Cheapflights has won the London Business Awards Innovative Company of the Year 2005. This award, sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland, is given to a company that has dramatically changed the way it does things or that has made an innovative breakthrough in its industry sector.

The London Business Awards are owned and organised by the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry and sponsored by The Evening Standard and by ITV, London.

Cheapflights is an innovator in that it pioneered internet search for flight deals in 1996 - the first in the UK and four years before the first US online travel price search company.  Profitable since its launch, Cheapflights was furthermore the first UK dotcom to introduce pay-per-click as its business model in mid-2000.  This innovation in particular enabled the company to accelerate its growth into becoming one of the UK’s most successful and long-lived dotcoms. Pay-per-click and an in-house developed flexible content management system enabled small travel operators as well as travel giants to display deals side by side on Cheapflights’ sites regardless of their technical capability.  Consequently, the list of travel companies now advertising on our five travel sites reads like a who’s who of the travel industry.

Having created a profitable scaleable business model with a history of successfully driving highly qualified leads to travel companies also enabled the company to launch a US departures flights search site in the US just over 2 years ago.  Cheapflights is now already a leading player in the US internet flights search market.

Commenting, CEO, David Soskin said:  “We are naturally delighted to receive this important award celebrating the dynamism and innovation to be found today amongst London’s businesses and business people.  Whilst we have London roots, we are now also an international company committed to helping maintain London’s importance as a commercial hub and contributing in our own small way to the continued economic success of the Capital. The Company’s own success in large measure is down to its staff and this award is recognition of their hard work and commitment.
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