The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2008–2018
Skyscanner gives away flight-search widgets and turns other sites into its growth channel
A flight meta-search site hands out embeddable search widgets, so partner sites and users put its brand and backlinks on their own pages.
Skyscanner
What it had to solve
Flight meta-search is a low-margin business, and buying the same customer again and again through ads is unaffordable. Skyscanner needed to be present where travellers already were — third-party desktops and websites — rather than only at its own domain.
How it works
Skyscanner's problem was economic before it was creative. Flight meta-search runs on thin margins, so buying the same traveller again through paid ads is a losing game; the site needed to be encountered where travellers already were. Its answer was not a campaign but a piece of product: a search widget that other people wanted to install.
In 2008 the company partnered with Netvibes so users could drop a cheap-flights widget onto personal pages or Windows and Mac desktops, removing the step of typing in a travel site's URL. Alongside that, Skyscanner offered a range of embeddable website widgets that let other travel sites put a working flight search in front of their own visitors.
Every installation did three jobs at once. It placed the Skyscanner brand where high-intent travellers were already browsing; it made the site a utility rather than an interruption; and, because each widget linked back, it quietly added to a network of backlinks that lifted Skyscanner's Google rankings — which the article credits with fuelling the site's explosive growth.
The case circulated as part of a 51-example list of growth-hacking strategies that stayed live for years, and the pattern became a familiar one: give away a genuinely useful, embeddable tool, and let every host of that tool become a channel.
Why it lands
- Widgets are opt-in utilities, so third parties install them willingly — prime real estate no advertiser could rent.
- Placement on travel-related pages put the brand in front of people already shopping for flights, not passers-by.
- Each embed added a permanent backlink, so the channel compounded into search rankings instead of decaying like an ad buy.
- The economics fit the category: partners paid nothing, Skyscanner paid nothing upfront, and growth was self-financing.
What it did
The widgets put the Skyscanner brand in front of millions of extra eyes every day and created a large network of backlinks; the article credits the combination of that reach with rising Google rankings for fuelling Skyscanner's explosive growth. The case went on to appear in a 51-example growth-hacking write-up that remained live for years.
What you can take
Make distribution the product: when the marketing is a widget others want on their pages, partners do the reaching, and every embed doubles as a permanent backlink.
Since then
The write-up kept Skyscanner's widget strategy in its list of 51 examples and described the embeddable range as an active channel into 2018. The approach outlived the desktop-widget era as a template: travel and price-comparison sites kept shipping embeddable search and comparison tools, each installation still doing the same double duty as a storefront and a backlink.
Sources
- 51 Inspired Examples of Growth Hacking Strategies & Techniques (Skyscanner section)
- Examples of marketing tactics (Hacker News discussion)
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