About Skyscanner
Here at Skyscanner, we’re on a mission to help travellers plan and book their trip with ease and confidence. We pride ourselves on being transparent, searching billions of prices for flights, hotels and car hire from hundreds of providers to help find the best deals available.
We make it all simple; once you’ve found the best flight, car hire or accommodation option for you, you can book directly with the provider.
Skyscanner collaborates with numerous travel providers who supply us with their inventory of flights, accommodations, and car hire options. These partnerships are essential for us to offer you a broad selection of travel choices. However, we do not compare all providers in the market, so our results are not exhaustive. The number of referenced sites or companies can vary depending on your search criteria.
When you choose to book with a provider through our platform, that provider usually pays us a commission or referral fee. This commission structure allows us to offer our services to you for free and Skyscanner does not pass any of this cost on to you. We also make money from displaying adverts on our website, or when you click on an advert and are redirected to the advertiser’s website.
Skyscanner is not a travel agent and is not responsible for providing any of the travel options displayed on our website. When you click on a travel option, you will be redirected from our website and will then deal directly with the relevant travel provider. Please do check all the details with that provider before you make a booking.
Content Recommendation and Ranking
Recommender Systems
We use recommender systems to help you discover content that we think you will like or that will be helpful to you in your travel search. On our site you will find a number of recommender system, including:
Explore Everywhere: curates cities or countries you may wish to travel to based on different factors such as (i) cheapest flight price (ii) what we think you might like based on your search history on our site, or based on popular cities in particular countries and (iii) destinations you may wish to visit categorised by experiences or the type of destination, e.g. beach, art, family friendly etc.
Hotels Recommendations: a curated selection of hotels that are relevant to your flight search criteria.
Savvy Search – allows you to use an AI prompt to get travel recommendations, with the answers being returned created by generative AI based on information from the internet and from Skyscanner’s pricing and destination information.
Our search results are also a recommender system, and they are explained in more detail below.
How Skyscanner ranks results
We’ll always be clear and transparent in how we rank results, and we’ll provide those results in a way that is useful to you. We give you more detail below on how our ranking systems work and why you see the results in the order that you do. This information on ranking applies only to our search results and not to sponsored links or adverts that may be included within or near search results (which are clearly recognisable as adverts).
We’re all about making travel search simple. To help you along the way, we provide filters to help you narrow down all the options out there to find your perfect flight – whether that’s by time of day, airline and more. We add and remove filter options from time to time, based on what travellers tell us they want and need. Content which does not fit the selection criteria will either not be displayed or will be ranked differently based on those criteria (e.g. if you’ve filtered by ‘direct flights’ we won’t show you indirect ones).
In certain cases, and where travellers have consented, we may provide some personalised results and this will affect the display of results.
Flights
Our default ranking or sorting option for flight search results is “best”. The aim of this ranking option is to give you the best trade-off between price and convenience and it takes into account a number of factors, including (i) price; (ii) speed (i.e. overall time of journey, including layovers); (iii) whether or not a flight is direct; (iv) the airline (v) departure times (vi) search criteria, e.g. date of departure, whether it is for a one-way or return flights, the flight origin and destination and the number of passengers; (vii) what country the traveller is searching from and (viii) also ensures that there is a diverse mix of carriers and travel times in the results shown.
Each factor can be more (or less) important in different cases - this is determined dynamically, on an ongoing basis, depending on the features of the flight and our understanding of how travellers interact with our platform. We believe that these are the most useful criteria on which to sort results to deliver what travellers need. For example, we include price as a criteria as we know that price competitiveness is important to travellers and we include duration speed as we know that travellers prefer quicker flights. In case of a tie in ranking between two or more different itineraries, we will randomly allocate the order of these itineraries. You also have the option to change the default search results in our flight product so that they are ordered in a different way, such as:
Cheapest first – flights appear in order of which is the cheapest
Fastest first – flights appear in order of which is the fastest
Outbound: departure time – flights appear in order of which outbound departure time is the earliest
Return: departure time – flights appear in order of which return departure time is the earliest.
