Case study
Skyscanner: data driven storytelling with WordPress
Developing high-priority storytelling content for Skyscanner’s global PR and SEO strategy to drive traffic and convert.
Industry
Technology
Services
Development, Consultancy
1. About Skyscanner’s Travel Trends
Founded in 2003 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Skyscanner is a search aggregator and travel agency used by over 100 million people every month to search billions of prices for flights, hotels and car hire.
The Travel Trends 2025 report is a cornerstone of Skyscanner’s PR strategy, aimed at bolstering their position as an industry leader. In the highly competitive travel industry, Skyscanner needed to be able to cut through the noise with a world-class report and a dynamic platform to host it.
Moving beyond the external platform they used to host 2024’s Travel Trends, the team aimed to optimise SEO, accessibility, and visual impact, creating an engaging experience across multiple markets and languages.
2. One report, multiple desired outcomes
Skyscanner’s ambitious goal was to establish a permanent, SEO-friendly home for Travel Trends, which would drive top-tier media coverage, boost global backlinks, and support their ongoing WordPress-to-Contentful migration.
In a competitive ‘trends’ landscape, the desired goal was that Skyscanner’s Travel Trends 2025 would go to the next level, via a single, permanent, beautiful, indexable Travel Trends section on each domain.
As long-term partners of Skyscanner, Human Made was enlisted to help the team achieve several objectives:
- Create a visually engaging report with a premium look and feel. The report had to present travel trends and data & insights in an engaging and captivating way.
- Use existing components, so time would be spent on the customisation of the new features needed to deliver the desired visual impact.
- Collaborate closely with the Skyscanner engineering team to ensure new components work with the new headless front end.
- Develop a suite of animated data visualisation tools that are engaging, accessible, performant, and SEO friendly.
3. Powerful collaboration for show-stopping content
Human Made collaborated closely with Skyscanner’s design and engineering teams to create a visually striking, data-driven digital experience for storytelling on WordPress.
By leveraging existing components and adding custom features, the project team focused on visual impact while maintaining SEO-friendly performance.
The landscape of the internal migration from WordPress to Contentful added a layer of complexity for the work, as the delivery into WordPress needed to be tested and rendered in the new Contentful environment. This spun up a few challenges at the delivery end regarding the new data visualisation approach, but working closely with the Skyscanner team, we overcame them together.
Agile processes ensured smooth collaboration on design goals, while animated data visualisation tools were created to present travel insights in a compelling, accessible way.
“Working with the Human Made team is always a pleasure – the team are cool, calm, confident and collected and guide you through their processes and deliveries in a systematic and approachable manner.
Working in an Agile framework works really well as it allows you to reflect and collaborate to shape the project’s success along the way – you make sure you have your “must’s” delivered and then can enjoy the remaining time to push those boundaries and try new things.
The Human Made team never loses sight of the main project goals and deliverables so nothing gets carried away or forgotten about.”
Kate Enderby, Senior producer, Skyscanner
4. Reaching further for global audiences
With Travel Trends 2025 now live, Skyscanner has a high-performance, content-rich platform for annual insights with effective WordPress storytelling that scales effortlessly across 16 global markets and multiple languages.
This optimised, visually captivating site is primed to boost Skyscanner’s digital presence for years to come, setting a new standard in travel trend reporting.
We had a blast working with the creative and technically brilliant team over at Skyscanner, and we can’t wait to see what comes next.
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