We’re forever talking about how great the foreign language internet is, but don’t just take our word for it. Flight comparison website, Skyscanner, has really, err, taken off, since launching their websites in different languages.

Launched in 2002 by three IT professionals, Skyscanner provides details of over 670,000 routes with 600 different airlines, as well as providing price comparison of hotels, car hire and holidays.

Due to a rapidly growing userbase, Skyscanner launched their French website in 2005. Spurred on by its success, the following year saw them expand into Germany and Spain, leading to the roll-out of a huge foreign language campaign in 2007. Today, Skyscanner is truly a multilingual and multicultural business, translating into 23 different languages and trading in 60 currencies. This has resulted in 70% of their business coming from overseas.

Realising the potential in the up-and-coming Russian market, Skyscanner bought a Russian domain name, translated and localised their website and embarked upon a country-specific online marketing and PR campaign. Skyscanner has grown to be the largest Russian meta search site and has seen user numbers skyrocket from under 30,000 to over 1 million in just 18 months. Thanks to this foreign language internet marketing campaign, Russia is Skyscanner’s second largest market, beaten only by UK users.

The success of the campaign has been attributed to the relative ease in which they were able to penetrate the foreign language market, owing to low competition online. And Skyscanner are absolutely delighted with the results. Frank Skivington from Skyscanner said, ‘Foreign language versions of our site have been paramount to our success and growth.’

And indeed, with a now-110-strong workforce, the sky isn’t even a limit for Skyscanner, with plans to add Asian and Middle-Eastern languages to their already-impressive portfolio of multilingual websites.

Tags: case study, Foreign Language Internet, Skyscanner

tags: case study, Foreign Language Internet, Skyscanner