Kiwi.com is a Czech online travel tech companyfounded by Oliver Dlouhý and Jozef Képesi in 2012. Through its online portal Kiwi.com provides a fare aggregator, metasearch engine and booking for airline tickets and ground transportation. Its ticket search features Kiwi.com’s "virtual interlining" concept – itineraries combined from over 750 carriers, including many that do not usually cooperate in online bookings. The booking service also features the industry-leading Kiwi.com Guarantee, which protects customers from missed connections caused by delay, schedule change, or cancellation. Today, the company handles more than 100 million searches every day and sells an average of 33,000 seats per day. Kiwi.com currently employs over 2,600 people. In November 2019, the company announced its vision to become the world’s first Virtual Global Supercarrier.
Background
The online portal skypicker.com was created in 2011. The company was founded in Brno by Oliver Dlouhý and Jozef Képesi. In 2016 the company acquired the domain name Kiwi.com for $800,000 and rebranded itself as Kiwi.com. Jiří Hlavenka was one of its first investors. In 2017, Kiwi.com acquired a stake in Jaroslav Kokolus. As of June 2019, Kiwi.com’s main shareholder is General Atlantic. Kiwi.com founders Oliver Dlouhý and Jozef Képesi remain as major shareholders and continue to run the company. Other shareholders are Touzimsky Airlines and Luboš Charčenko.
Services
Kiwi.com helps travellers get from any A to any B in the world. Its Virtual Interlining concept allows passengers to combine air and ground transportation from a range of carriers who do not normally cooperate with each other, in so doing facilitatingbillions of route combinations. In 2018 Kiwi.com launched NOMAD, a special multi-city travel search tool, and Tequila, a dedicated B2B platform. Along with its headquarters in Brno, Kiwi.com has offices in Barcelona and Prague. The company has outsourced partners in Belgrade, Bratislava, Dalian, Kyiv, Manila, Split and Zagreb, Pune, Nashik and Indore, Tunisia, Miami, Bangkok, Beijing, Foshan, Ljubljana, Bogotá. The company is presently one of the five biggest online air ticket sellers in Europe, with an annual turnover of approximately 1.1 billioneuros in 2018.
