Cheapflights attracted 5.25m unique users in January, with one in ten UK visitors clicking through to the advertisers’ site. more

Founded in 1996, Cheapflights was the first independent online price search and comparison portal for travel deals.  It pioneered the Travel Search Engine (TSE) concept by publishing flight prices advertised on its site by airlines and other travel operators. 

Cheapflights, which is independent and privately-held, will maintain its strategy as an online media company.

Following a management buy-in led by David Soskin and Hugo Burge in early 2000, it was also the first travel site to introduce pay-per-click (PPC) for advertisers.  Cheapflights supplies travel industry advertisers - whose names read like a Who’s Who of the industry - with qualified leads and enables them cost-effectively to present their best deals to the growing online market place.

According to recent research by Merrill Lynch, by the end of 2007 internet sales of travel are set to grow by 39%. Point Topic research found that broadband adoption in the UK grew by 3 million subscribers to 9.8 million in 2005 and that USA Broadband connections now stand at 40.9 million. In addition, a recent report by Thomson Intermedia and KPMG has found that online advertising by the UK travel industry now accounts for 9% of total UK online advertising.

Commenting, David Soskin, Chief Executive of Cheapflights Ltd. said:

“We are delighted with the powerful traffic growth we achieved in 2005.  Growth in the USA has been particularly encouraging, especially as we have only spent minimal sums on off-line advertising.

“Three strong trends are helping to drive our growth. First, more and more people are building holidays for themselves around their flights. According to the CAA’s latest report, there is continuing strong UK growth in leisure air bookings, principally direct with airlines. Second, the take-up of broadband is continuing apace. Third, the international trend towards online booking is increasing sharply.

“All this implies a fast-growing market for our existing and planned products as well as continuing organic growth at Cheapflights”.
——-