Skift Take
Skyscanner is becoming an online shop-window for airlines, providing a branded experience that's similar to the airline's own sites. Behind this move is a technological upheaval that's scrambling commercial alliances.
Lots of companies publish whitepapers as thinly disguised marketing. But a new whitepaper from Skyscanner, the travel price comparison company, has actual value. The paper outlines a business view that we haven't heard a major travel booking company articulate before.
Skyscanner's paper — A Vision for the Future of Airline Distribution — says that consumers will soon find that visiting metasearch websites will look sort of like a collection of branded airline sites.
The paper focuses on "instant booking," where travelers buy their plane tickets without leaving the sites or apps of metasearch companies like Skyscanner.
Take a look at these two screenshots. The first is of VirginAustralia.com's booking page, and the second is of Virgin Australia's transaction page on Skyscanner. Already today they have a similar look and feel. Over time, the same functionality will be available in both places.
While Skycanner chief executive Gareth Williams did discuss the big picture with Skift in an interview last month, this paper is the first time we've heard his company explain in a complete way how instant booking would reshape the commercial landscape.
The technology that powers instant booking is going to unseat legacy companies and give rise to a whole fleet of smaller companies, while also doing wonders for Skyscanner, the paper says.
Like a Chinese-style shopping mall
Ever since last November, when Chinese travel conglomerate Ctrip.com acquired the Edinburgh-based company for $1.74 billion, executives have talked a lot about Chinese website Tmall.com as a metaphor for its future.
Tmall is a Mandarin-language retail marketplace run by retail giant Alibaba. It differs from a retail marketplace like Amazon in that its default format is to have brands run their shops on it.
The Skyscanner strategy is to become more like Tmall. Executives want to give supplier brands space and control to display their products by offering "a storefront of sorts, with abundant upsell purchasing options baked in."
The report says: "Shopping sites like Tmall... are still marketplaces where sellers must compete for their business but also offer an online shop window for brands that provides the same experience to users as they offer on their own sites."
"Apply this to metasearch: the winners in this space — both among airlines and intermediaries — will be those that can see the value in bringing a rich and differentiated shopping exp
