Kiwi.com celebrates 5th anniversary and announces far reaching global expansion
The Czech-based company Kiwi.com celebrates five years since its founding, during which time it has grown into one of the biggest and most popular flight search engines and ticket sellers with annual sales of over €700 million. CEO Oliver Dlouhý will announce that Kiwi.com will be opening offices in Manila, Durban, Prague, Barcelona and Dalian. With over 1,100 travel and technology experts currently working for the company this is set to grow at an exponential rate.
Following a rebranding in May 2016, Kiwi.com aims over the next five years to become one of the world’s leading online travel agencies, leveraging its unique, groundbreaking flight search algorithm which allows its customers to automatically combine flights from airlines that do not normally collaborate onto a single itinerary in seconds, often resulting in significant savings of up to 80%, while offering exceptional customer service.
The Brno-based company also provides added reassurance for trips that normally involve multiple bookings with little or no protection if a flight is delayed or cancelled, covering these itineraries with its so-called ‘Kiwi.com Guarantee’. This means that if the first flight is delayed and the connecting flight with the other airline is missed, Kiwi.com books another flight to the final destination free of charge or refunds the money.
“Kiwi.com is now among the world’s top ten, and Europe’s top five, largest flight ticket vendors. We expect that in five years’ time we will become a world leading online travel agency, offering at a cheaper rate new routes, services and guarantees for our customers that are not available with other online travel agencies,” says Kiwi.com’s founder and CEO, Oliver Dlouhý. “We identified a gap in the market so we are not trying to compete on direct flights; rather we are offering a completely new way of booking and going further.”
Take-off
Kiwi.com was founded as a start-up by young entrepreneur Oliver Dlouhý five years ago in Brno. Since then, it has grown multiple times in size each year into a company with more than 1,100 employees –and annual sales of €700 million. Last year it surpassed the Czech Republic’s previous leading flight ticket vendors Asiana and Student Agency, cooperating now with nearly 650 airlines, both budget airlines and major long-haul carriers, which enables its unique flight search engine algorithm to combine flights of otherwise non-cooperating airlines in a process its calls “virtual interlining”. The German magazine Focus found Kiwi.com to be, on average, 28% cheaper than the competition, and in some cases the savings were as high as 90%. Its mobile app has been nominated for the Czech Republic’s “Mobile App of the Year 2017”.
Kiwi.com in figures
€700m annual sales
5 offices currently in operation (Brno, Kiev, Fiji, Split, Belgrade)
5 new offices to open (Manila, Durban, Dalian, Barcelona and Prague)
1,100 staff (with 900 Czech based)
63 nationalities among employees
32 languages spoken among the employees
650 cooperating airlines
40 million flight searches daily
6000 flights booked daily
172 terabytes of daily incoming data