Earlier this month, flight meta search company Routehappy unveiled what it calls "the first Amazon-style product pages for flights."
Each individual flight that appears in its meta search results can be clicked on to reveal a product page that is similar to how Amazon presents any individual product -- with granular detail covering user reviews, promised services (such as if wi-fi is available in-flight), and an algorithmic ranking that rates how good the flight is relative to others.
Seeking more investment
The nine-person, New York City start-up raised $1.5M in seed funding last September. It came out of beta in April.
The company says it is raising a Series A. It just hired Amit Goyal as vice-president of strategy and business development, who comes over from American Express, where he led enterprise wide business development activity with emerging tech start-ups.
If successful, a flight-reviewing service could make a good acquisition by a larger player, just as TripAdvisor snapped up SeatGuru years ago.
Routehappy self-reported receiving 100,000 unique visitors in its first 10 weeks after its alpha launch. This month, it touts "more than 30% return visitors."
It claims to have collected more than 100,000 ratings, 30,000 comments, and thousands of photos from reviewers in more than 60 countries. Users can review their flights on Routehappy's review app for iPhones or on its website. (The app works offline, so users can review their flight, even without Wi-Fi, the company says.)
Reviews come to flights
Routehappy's hallmark is its ranking of flights by a variety of factors, which frequent fliers may debate endlessly. The company acknowledges that its rankings are a work in progress.
Last December, in response to a Tnooz article about the company, an Australian journalist complained about some of the rankings ("How is all VX [seats on Virgin America flights] marked as "roomier" when its own website says 32?") The company eventually hired him as director of data.
The company says its team "reviewed tens-of-thousands of reviews and scored each one for quality and content." That's a nearly miraculous feat for a tiny operation to pull off in two years, while doing all the other work of building a company.
Routehappy then engineered a way to display the most relevant reviews at the top on any flight page, "based on a relevance algorithm (corresponding airport, airline, aircraft) + review popularity (users can vote reviews up or down)."
Future challenges
Getting airlines to fully participate is an ongoing issue.
Amadeus, the global distribution system, supplies the fare content to the company, but Routehappy uses its own algorithm for sorting search results that is "based entirely on complex data that we source, curate and and organize entirely independently."
Routehappy is in discussions with numerous airlines, both GDS-participatory and not. It has not added any of the non-GDS airlines (Southwest, Ryanair, easyJet) yet, but it covers the major carriers in the US and Europe.
Spirit and Virgin Australia participate in Amadeus, and the startup has added those airlines since April. The company says that additional international airlines it has researched, analyzed, and graded include South African, El Al, Austrian, Dragonair, Aerolíneas Argentinas, Aer Lingus, and LAN.
The start-up does all of its engineering and design in-house, with three data engineers and two designers.
Says spokesperson Kellie Pelletier:
Routehappy plans to optimize the new website for mobile later this year and to develop a native app for iPhone and iPad in 2014.
Routehappy has received 200 media mentions worldwide in various languages since its alpha launch on April 26, including mentions in at least 20 US newspapers plus several tech sites such as Mashable and Fast Company. Overseas, the media of Thailand and Israel in particular are apparently quite enthusiastic.
For more, see Tnooz's April profile of Routehappy.