THE PEAK NEWS- Scotland’s Skyscanner sold to Ctrip for 1.4 billion GBP

                                                                    Gareth Williams, co-founder of Skyscanner

Edinburgh-based Skyscanner, a search engine for affordable flights, hotels and car rentals, recently announced that it had come into agreement to be bought by China’s biggest travel company, Ctrip, for 1.4 billion British Pounds.

Text by Joanna Lee

Skyscanner was first set up in 2001 by IT programmer Gareth Williams, who teamed up with co-founders Barry Smith and Bonamy Grimes. The idea of it all came following the frustration of having difficulty in booking cheap flights online. It has since grown to over 60 million users monthly, and annual revenues of more than 120 million Pounds.
This sale came merely a day after Philip Hammond bemoaned a perceived short-termism among British technology founders in his Autumn Statement speech, and had promised more funding for start-ups who feel pressurized to sell to foreign buyers.
“This news with Ctrip propels us forward and allows us to take the business to the next level,” co-founder of Skyscanner, Gareth Williams said. “They’ll allow us to extend our already substantial reach globally, as well as augment our understanding of the Chinese market.”

Williams also promised that Skyscanner would be “recruiting at pace” and that there would be no redundancies among its staff of 700 because of the deal.
As a result of the deal, the three founders will cash in on generous paydays, as well as a pay-out of roughly 500 million Pounds for Scottish Equity partners, which is a huge return on the 9 million Pounds the latter had put into the company in 2007. The deal is scheduled to complete by the end of 2016. Ctrip, which is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York, merged with another travel company, Qunar, in early 2016. This merge managed to give the Chinese web service Baidu a 25pc stake in the company.