INTERVIEW
Dlouhý says : “ We are actually solving one of their biggest problems . Mostly they ’ re happy that someone is taking care of the thing that they don ’ t want to do . It ’ s extremely complex in the airline world to define what portion of the fare should be split and who takes care of the customers .”
Kiwi . com works with more than 90 airlines and 150 distribution partners , through whom the service is displayed along with other mainstream flight search results .
Dlouhý came up with the idea six years ago while travelling with his thengirlfriend . He says : “ We wanted to go to Portugal and were looking for a local flight from Prague to Porto . We found a flight with Ryanair from Prague to Milan , then Milan to Porto , then Porto to Eindhoven and back to Prague again . The four flights were only £ 50 or £ 60 and we saved a lot of money . It took us some time , but we were able to do it . I knew if we offered this service to customers it would be successful .”
What Dlouhý assumed would be a small gap in the market turned out to have much greater appeal . Last year the company made more than € 700mn in sales , with more than 40m flight searches and 6,000 daily bookings .
It wasn ’ t Dlouhý ’ s first business . He first tasted the entrepreneurial bug when he started a school newspaper at the age of nine in his hometown in the Czech Republic , 15km from the Austrian border . The teenage Dlouhý was walking past the local bakery one day , when he noticed that they were buying up blueberries for € 2 per litre . He says : “ The road sellers close to the border were selling them to the Austrians at € 5 or € 6 per litre . So , I decided to buy up the blueberries in bulk from the pickers in front of the store for 10 % more than the bakery . After 70 litres or so , I sold to the Austrians with a 300 % markup .”
It ’ s this sort of attitude that Dlouhý thinks has helped Kiwi . com to be such a success : “ I walk around the world with my eyes open and see what could be done better ,” he says . It ’ s also this sort of attitude that has
‘ Kiwi . com works with more than 90 airlines and 150 distribution partners ’
18 September 2017