When Skyscanner was acquired in a £1.4 billion deal, the coverage of the story quite correctly focused on the scale.
This was one of Scotland’s two much-vaunted unicorns (the other being Fan Duel), a start-up which had been valued at more than £1bn.
Ctrip’s offer exceeded this valuation but raised questions about whether the group’s technology would continue to be developed in Scotland.
A year and a bit on and with Skyscanner continuing to operate largely autonomously from its Edinburgh headquarters, we are beginning to see the benefits of its collaboration with its Chinese parent.
Skyscanner’s chief technical officer Bryan Dove said the relationship with Ctrip is “strong… with many shared learnings”. So, while the addition of train fare comparisons is not transformational for Skyscanner, it reveals how pooling the skills of both Scottish and Chinese developers brings benefits.
Skyscanner is working in an intensely competitive market with numerous online comparison sites also offering booking services. By adding train fares to its offer, Skyscanner is now also competing with the likes of trainline.com and Virgin Trains, and each traveller it can lure to its own website or mobile app is a minor victory.
These victories add up. The more services which can be aggregated into a single app, the easier the group makes it for customers, the more its app will be downloaded.
To that end, Skyscanner is very well positioned thanks to its structure. That can only be good for the Scottish tech scene, and the jobs market.
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