Speaker Profile
Barry Smith is Director of Business Development and co-founder of flight search site Skyscanner.
Skyscanner started off as an underground success story and is now Europe’s leading flight search engine, with more than 50 million flight searches taking place each month on the Skyscanner site. The site is available in 20 languages including Polish, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese and covers over 600 airlines and 670,000 routes.
The Skyscanner engine was developed by Barry and two other friends who were frustrated by how difficult it was to search for and compare flight prices on the web. Sometimes people want to know which destinations and travel dates are cheapest before they decide when and where they want to fly. Online travel sites wouldn’t let you do that. If you wanted to look and see where was cheaper, you had to go through all the different options one after the other
They thought it should be easier so they developed Skyscanner to do it in a different way, starting with what they wanted from a flight search site. Skyscanner is designed to be centred around the user, to be as simple and easy to use as possible, and let you search whichever way you want.
After being in charge of affiliate publishing for the last 7 years, Barry is now running Skyscanner’s new affiliate marketing programme and is now wrestling with the challenges involved with building an affiliate marketing programme that does everything he ever hoped for – from the other side of the fence.
