Skyscanner has reported a slowing in annual revenue growth, although the Edinburgh-based price comparison website still saw a more than 40 per cent jump in turnover on the back of strong demand for its hotel and car hire searches.
Privately-owned Skyscanner on Monday said its 2014 revenues climbed 42 per cent year-on-year to £93m - a slowdown from the doubling of turnover recorded in 2013.
However Gareth Williams, Skyscanner chief executive and co-founder, said there was no reason to expect a lasting slowdown in expansion for the 12-year-old company.
The shift of travel booking online offers huge potential for growth in a market where search remained technically challenging and there is no dominant provider, Mr Williams said.
"We are at the very early stages of our development," he said.
In 2014, Skyscanner launched hotel and car hire mobile device applications and established a unit offering data-led tools to the travel industry, helping to raise the contribution of such non-flight-related revenues 47 per cent year-on-year.
Mr Williams said non-flight services comprised about a quarter of total revenues in 2014. Over time he expected flight and hotel search to each generate about one-third, with other services accounting for the remaining third.
Skyscanner, which competes in flight search with rivals including Priceline's Kayak, Baidu-invested Qunar, and Google, said its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation were £20m in 2014.
The company said more than 35m people used its services each month - up from 25m a month last year.
Skyscanner has grown rapidly both in Scotland and overseas, opening offices in Asia, continental Europe and the US, employing a total of 600 employees - a more than doubling over the past 18 months.
"We are still recruiting pretty hard," Mr Williams said.
A particular area of focus is China, where Skyscanner last year acquired search provider Youbibi. The company said it had seen a 61 per cent increase year-on-year increase in unique visitors from China in 2014 to more than 1m users a month.
"We now have a dedicated software and engineering team that are working on a China-specific product and so I think that growth will accelerate going into the next year," Mr Williams said.
In October 2013, Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture capital group, acquired a stake in Skyscanner that valued the company at $800m at the time.
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