On March 29, Czech-based flight-booking site Skypicker re-launched its metasearch booking engine for flights.
Focusing first on European travelers, the startup aims to provide a fresh user experience, to woo away customers from travel agencies and competitors like Skyscanner, DoHop, Kayak, and Momondo.
Skypicker is funded by the angel investment of 20,000 EUR by Jiří Hlavenka, a Czech entrepreneur.
It hopes to reach break-even this May or June, at which point its founders would like to raise some money in a second round of financing in order to move more into multi-modal.
The seven-person team is led by co-founders Oliver Dlouhý (CEO) and Jozef Képesi (head developer), and includes a front-end developer, a back-end developer, a head designer, a PR specialist, and a social media specialist.
Q&A with Oliver Dlouhý:
Describe what your start-up does, what problem it solves (differently to what is already out there) and for whom?
Skypicker is a place where you can find & book low-cost flights within Europe (+ surrounding countries).
We have an easy-to-use interface based on Google Maps where the user can literally find his flight with just one click. Search results are displayed immediately, there’s no need to wait until we get the data from the carriers or GDSs, simply because we have all the data in a local database.
At Skypicker it’s also possible to search for general queries such as flights from France to Anywhere in March. This is really useful let’s say for student who has 2 months holidays and wants to travel somewhere for a week and the only thing that matters is the price.
Our booking makes it really easy for anyone to book the flights. This is especially appreciated by the customers who are not familiar with low cost airlines websites (which often try to cross-sell unwanted services).
There are other flight search engines like Skyscanner, Kayak, Momondo, … But we’re most afraid of the carriers themselves. Some of them are working really hard to skip the intermediaries and sell the airtickets directly.
And of course – Google. They simply have the data. But with such competitors in the ring the business is much more challenging and also fun.
We estimate the market size for the sale of European low-cost flight tickets as 350 billion EUR.
Revenue model and strategy for profitability?
We have currently 3 revenue streams:
Assisted booking means we’re booking on behalf of the customers and charging a service fee. A live chat greets customers upon arrival on our site.
We’re also taking part in the airlines’ affiliate programs and receive a commission upon successful booking made by our customer.
We are also experimenting with Adsense and other contextual ad networks. Our first choice isn't to depend on advertising, but we'll need it for at least the short term.
Why should people or companies use your startup?
It is the easiest and fastest way to find and book a low-cost flights within Europe. It is also very inspirational – you immediately see the cheapest flights from your country. And last but not least: Skypicking is FUN!
Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users?
We’ve played a lot with SEO. Search traffic is important for us as it generates a lot of repetitive users. Long-tail search is already doing more than 30% of our traffic.
Word of mouth works also very well for us – happy customers just spread the word.
Recently we started working intensively with our Facebook fans, which definitely pays off.
iOS and Android apps are almost ready as well as the mobile web. It is still easier to win a market share in mobile as it is less competitors there than on the web. And our mobile apps will be killer, stay tuned ☺
We’re also currently testing our affiliate program with one big partner (monetizing his travel traffic using our assisted booking service). If it works we’re going to offer the program publicly.
These are our main pillars for going viral.
How did your initial idea evolve? What's your Plan B?
The business model changed significantly. At the beginning we wanted to make money in the airlines’ affiliate programmes.
However we soon found out that the biggest airlines don’t offer any commissions for bookings. And if they do, it’s mostly for the big players only.
So we decided to start with the assisted booking service. It was a good decision, because it secured us some cash-flow and nowadays we’re almost break-even.
As for the other options – we were also considering selling our data B2B, but it is not that much fun, so I hope we will never have to.
Where do you see yourselves in 3 years time, what specific challenges do you hope to have overcome?
Skypicker currently searches for the flights only. However, budget travelling is also trains, buses, cars.
We would like to implement all the means of transport into Skypicker so our users will be able to find the most suitable way to get from point A to point B anywhere in Europe. No matter whether you want to find the fastest or the cheapest way. We will find it!
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
Finding the right connection between two places in Europe is still too difficult. There are many flight search engines on the internet. But most of them are slow, form-based and unintuitive.
In the past, the real traveller couldn’t get along without a map. We think that travel search based on the map is just natural. And if we add the instant price information and the easy booking service, we think we’ve got a very interesting and competitive product.
Tnooz view:
This startup looks very promising, finding a fresh user experience for flight metasearch and targeting under-served European markets.
Hopefully it'll get the funding it needs to make the move to multi-modal. In Europe, the move is increasingly toward flight and rail being complementary options that need to be compared side-by-side -- unlike in the US or Australia. where rail is neglected.
Some general tips: Be more playful. Hipmunk's animated flying chipmunk-like mascot makes it fun to search flights. Maybe there's potential with Skypicker's cute mascot, too.
Listen to your users more than the press. Don't get sucked into the gravity hole between you and your competition. Ruthlessly run your own path, not someone else's.
Growth is paramount. Startups are built to scale quickly. Otherwise, they're just mom-and-pop shops. When faced with decisions, consider whether doing something or not doing something will affect growth.
Tnooz wishes Skypicker the best of luck.
NB:TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.