weakness in a CEO who should be more conscious of the big picture than fixated on the details.
“One of the hardest things is my desire to build stuff, and my job is to help others build stuff.” He admits to being diverted currently by natural language understanding and “I have to apply discipline”.
“You can see interesting things happening in AI and natural language understanding in retail use. Travel is a complex product, there’s got to be a good way for the human to express what they are after and how we can apply machine learning to improve the value of what we do.
“I am quite against any suggestions like, let AI do it for you, remember, garbage in, garbage out – you still need to apply analysis and critical thinking prior to AI.”
As for voice search and concerns that it could lead to even more filtered, biased results by the gatekeepers such as Amazon and Google, Williams said, “There’s always been gatekeepers. Tech has a way of finding paths that apply the auction as the best ranking. We’ve had 15 years of using trust as the basis. That will continue going forward. Our solution in taking voice or free text input will always work on behalf of the traveller.”
Williams believes two things will stand in good stead for Skyscanner in a future where horizontals such as marketplaces, banks and other companies are muscling in on travel.
“We have been, are now and will in the future be a strong advocate of the supplier. Secondly, the size of online travel – if you throw in conferences, leisure, business travel – is so big that it’s not a winner takes all market. That gives us space to work.
“The product with the best functionality, best content, best prices, best range of options, best recommendations, greatest trust, will win. We have a long history of choosing the things that are best for the traveller rather than monetisation of their visit.”
As for what company he’d want to run after Skyscanner, he said, “I wouldn’t run anything else. I am not a chief executive by nature. I’d be working on some software problem, some interesting data problem.”
And there you have it, you may take the man out of product but you can’t take the product out of the man, and no amount of money can change that.