Keynote Interview with John Mangelaars, CEO of Skyscanner: “Evolution of Metasearch and the Future of Distribution”

 

At World Aviation Festival, John Mangelaars, CEO of Skyscanner took to the keynote stage to speak on accessibility, passenger behaviour, generative AI (gen-AI) and machine learning (ML), modern airline retailing, and data.

Mangelaars observed, “there’s people that are loyal to an airline, and there’s people that are loyal to their wallet.”

With 80 per cent of users arriving to the website undecided on budget, destinations, and dates, Skyscanner plays a critical role in shaping their journey by offering the right deal. Mangelaars stressed this is more about value for money, than the cheapest price, and highlighted how data, gen-AI, and ML are key in anticipating traveller demand and delivering personalised solutions.

“The big one for me is the breakthrough we are seeing in machine learning. I think this is going to be very disruptive and it’s a bit of forgotten area, but with machine learning we are seeing things we haven’t been able to do before. For example, we do projects with students where they reverse engineer the yield curve of an airline. So now we have data on our search behaviour: we see people searching, we see people searching on routes, we see people searching and then booking, so there’s a lot of data we have on what the behaviour of a traveller is, but now we’re also able to predict the price, not just because our algorithm is predicting the price, but because we’re actually looking at the actual yield system which has been reversed engineered by by a machine learning model. So I think we have to get ready for some serious disruption in the industry because things that are secure today won’t be secured tomorrow.”

For more insight, including Mangelaars’ perspective on “where will airlines make their money in the next 6-12 months?” Watch the full interview below.

 

 

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