How Skyscanner doubled release velocity and unlocked new growth opportunities with Runway.

Skyscanner is a global leader in travel search, helping millions of users find the best flights, hotels, and car rentals. They aggregate and analyze vast amounts of travel data in real time, surfacing the most competitive options from airlines, booking sites, as well as car hire and hotel providers. What looks like a simple travel search engine to users is actually a complex app powered by sophisticated frontend and backend technology that handles vast amounts of pricing data, availability updates, and user preferences every second of every day.

Mobile is Skyscanner’s highest-performing platform in terms of user engagement and conversions, and it’s where they see their greatest opportunities for future growth. The eight squads that make up their mobile engineering team are kept busy building new features for the fully native Android and iOS apps. 

With hundreds of millions of searches conducted on mobile each month, even small improvements to performance, speed, or personalization can have a huge impact on their business. Constant iteration and rapid feature deployment are core to Skyscanner’s success. Which means seamless mobile releases are an operational necessity.

Skyscanner had invested many resources in an in-house mobile release management platform, however it was first built out years ago and never entirely finished. Constant maintenance and gaps in functionality were causing mounting bottlenecks that meant the team wasn’t able to keep pace with Skyscanner’s needs. The mobile team wanted to ship more often. Product wanted them to ship more often. Leadership wanted them to ship more often. And everyone wanted to do that without sacrificing quality. But how were they going to pull it off? 

Challenge

Fragile, outdated release processes and tooling blocked faster cycles, limiting the speed of product development and Skyscanner’s ability to ship features and scale efficiently 

Skyscanner’s mobile engineering team could only move as fast as their mobile release process would allow. Their internally-built release platform — called Skytrain — was originally designed to streamline deployments and let them move quickly, but over time it became a liability. 

During COVID-19, Skyscanner faced enormous pressure for the same reasons every single company involved in the travel industry did: no one was traveling. Skyscanner was hit hard during this period, and, because of this, critical knowledge about the inner workings of Skytrain was lost. With no one having the time to properly maintain it, it became a fragile and unpredictable black box.

“We had an in-house mobile release system that was meant to be continually in development, but the engineers who built it left and all their knowledge went with them. It wasn’t really maintained after that and we were very lucky that we were able to keep it running without any serious incidents.”

Michael Tweed
Principal Software Engineer
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While the team was able to keep Skytrain running — and having anything was better than nothing when it came to release tooling — it failed to meet any sort of internal technical standards for code quality, security, and maintainability. But upgrading it to modern standards would have required a significant engineering effort, and that time and those resources were needed for working on Skyscanner features, not on upgrading internal systems. 

As the world came out of the pandemic, Skyscanner’s business completely recovered (and then some), but institutional knowledge of their custom release tooling did not recover with it. Engineers did what they could to work with and around the system, but when things broke, the team had to reverse-engineer the cause of the problem, sometimes delaying releases by days. These delays weren’t just frustrating — they directly impacted Skyscanner’s ability to ship new features, improve the traveler experience, and stay one step ahead in the highly-competitive market of travel booking. 

“We were spending hours each week managing releases in Skytrain — either in the process of releasing manually or else fixing problems with the tooling itself — and this always added up.”

Nicolas Frugoni
iOS Engineer
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The complexity of managing releases with Skytrain forced the mobile engineering teams to run their Android and iOS releases on different weeks, which further slowed down their release process. Engineers were rightly worried that running Android and iOS releases in parallel would likely cause even more unexpected failures and delays, and, in turn, lead to additional missed deadlines and last-minute troubleshooting. This staggered release cycle meant slower feature rollouts, as updates could reach one platform weeks before the other, creating an inconsistent experience for users. 

Despite these frustrations, other priorities often took precedence over fixing the release process. While the mobile engineering team consistently pushed for improvements, securing  buy-in was difficult because the issue was largely seen as an operational challenge. Given the complexity of mobile releases, the broader organization recognized the need for a solution but had to balance it against strategic initiatives. 

However, things began to change when Skyscanner’s slow and fragile mobile releases increasingly became a blocker for product launches, leading to missed opportunities and growing frustration for teams across the org. The team recognized that their in-house tooling was directly blocking faster release cycles, which severely limited the pace of their product development and their growth potential. Skytrain and iffy mobile releases weren’t just technical debt that needed a little elbow grease to fix; this was an opportunity to empower Skyscanner mobile and enable their mobile engineers to ship an even better product, and do that faster and more frequently. 

“We knew Skytrain was a house of cards, but every time we thought about replacing it, other priorities got in the way. It wasn’t until product managers started feeling the pain of slower releases — ‘What do you mean we have to delay the launch by three days because of a Skytrain issue???’ — that we could make the case.”

Michael Tweed
Principal Software Engineer
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Solution

Better automation and organization to streamline deployments, increase release velocity and frequency, and remove bottlenecks that were slowing product cycles  

Skyscanner needed a better way to ship their mobile apps. Ideally one that would reduce, not add, to their team’s workload, and create net new opportunities for product and the business by accelerating the speed at which they could get new features out the door. 

“We explored building something new internally, and also considered a couple of external tools. Runway felt like the one solution that met all of our needs without requiring a huge investment of time from our engineers.”

