Skyscanner: one global brand, four cities, one trusted team
1st October 2026
BW has delivered Skyscanner’s offices in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and we’re now hard at work on a fourth in Barcelona. Our Design + Build team took what was done in London and translated it into each new city. Every office looks and feels different. The way we work together doesn’t.
Here’s what we’ve learned along the way.
Same brand, different city
London gave us the foundations. We got to know how Skyscanner worked, what mattered to its people and how the brand translated into physical space.
When Glasgow came next, the answer wasn’t to recreate London in Scotland. It was to take what worked and make it work for a different team, building and city.
Edinburgh went a step further. It’s where Skyscanner began, and at 25,000 sq ft across two floors, it’s their biggest workplace to date. Familiar Skyscanner touches sit alongside details that root the space in the city: a Skyscanner tartan rug, murals of local landmarks by a Scottish artist, a 3D print of the townscape. Even the original CPU from the company’s early days has a place at reception.
As Jordan Craig, Principal Engineer at Skyscanner, put it: “When you come into the office, it shouldn’t really matter whether your colleagues are sat beside you or in the Shenzhen office, thousands of miles away. You should be able to work in the same way and collaborate in the same way.”
Barcelona brings a completely different cultural and architectural context, but the question stays the same. What needs to stay consistent, and what should change? Good global workplace design is knowing the difference.
One team, from one project to the next
BW’s Design + Build team has stayed largely the same across Glasgow, Edinburgh and now Barcelona. That matters, because it means each project starts with an understanding of what’s come before, without being tied to it.
It also changes how we deliver. In Glasgow, Skyscanner brought in our Design + Build team before the lease was signed, so we could help shape the scope before the project even had a postcode. Everything was handled in house, so there were no handovers and no crossed wires.
Edinburgh put that to the test. It landed while Glasgow was still on site, and it was delivered in two live phases. One core team stayed on from early design to final delivery, running both phases in a working building. The first phase was delivered on time and Defect Free.
As Daniel Callegari, our Design + Build Director, explains, the relationship works because of how Skyscanner works with its partners:
“Skyscanner have been incredible: trusting, supportive, transparent, invested, integrated and committed. So, all we had to do was mirror that behaviour and deliver a space the relationship deserved.”
That meant open conversations from early design workshops through to delivery, and keeping things simple. “The client often gives us the answers to how they would like us to act and deliver, but all too often, the industry can overthink and overcomplicate. I think the success of our relationship was grounded in active listening.”
Hear from the Skyscanner and BW teams on our Glasgow and Edinburgh projects.
Reuse what’s already there
The relationship has also given us the chance to look beyond what’s new and make better use of what a client already owns.
For Edinburgh, we audited furniture across Skyscanner’s UK offices to see what could be reused. Those pieces were mapped into the new floor layouts from the start, stored off site and brought back in phases to line up with the build programme. We kept the existing ceilings, paired old table frameworks with new worksurfaces and found new homes for the furniture we couldn’t use.
Verve tracked the carbon impact along the way, so decisions were based on real data. The result was less waste and lower costs, with more of the budget going into what people notice: the experience, the local identity and the technology.
The lesson: plan reuse at layout stage, not after the design is done.
Knowledge, not a template
Lessons travel. What London taught us informed Glasgow. Glasgow shaped Edinburgh. That experience now comes with us to Barcelona. But we’re not taking a template from one city to the next. We’re taking knowledge.
It’s also why Defect Free matters so much to us. It’s what we own as a business, and a long relationship is where you find out whether you mean it.
And that, for us, is the real value of having a Design + Build team in a long-term partnership: not delivering the same workplace over and over, but knowing the brand well enough to create the right one wherever it lands.
