100 million people used Skyscanner every month to search for flights. Almost none of them had a reason to come back.
Skyscanner is one of the world's largest travel search engines. The platform was exceptional at helping people find the cheapest flight for a trip they'd already decided to take. What it couldn't do was spark the decision to travel in the first place.
Drops changes that. It surfaces flight price drops of at least 20% — from your home airport, to anywhere in the world — so travellers can open the app on a Tuesday morning and find themselves booking a weekend in Lisbon they hadn't planned.
The hardest product problem isn't acquiring users. It's giving them a reason to come back when they're not actively planning.
Skyscanner's search model served intent — but intent-based products are vulnerable. When a user isn't planning a trip, the app disappears from their life entirely. No notification, no discovery surface, no reason to open it.
The internal challenge was just as real. Multiple product surfaces, competing priorities, and a question nobody could fully answer: if we surface a deal, how do we make sure users trust it enough to act?
The research finding that changed everything: people don't need a plan to book a trip. They need a number that feels too good to ignore.
We ran discovery across six markets and studied the behaviour of opportunistic bookers — people who'd taken a trip in the past year that they hadn't originally planned. The pattern was consistent: a specific price point triggered the decision. The destination came second.
That inverted the product logic entirely. We weren't designing a loyalty feature. We were designing a moment of serendipity — one that had to feel personal, not algorithmic.
Users can now open Skyscanner, see a flight that's dropped 30% overnight, and book it — without ever having searched for it.
The core interaction is simple: set your home airport, and Drops surfaces deals to everywhere in the world, filtered by how far in advance you like to book. The threshold — 20% or more — is precise enough to feel significant without being arbitrary.
The critical design decision was the notification layer. Deals that feel relevant keep people in the app. Deals that feel like noise make them turn notifications off permanently. We spent significant time calibrating what "relevant" meant for different travel personalities — weekend breakers, long-haul planners, last-minute bookers.
The design work was easy. Getting five product managers to agree on what "a good deal" means took three months.
Drops sat across flights, hotels, and car hire — each owned by a different PM with different success metrics. What one team called a good deal, another called noise. Getting to a shared definition of the threshold, the notification cadence, and the ranking logic required a level of cross-functional alignment that couldn't be solved in a design review.
I ran a structured brief workshop that separated the strategic questions (what behaviour are we trying to create?) from the design questions (what does that look like?). Once the strategy was agreed, the design followed quickly.
Drops is live in the Skyscanner app today, available to over 100 million monthly users.
The feature is now a core part of Skyscanner's consumer app experience — not a side project or a test. It represents a meaningful shift in how the platform thinks about its relationship with travellers: not just as a search engine, but as something worth opening even when you're not actively planning.
The hardest part wasn't the design. It was convincing people that passive discovery could drive active bookings.
Every instinct in a search-based product organisation pushes toward intent. Users have a problem; you solve it. Drops required the opposite argument: that you could create the intent, not just serve it. That's a harder sell internally than it looks from the outside.