Skyscanner sold to Chinese travel firm in £1.4bn deal

Skyscanner, the UK-based travel website, has been acquired by a Chinese firm in a £1.4bn deal.

Launched in 2003, Edinburgh-based Skyscanner acts as a search engine for prices of for flights, hotels and rental cars.

The company is available in more than 30 languages and boats around 60 million monthly users.

Ctrip, China’s biggest online travel service, is now expanding overseas with the purchase of Skyscanner. Founded in 1999, Ctrip believes the takeover will be completed by the end of the year.

Gareth Williams, Skyscanner’s chief executive, said the deal would “take the business to the next level”, and that it will allow them to be “one step closer to our goal of making travel search as simple as possible for travellers around the world”.

News of this deal was announced less than a day after chancellor Philip Hammond used his first autumn statement to pledge £400m of funding to stop British technology startups selling out to larger international companies.

Hammond announced that the “long-standing problem of our fastest growing technology firms being snapped up by bigger companies, rather than growing to scale”.

Once the deal is completed, however, Ctrip has said that Skyscanner’s management team will remain in place and continue running the website independently.