Making a Positive Impact
As we continue to grow at scale, we have a responsibility to ensure our business has a positive impact on our people and communities, acknowledging that we must take action when it comes to climate change and the impact our business has on the environment. We're working to bring greater diversity to the tech sector, striving to ensure we're as inclusive and accessible as possible, taking ownership for our carbon footprint and supporting initiatives to heighten the positive effects of travel. Our areas of focus (Accessibility, Communities, DEI and Sustainability) have been a part of Skyscanner for many years now, and we're proud of our achievements.
A workplace for everyone
We know that Skyscanner will be strongest when our team is both inclusive and diverse. So, we've committed to eliminating biases, removing obstacles to inclusion and ensuring that all our people can thrive. We aim to be a workplace where all our people are represented, belong and feel empowered. By the end of 2025, our goal is that 90% of employees say they feel that people from all backgrounds are treated fairly at Skyscanner.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in action
We have a range of very active employee networks, who are dedicated to representing, inspiring, supporting and empowering our diverse workforce. Their successes include building programmes to support gender inclusion, introducing disability inclusion tools like Read&Write, introducing Quiet Rooms for neurodiverse colleagues, developing guidance and training for managers on micro-aggression, allyship and bias, and implementing Adjustment Passports to name just a few.
Inclusion is embedded into every part of our culture—from how we build our products to how we show up for one another. On the product side, we've introduced Inclusive Design Language Guidelines and rolled out inclusive coding standards across our engineering teams, ensuring our language and practices reflect our values. Throughout the year, we celebrate key moments such as Black History Month, International Women's Day, and the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, and we're proud participants in Pride marches around the world. We're proud to be signatories of the Race at Work Charter and are working towards Disability Confident Level 2 by the end of 2025.
We're delighted to be named one of The Times Top 50 Employers for Gender Equality 2025, recognising our commitment to equitable policies, inclusive leadership, and progression opportunities. We've also been awarded Silver in Stonewall's Global Workplace Equality Index, which highlights our continued efforts to support LGBTQ+ inclusion globally. These recognitions are milestones on our ongoing journey to build a truly inclusive, supportive, and equitable workplace for all.
“We talk a lot about creating the right environment at Skyscanner. As a woman in tech, working here has been a great experience. I've had a lot of opportunities that I wouldn't have had elsewhere so now I'm passionate about showing that this pathway is possible and ensuring women can see a successful career path in tech.”
Myra Fulton, VP Engineering
Sustainability
Sustainability matters to both Skyscanner and travellers (65% of whom say it's important to them when they travel). Travel can be a force for good, whether that's learning about other cultures, building connections around the world or in visiting friends and family.
However, transportation, particularly air travel, can cause significant environmental impact, contributing heavily to carbon emissions. Additionally, the rising demand for popular destinations can result in over-tourism, which can place increasing strain on local communities and ecosystems. Skyscanner has a responsibility to collaborate with our partners, suppliers and travellers to build a more sustainable future for travel and tourism.
We're working on a number of ways to help drive tourism to lesser-known areas, away from ‘hotspots’. This includes an ‘underrated destination’ inspiration feature in our Everywhere search. By inspiring travellers to look at alternatives to big ticket capital cities and popular destinations, we can not only help them to support more local communities, but also reduce over-tourism.
As well as highlighting lower-than-typical emissions flights in our product, we've also introduced EV car hire, hotel filters for EV charging and are trialling trains in some markets. Travellers can find sustainability information in our sustainability hub.
We've partnered with the regenerative tourism fund, UnTours Foundation to support changemaking small tourism businesses.
We've committed to reaching net zero by 2045, having signed the Glasgow Declaration in 2021, measured our footprint under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and published our Climate Action Plan.
We're founding partners of SkyNRG's Board Now programme, which helps contribute to the development of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (and reduce the impact of our own business travel emissions through this). We're a founding partner of Travalyst, where we've aligned with partners around the Travel Impact Model for displaying aviation emissions in our search results, and are members of Tech Zero, a tech climate action group.
Accessibility
Our vision? To make Skyscanner a flagship of disability inclusion, our products accessible to all, and travel planning easier for people with disabilities.
Year over year, we've improved our accessibility scores, and thanks to our accessibility champions, we'll continue to work to make Skyscanner products as accessible as possible. We're also taking our first steps in supporting the wider travel industry to do similarly.
Our work in building accessibility awareness and change across our business includes ensuring every new employee experiences an Empathy Lab, and building our Accessibility Champions Network, made up of passionate volunteers from all areas of the business. This now boasts around 7% of our staff.
Now, designers are annotating their designs with accessibility information to ensure a seamless transition to engineering. Engineers are now running automated and manual accessibility tests before shipping code, and as a business we run user-testing sessions with disabled users to learn from their lived experiences.
Changes across our brand colour palette have made the colours and colour combinations more accessible, and we've added 20 new accessibility amenities that disabled travellers can use when filtering hotels. We're also working to improve our procurement process to ensure we work with accessible suppliers.
More widely, our people have volunteered with charitable accessibility organisations, Skyscanner is part of the Champions of Accessibility Network (CAN), and collaborates with organisations and universities in both guest lectures, webinars, and sponsorship of accessibility prizes.
“Last week, I was able to use my screen reader as a visually impaired person to book my first flight with Skyscanner, travelling from Glasgow to Birmingham for a football match. The ease with which I could navigate and complete the booking was truly remarkable and made the entire process seamless for me.”
Abdul, a blind traveller
Communities
At Skyscanner, we want to give back to the communities that surround us. Our charitable approach reflects our goal of increasing diversity and accessibility in tech: in our business, sector and beyond. We recognise that in order to address the long-term diversity of the tech sector, we need to change the make up of those taking up coding as a career.
We provide financial and volunteering support to charities who are experts in making this happen, whether at pipeline stage (with a focus on women and minorities in tech) or through tech education at school level.
We also support our employees' own fundraising efforts, with up to £500 matched per person. We have set aside a budget for humanitarian aid every year, and give every employee a paid day to volunteer annually.
“Having childcare support during my training with CYF was an absolute lifeline, especially with the high cost of childcare and rising living expenses. Without a personal support system to rely on, this assistance allowed me to fully engage in Saturday live sessions and dedicate time during the week to study and complete projects. It made it possible for me to balance parenthood and pursue my career goals, something that would have been nearly impossible without this vital support.”
Bedi, Code Your Future graduate
“I like the Technicoders because we got to explore different aspects of tech and learn new things. When I'm older, I will want to work in tech especially since there is likely to be more advanced tech in the future and we will be more surrounded by it.”
Zoe, 12, supported by Digital Xtra
Skyscanner is an equal opportunities employer. We're committed to ensuring our application and recruitment processes are inclusive and accessible to everyone. If you require any reasonable adjustments or accommodations for interviews, please let us know. If you'd like more information on any of our policies, such as hybrid working or Parental Leave policies (typically we pay a minimum of 24 weeks birth parent/maternity leave globally), our recruitment team can provide more information on these.
