Skyscanner to cut jobs, offices, as revenues collapse
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EDINBURGH • Skyscanner, the travel booking service owned by China's Trip.com Group, is preparing to cut as much as a fifth of its workforce and close several offices after revenues collapsed following Covid-19 lockdowns.
The company intends to consolidate its operations in Britain, close its Sofia and Budapest offices and reduce its presence in Singapore and Miami, according to an internal e-mail from chief executive Moshe Rafiah seen by Bloomberg News.
In total, it anticipates "that of our 1,500 Skyscanner employees around 20 per cent may leave us", Mr Rafiah wrote.
According to a source familiar with the plans who asked not to be named, those will either be let go or accept voluntary redundancy. The CEO hosted a conference call with 1,200 of the company's employees on Tuesday before sending out the message detailing the plans, said the source.
Mr Rafiah wrote that Skyscanner's revenues "have been hit significantly" and the company is having to adapt to a very different travel industry where "a full recovery to our previous scale before Covid-19 looks to be several quarters or possibly years away".
A Skyscanner spokesman said in an e-mailed statement: "While we're confident of Skyscanner's recovery in the long term and we're seeing early signs of growth in the sector, we now know it will take longer than originally anticipated for travel to return to normal."
Trip.com is a dominant force in China's domestic travel market and acquired Edinburgh-based Skyscanner in 2016 for US$1.7 billion (S$2.4 billion) in order to boost its global ambitions.
Before the coronavirus pandemic disrupted global travel, the company touted that more than 100 million people relied on its app and website to help them with their travel plans.
With its main offices in the Scottish capital and London, Skyscanner will now focus marketing operations in Britain and will look for a new office for its reduced Miami operations while its employees there continue working from home.
BLOOMBERG