When you select a flight itinerary, there are usually a number of providers who give us a price for that itinerary. We rank these providers in order of price, with the lowest price first. Where there is one or more provider who has the same price, we use a number of criteria to resolve any tie, including the type of itinerary offered by the provider (e.g. whether you need to do a single or multiple bookings for the itinerary, the provider type (e.g. whether the provider is an airline or an online travel agent) and our Quality Score. If there is a still a tie-break between two or more providers, we rank these providers in alphabetical order.
Skyscanner Recommended Provider Badge
Beside some of our partners in flights you may see a “Recommended Provider” badge. Recommended Provider Badges cannot be bought by our partners. They are designed to enhance traveller trust in our online travel agent (“OTA”) partners and are awarded objectively based on the factors outlined below. Airlines don't come in the scope of this, so Partner Recommended Badges will only ever be shown next to OTAs. This is because travellers tend to have more familiarity with airlines brands, who are labelled 'airlines' in our results page.
Which factors are taken into account?
1. Partner quality score: after you’ve visited a travel provider site from Skyscanner, we show a survey asking for feedback about your experience. We combine these survey results with feedback received by our support team to generate an overall quality rating.
2. Price accuracy: we compare the price shown on an OTA’s website once our users have redirected from Skyscanner, and measure how well they match.
3. Booking conversion: we measure how many travellers make a booking once they have redirected from Skyscanner to an OTA’s site. Booking conversion is a good indicator that the service provided to you has been satisfactory in respect of things like price accuracy, flight availability and positive user experience. All of these factors are weighted evenly. This means that none are more important than another. We have set a threshold for all three factors, and if a partner falls below this on any of the three factors then they will lose the Recommended Provider badge. To make sure this is up-to-date, we refresh our results on a monthly basis.
Accommodation
Our default ranking system for accommodation search results is “recommended”, which considers several key factors that strongly influence the order of results including (i) price (the property’s price and how it compares to others) (ii) star rating (iii) popularity (how often the property is clicked on by users) (iv) number of reviews; and (v) our estimated potential revenue from each property. There are other factors that are included, which have less influence on how properties are ranking, including (i) the type of accommodation (e.g. hotel, resort or hostel); (ii) the properties location, such as proximity to city centres or attractions (iii) listing content like photos or customer reviews; and (iv) details such as duration of stay, guest type, booking device and the user’s location.
We use these factors because we know they’re important to travellers when searching for properties and balances our potential for revenue. The weight of each factor can vary depending on the specific search results and our understanding of how travellers interact with our platform.
You also have the option to change the default search results in our accommodation product so that properties are ordered in a different way, such as:
Top reviews – results appear in order of which have the best reviews
Lowest Price – results appear in order of which has the lowest price
Most stars – results appear in order of which has the highest star rating
Nearest first – results appear in order of proximity to certain landmarks or places
For each property for which we return a result, there may be several providers who give us a price for that property. You will be able to see all of these options, but we rank the offers from each provider based on a number of factors, the most important of which are (i) popularity (how often the property is clicked on by users) (ii) the number of available partners for that property (iii) the type of device the search is being made from (iv) the price relative to the cheapest price and (v) the revenue potential for Skyscanner from each provider and(vi) partner price accuracy. We believe that the parameters we use in this ranking model balance the relevance of results for users and improving our revenue.
We give the most prominence to the provider offer which ranks the highest using this model.
Car Hire
Our car hire results are default ranked by “Recommended”. We first group cars together based on a number of criteria, including its ACRISS code (that’s things like the type of car, size, fuel and transmission type) and the pick-up location. We then rank the results based on a number of factors including (i) the group (ii) deal price (iii) the popularity of the given car type (iv) value for money (the size of the car compared to the price for the car) (v) the market you are searching from (vi) pickup location and (vii) the revenue potential for Skyscanner from each provider.
