How Kiwi.com Has Transformed the Travel Booking Industry
“At the heart of Kiwi.com’s success lies its proprietary algorithm that allows users to automatically combine flights from nearly 700 airlines into a single itinerary. This results in significant customer savings,” according to Oliver Dlouhy, CEO, Kiwi.com. “The industry is shifting away from individual hotel and airline websites to metasearch, and companies such as Kiwi.com due to our interlining capabilities,” he adds.
How did Kiwi.com become one of the most admired travel start-ups in Europe?
A process called “virtual interlining” is at the heart of our success. Kiwi.com allows users to combine flights from nearly 700 airlines into a single itinerary, including budget carriers that normally do not collaborate with each other.
Industry surveys show Kiwi.com is on average 28 percent and sometimes even up to 80 percent cheaper than the competition. Our online travel agency handles more than 50 million daily search queries and offers over 225,000 updates per minute, allowing users to find the best deals via notifications and price alerts. It guarantees alternative flights or a refund to customers in case of flight delays and cancellations.
What lessons did you learn along the way that could be useful for other executives in this industry?
I enjoy getting people excited about my ideas and sharing my vision and innovations. By engaging all my fellow teammates together we can create something really great. Creating enthusiasm and empathising with people and ideas is key, in my opinion.
How can other organisations apply the start-up mindset to achieve organisational growth?
It all comes down to company culture. For Kiwi.com it all happened organically. We were a small family that grew into a larger family, and now we are nearly 2,000 employees! We managed to keep our start-up mindset (the cooperative and goal-oriented culture, as well as the work-hard-play-hard mindset). We have, however, matured as an organisation and were able to put in processes that helped us manage our rapid growth.
What trends and innovations do you predict for the future? How could travel and hospitality organisations prepare?
The future of travel booking will definitely remain on-the-go and by voice recognition; so far nearly two million people have downloaded our app. The industry is shifting away from individual hotel and airline websites to metasearch, and companies such as Kiwi.com due to our interlining capabilities.
Coupled with this I see an increasing convergence of metadata players and online travel agencies currently. We see a lot of “coopertition” and “frenemies”. For example, we work as partners with Skyscanner, Kayak and many others. It benefits us all.
It is my aim to offer multi-modal transportation to as wider a global audience as possible, backed up with rich, accurate, real-time content and data.
In the end, this can only be good news for consumers, who need all the tools at their fingertips to be inspired, research and book their chosen travel.
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