Superfly continues to focus on both accumulating and leveraging data with an eye to enhancing the travel experience for users. Next up: hotels.
Fresh off the recent hire of Jackie Loverme (previously of Kayak) as VP of Business Development, Superfly is pushing forward to develop new applications for its data-focused model.
The new hotel app will function like a typical booking app, showing a set of targeted-to-user results of hotels.
Date, distance, and length of stay are all customizable, and the results will be sorted for relevance according to available user data on Superfly website and mobile. Credit card information can also be saved for seamless use.
Co-founder Jonathan Meiri:
We're all about helping solve some of the key pain points for heavy travelers - organize miles, a search engine for best flights. Now we're taking that into the hotel space with a mobile-first approach.
Most of our users are in their 20s and 30s make over 100k USD and are willing to spend extra for quality service. We are seeing people that spend over 30 nights a year in hotels without even having a hotel loyalty card.
Explaining the entrance into the hotel booking space, Meiri points to enhancing the value of current assets.
The app is actually going to leverage all the assets we've built over the past few years - user's loyalty information, communities that we've built, news related to loyalty programs, etc.
We want to nail the hotel booking experience by crunching a bunch of data behind the scenes and help you find the best hotel for you.
For example, if you arrive late and are trying to find a hotel, we can show suggestions relevant to you.
Dates can be changed to any date you want and location can be changed anywhere in the world - we're available worldwide from day one. Any night, any time of the year, any location on earth.
Open the app, and relevant hotels will be listed according to various categories: places where a user has stayed before, places preferred by members with similar travel status, and other ways of differentiating hotel options beyond price, location and rating.
Rate parity will be adhered to, and therefore the posted rates won't be discounted.
In addition to data-based relevance, the other key value proposition to consumers is cash back. Users who book via the app will receive between 5 to 10 perecent back, in cash. This will literally be a check from the company, and not in any way be affiliated with the purchased hotel. Heavy travelers will see a more generous cash back amount.
The driving idea here is that loyalty is broken; travelers, especially Millennials, are traveling often but are not brand loyal. Thus they don't benefit from the perks of elite status, and oftentimes do not want to jump through the many hoops required to earn and maintain status. By offering an immediate incentive, Superfly hopes to engender that loyalty for themselves.
While this could indeed signal a shift in perspective on what loyalty means, and how to capture it, there's also plenty of skepticism that this data-based model is truly worthy.
Despite the potential to deliver a refreshed targeting of high value travelers, an executive from a top airline was recently overheard saying that they would never work with a model such as Superfly's. It's unclear exactly why - but the ingrained skepticism of external data-driven models is very real.
Nonetheless, Meiri points to the company's differing take on travel as a driver to the app's success.
It's all about the data, and helping the consumers select the perfect hotel for them. The old model was show me a bunch of results and give me tools and filters to sort through results.
That worked on Web, but doesn't work well on mobile. on Mobile you have to have that initial set of 10-15 results that are super relevant. That's the real message of Big Data: increase the relevance and show me what's right for me based on my patterns or behaviors of people like me.
Investors, unsurprisingly, are equally enthused. Bill Smith, also formerly of Kayak:
Through the aggregation and use of this new mobile search data, Superfly will be able to differentiate its search product to provide more relevant and personal results and therefore greater value to its customers. I expect the smart and sophisticated travelers to be quick to realize the value of this service.
The company, which announced earlier this year the Travel Emails service aimed at both gathering data and ensuring that users don't miss out on specific travel-related deals, has been focusing on collecting deep information and creating full profiles of users. These profiles then allow for more relevant offer targeting, the USP that Superfly is pushing out to travel suppliers such as airlines and now hotels.
The main challenge remains user acquisition and continued engagement, which should be much easier with the additional hotel booking service. Users are increasingly interested in owning their own data, and gaining the financial and perk-related advantages inherent in their own behaviors.
Should Superfly continue to differentiate and broaden their offering, the ability to become the center of frequent traveler's travel lives - and thus build a comprehensive industry-wide share-of-wallet database - could translate into an appealing business with deep hooks.
The new app can be downloaded here.