You have the option to reorder your default search results by “Cheapest”, so the lowest-priced car hire options appear first.
For each option, there may be multiple providers offering prices. You will be able to see all of these options, but the offers are ranked based on a range of factors, with the most influential being: (i) price, (ii) car popularity, and (iii) revenue potential for Skyscanner from each provider.
We also display other key information for each result. That’s things like the underlying vehicle provider and the fuel policy (for example, if you get a full tank and return a full tank), as well as a Partner Quality Rating (which tells you the experience of other travellers who used them). That information does not alter the ranking of results.
Trains
For certain search parameters we will surface rail options, e.g. where our algorithm determines that there is a suitable rail option that is an alternative for a flight. These options will be provided by our partner, Trip.com, which is a Skyscanner group company. We will usually display the cheapest and fastest route first, with further results available once you redirect to our partner
Package Holidays
Where there is an option to search for package holidays, our default ranking parameter for packages search results is “best”. This ranking algorithm takes into account a number of factors, including (i) package price; (ii) hotel star rating; (iii) whether or not the flight is direct and (iv) board type. We have chosen these factors as we believe they are important to travellers looking for package holidays. In general, the lower the package price the better, the higher the star rating the better, preference is given to direct flights and we give extra weight to board types that include more meals (e.g. all inclusive would be weighted highest).You also have the option to change the default search results in our packages product so that packages are ordered by cheapest first.
Reviews
How we source and rank reviews
Reviews appear on our site in relation to our accommodation product only. These reviews come from our trusted third-party partners, Trip.com, Hotels.com, Tripadvisor and Expedia and we do not control the content of consumer reviews. We do not moderate consumer reviews published on Skyscanner; they are managed and edited only by our partners, in accordance with their own Term of Use, which are Trip.com Terms & Conditions, Hotels.com review content moderation policy, Tripadvisor review content moderation policy and Expedia reviews content moderation policy.
The default ranking for our reviews is “Recommended”. This ranking algorithm takes into account (i) how recent the review is (ii) the length of the review and (iii) how many images are available in the review. You can also rank reviews by Rating (High to Low), Rating (Low to High) and Most Recent.
Review Ratings
We bring together hotel reviews from trusted partners— such as Expedia, Trip.com, and Hotels.com—into a single fair score on a 1–5 scale. Sources with more reviews and a consistent track record count more, so the rating reflects the bigger picture. If TripAdvisor is the only source available, we’ll show its score directly. For hotels with very few reviews, we gently nudge the score toward the overall average so that a single extreme review doesn’t give the wrong impression. Scores are refreshed regularly as partners update their reviews, helping you see a clear, balanced rating that’s easier to compare across hotels.
Our Quality Rating
You’ll see this rating displayed as stars beside a provider’s name in some of our products. Quality Scores allow us to give actionable feedback to providers, allowing them to improve their service for travellers.
It takes into account several factors and you can read more information about our quality rating and how we use it here.
Self-Preferencing
Other group companies of Skyscanner, such as our parent company Trip.com and our sister company Travix appear as suppliers on Skyscanner. Neither are subject to preferential ranking on our products, and in all cases, they are subject to the same criteria and policies as any third-party supplier.
Other Important Information
Illegal Content
We will remove illegal content and reviews that do not comply with the law or with our terms and conditions after manual review by one of our team based on a notice sent to us at illegalcontent@skyscanner.net. Please visit our Privacy, Trust & Online Safety Hub to learn more about illegal content and how to report it.
Frequency and Method of Updating Offers
We strive to provide a comprehensive view of available options by regularly updating offers to ensure that the information provided is as accurate and up-to-date as possible. Our systems connect directly with providers and use automated processes to refresh data frequently throughout the day. However, prices and availability can change rapidly, so there may be instances where offers have changed between your search and booking.
Published September 2025
