A Czech was looking for a cheaper flight to Portugal. Ultimately, his quest ended up rewriting the rules of the airline industry. This is how the story of Kiwi.com begins, which, from a simple idea born out of frustration, turned into a business model that changed the way we fly. From an apartment with ten people, Kiwi.com has evolved into a global platform that unites flights, companies and continents and seems to have the trajectory of a European unicorn.![]()
I met Oliver Dlouhý, the Czech founder of the Kiwi.com platform, over a glass of Spanish beer — an almost absurd image, but perfectly suited to his way of being, open to different worlds. It was a warm autumn evening in Barcelona, and our discussion, as journalists visiting the company's Spanish offices, flowed naturally. Although he runs a company whose value seems to approach the value of those with unicorn status, Oliver takes the time to sit at the same table with every journalist who visits him and proves to be a good, attentive and present host, who talks, in an informal setting, about work, family and life with surprising modesty. The co-founder of Kiwi.com has none of the aloof air that often characterizes a successful entrepreneur. He has a calm but energetic demeanor and seems to be more concerned with personal balance than financial performance. He trains daily and aims to burn at least 700 kilocalories a day – a goal he treats with the same consistency with which he built from scratch a platform that changed the way people travel. He is a husband, the father of three boys, and the time he does not dedicate to his family he divides mainly between the offices in Brno and those in Barcelona, where part of the Kiwi team – about 70 of the total 800 employees – works on product development, testing user experiences and integrating new technologies. «Everyone has ideas – the important thing is to put them into practice,» says Oliver, smiling but firmly, as if he were enunciating a life lesson rather than a business principle. Dlouhý is the son of an entrepreneur, and his father's story, full of trials rather than successes, shaped him. «My father was the first businessman in the Czech Republic after the fall of communism. His company was registered with the number 001,» he says with sincerity. The father's business was not very successful – «he collected more debts than profits» – but Oliver sees this history as a moral legacy: «It is appreciated that he tried, even in the conditions of the time». His path was, in turn, winding. He tried to study several fields – including philosophy – before discovering what he was really passionate about. The idea of Kiwi.com was born out of personal frustration: he was trying to organize a trip to Portugal, but the tickets were too expensive. He spent a whole week looking for the perfect solution, and when he succeeded, he realized that he had just discovered a business opportunity. In 2012, Oliver Dlouhý and Jozef Képesi, the current CTO of Kiwi.com, co-founded the company after developing a unique flight matching algorithm. Today, Kiwi.com is a platform synonymous with innovation in travel tech, but also one of the most dynamic travel technology companies in Europe, which reached, in 2024, a total value of bookings («gross bookings») of 2.062 billion euros. According to the description used by the company's representatives, Kiwi.com is one of the most important travel technology companies, which records 2 billion cost checks daily, analyzing 95% from global flight information. Read more on www.businessmagazin.ro
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