Michael Tweed
Principal Software Engineer
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They considered three options:

1. Rebuilding Skytrain from scratch
2. Using release management add-ons their CI/CD tool offered 
3. Adopting Runway, a platform focused entirely on mobile release management

A full Skytrain rebuild was quickly ruled out. It would have required months of engineering effort because of how little institutional knowledge remained about the system, and scrapping it entirely to start from scratch was too risky and resource intensive. It was entirely possible that if they built something new, it would work well at first but then eventually have the same issues as Skytrain.   

Leveraging the release-adjacent features included with their CI/CD seemed like a potential solution. But these features were limited and lacked the full automation, visibility, and flexibility Skyscanner was looking for. This approach seemed awkwardly build-centric in a way that didn’t serve the broader mission. Ultimately, it was seen as only a partial fix rather than a complete solution. 

Skyscanner’s ideal release tooling needed to seamlessly handle approvals, orchestrate team-wide tasks, and integrate deeply with existing pieces of their stack like Slack, New Relic, and GitHub, reducing the need for constant manual interventions and context-switching. Various Skyscanner team members had encountered Runway at mobile conferences in the past, and they quickly realized the Runway platform checked all of their release management boxes. 

Unlike other third-party options, Runway was purpose-built for mobile release management at scale, addressing the specific pain points that had plagued their teams for years. It provided a structured approach to mobile releases without requiring Skyscanner to overhaul their preferred workflows, integrating seamlessly with their CI/CD and every other critical piece of their release toolchain. After leadership saw just how much Runway could do, and just how much time it could save, they realized  the many possibilities available when engineering time and resources were freed up. 

“We don't want to have to check over and over again whether something happened or didn’t happen. We were used to that with our custom tooling, but with Runway we don’t have to be constantly aware of the tool and checking in on it.”

Nicolas Frugoni
iOS Engineer
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Skyscanner quickly found  Runway could orchestrate their entire release process, ensuring every step happened smoothly and on schedule and eliminating the need for engineers to spend time tracking down approvals or double-checking store submissions. The platform also provided critical visibility Skyscanner never had before. Instead of guessing where a release was getting stuck or manually tracking app store review times, engineers and product managers could now see real-time data on delays, PR activity, and rollout status in one place. 

Most importantly, Runway enabled Skyscanner to solidify and speed up their release cadence, something they had long wanted but couldn’t achieve with Skytrain. With the ability to align Android and iOS releases, accelerate towards weekly deployments, and reduce engineering toil — both in terms of manual release work and maintenance on tooling — Runway proved itself as the only solution that truly transformed how Skyscanner ships their apps, rather than just delivering marginal improvements.

“The key to getting buy-in across the org was to consider both sides: not just engineering, but also product. On some level, engineering pains were just seen as part of the job. But when we shifted the story from ‘this will fix our process’ to ‘this will enable us to ship value faster,’ that’s when it clicked. Leadership saw that this wasn’t just about dealing with some old tooling, it was about accelerating our entire product strategy.”

Michael Tweed
Principal Software Engineer
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Results

A tool that makes weekly releases a reality and takes care of everything release to release, accelerating time to market and freeing up engineering resources to focus on building 

“It’s been a lot more fun building new product instead of going down dark rabbit holes trying to figure out why a release is blocked.”

Nicolas Frugoni
iOS Engineer
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With Runway fully integrated, Skyscanner unlocked faster, more reliable deployments and successfully achieved their goal of transitioning from biweekly to weekly releases for both Android and iOS: 

• Between both platforms, a day of work per release — previously wasted on manual release management — is returned to engineers to spend on feature development.
• There’s less firefighting, as automation — and more reliable automation — has reduced possible points of failure and virtually eliminated the need for manual interventions or maintenance.
• The entire org has complete visibility into Skyscanner’s mobile releases, making it easy to track PRs, store review times and approvals, and rollout progress and health.
• By unifying and shoring-up their process so that Android and iOS can be released in tandem, a single release manager can now run both releases at once, a key driver in transitioning to weekly releases.

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“Before Runway, we spent hours per week just managing releases. Some weeks, we could spend two days trying to unblock things. Now, releases mostly just run in the background.”

Nicolas Frugoni
iOS Engineer
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Weekly releases had previously been deemed impossible to achieve, but Runway reduced risks to such an extent that it gave the Skyscanner team the flexibility to transition from biweekly to weekly releases for both Android and iOS. What had been impossible with Skytrain was now easily doable with Runway. 

“For one of our new engineers, Skyscanner is literally the first job of their career. Yet it's been really easy for them to understand and confidently run the release process from start to finish using Runway."

Nicolas Frugoni
iOS Engineer
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Showing new engineers how to manage releases with Skytrain had been fairly daunting. There was some documentation for them to follow, which they’d need to return to every time they managed a release, and then a lot of hand-holding. But with Runway, there is essentially no ramp-up required. Any engineer can run a release after a quick introduction to the tool. 

With automated releases that provide full visibility into every step of the process, the Skyscanner team can now focus on what matters: building a world-class travel platform. Faster releases mean faster innovation, better user experience, and fewer roadblocks for product teams.

Runway isn’t just another tool. It’s become a core part of how Skyscanner ships software, enabling them to achieve what was previously considered impossible: simultaneous weekly releases at scale, across both their Android and iOS platforms, which meaningfully improves their ability to quickly deliver new features and improvements to users.

“Runway gives us the confidence to ship faster and make our users happier.”

Michael Tweed
Principal Software Engineer
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