Chris Martin joins Cheapflights

A few weeks back we revealed Cheapflights would shortly be - amongst other things - hiring a chief technology officer to drive the price comparison site’s next – and, arguably, ambitious – stage of development.

The company has today unveiled Chris Martin (no, not he of Coldplay fame) as the man for the job. [Some would argue that hiring the Coldplay frontman would hardly be conducive to livening up the site]

Martin joins the London-based website from technology commerce site, Ebuyer.com, where he held a similar role. He has also worked for the AskJeeves.com search engine (now Ask.com) and Orchestream.com, a bandwidth and technology company.

Cheapflights CEO David Soskin says:

“With an anticipated European website launch this year - and with our continuing emphasis on product improvement - Chris's experience will be vital to executing our strategy.”

This is very true. The CTO position will arguably be one of the most important in the company as it looks to not only launch elsewhere in Europe, but fulfil Soskin’s recently stated desire to “have a presence in every major online travel market in five years”.

Couple this with plans for a re-launch of the main Cheapflights site already and Martin is likely to be a very busy man.

[Not forgetting the ongoing speculation regarding the ownership or future funding of the company]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution