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Skyscanner Completes 24 Hour Development Challenge – New Twitter Flight Finder Service @FlyScan Launched at 12.00

Dépèche transmise le 24 mars 2011 par Business Wire

Skyscanner Completes 24 Hour Development Challenge – New Twitter Flight Finder Service @FlyScan Launched at 12.00

EDINBURGH, Scotland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--At 12 noon yesterday (GMT) Skyscanner set itself a 24 hour challenge to develop and launch a new @FlyScan flight finder search tool which lets travellers tweet destinations and dates and get an immediate tweet back with the best price available and a link to buy it.

“We set ourselves the challenge to do it this way partly for the hell of it and partly to raise money for a very worthwhile cause and we’re very grateful to the companies who have lent their support and donated such fantastic prizes.”

At 12.00 today, after a massive team effort, @Flyscan is now live!

“This has been an extraordinary effort,” said Skyscanner’s Development Director Bonamy Grimes. “The idea was dreamed up by some of the Skyscanner team the night before last, and the @FlyScan project was given the go ahead yesterday morning. The team have worked flat out to make it happen.

“We hit a number of challenges and development is going to continue today while we iron out a couple of glitches. For instance we’d hoped we could get a million Tweets out in the first 24 hours but we didn’t anticipate some of the volume constraints on the Twitter platform. We’re working out now how to boost capacity so we can keep up with demand, so please bear with us while we do that.”

Skyscanner is donating £5,000 to Comic Relief to celebrate hitting the 24 hour deadline and pledged a further £20,000 when the first 1 million @FlyScan tweets have been sent. Over 5000 prizes are also being given away to our Tweeters, including an iPad2, flights to New York with British Airways, £250 lastminute vouchers, exclusive deals from netflights.com, Monarch flights to Europe and ebookers hotel discount vouchers.

“We’ve known for a while we wanted to create something special for Twitter,” said Bonamy Grimes. “We set ourselves the challenge to do it this way partly for the hell of it and partly to raise money for a very worthwhile cause and we’re very grateful to the companies who have lent their support and donated such fantastic prizes.”

“Anyone who wants a flavour of the atmosphere at Skyscanner HQ should check out the blog at http://flyscan.org and send us any feedback and suggestions to us Twitter @skyscanner. It’s triggered a lot of new ideas too; we already have a ground-breaking new social media based project in the pipeline.”

@FlyScan – a step-by-step guide

1) Tweet @FlyScan with details of the flight you’re looking for, e.g. @FlyScan London to New York on 14 June, or @FlyScan flights from Edinburgh to Paris in August

2) @FlyScan will send you a customised response with details of your flight

3) Click on the link to go to the Skyscanner website and book your flight!

About Skyscanner

Skyscanner is Europe’s leading travel search site providing instant online comparisons on flight prices for over 670,000 routes on over 600 airlines, including flights to Dublin, as well car hire and holidays.

Follow Skyscanner on Twitter and Facebook