After several years in stealth, Hopper
launched a little over a year ago with the "world's largest structured database of travel information." The startup quickly discovered soft consumer interest in that value proposition, and decided to follow a bright spot of engagement:
flight research.
That pivot is now further entrenched with a shift to a mobile-first strategy focused on a
flight research app of the same name. The slogan now is "save money with the bunny."
There are three key areas addressed by this new app:
- Never miss a deal: The app promises to notify users instantly when prices on chosen flights are dropping — and on the flip side, when they are about to rise.
- Know when to buy: The app claims to predict exact times to buy tickets, assuring a savings of up to 40%.
- Insider tips: Beyond specific flights, the app is leveraging data-driven knowledge about dates and airports to offer the most affordable suggestions to its users.
The original flight research reports are still available online, as are two other sections: Deals and Explorer. The deals are all sourced from a user's home airport and easily surfaces special fares, while the "explorer" feature delivers a flexible interface to discover different places to fly during a set time period in the future.
This latest push to mobile suggests that the product may have finally found a market after the multi-year, multi-million time investment. In an email interview, Hopper's Chief Data Scientist Patrick Surry shared more about the renewed focus on airfare data.
Where is all of this data coming from?
Hopper receives a real-time feed of airfare search data from a number of GDS partners, resulting from consumer flight searches made on numerous online travel agencies all around the world.
Every day we collect about two billion priced trip itineraries coming from about 15 million daily flight queries. We don’t receive any personally identifiable data about who, what or where the search was made, just the trips that were available to purchase at that point in time.
Why the focus on the mobile app?
Our users have told us that although they love our research about when to fly and buy, the process of actually finding and booking the right flight is still very frustrating. From third-party research, the typical consumer spends 10-14 days comparison shopping multiple OTAs trying to find a good deal, but on average ends up paying 5-10% more than the first price they saw, due to general upwards drift in prices as departure nears.
Our goal with the app is to help consumers get the best price without having to do the shopping themselves, and ultimately make flight booking a positive experience rather than a time-consuming and frustrating one.
Where is the bookable inventory coming from?
Before presenting a fare or sending a low price notification, we validate any fare discovered in our real-time feed by performing a direct airfare shopping query through the GDS API. Ultimately, we hand off the actual purchase transaction directly to an airline or an OTA such as Expedia or Travelocity, so we don’t manage the actual ticket sale.
Tell us more about the "flash sales" that populate the "deals" area on the website. Are these sourced directly from the airlines, or is this just showcasing a special deal that's found on a third party OTA?
These are great deals that we discover by watching the real-time feed of airfare prices. We track typical prices in every market and when we see a rapid drop in price, we automatically identify which airlines and dates have gone on sale and alert users who are interested in that route.
What's the product roadmap, given the ongoing insights gleaned from the data over time?
We’re responding to user feedback and expanding the flexibility of the kinds of trips you can watch, for example looking at one-way flights, non-economy fares, airline-specific filters and so on. We’re also working to bring more of the broader research from the web into the mobile form factor, as well as offering the price prediction and 24/7 price watch and notification capabilities on other platforms including Android and the web.
How are consumers using the app so far? What's the most popular engagement point?
We’ve gotten great feedback on the calendar to give you a birds-eye view of pricing, as well as the tips for alternate airports and tweaking your dates to save money. But the thing people love is the ability to watch a trip and get real-time notifications when a deal pops up, or when we predict that the is likely to rise.
Sometimes these prices are only available for an hour or two, so being able to catch it right away makes a big difference, compared to something like a daily digest which basically tells you the deals you’ve missed. We’ve had several people tell us already that they’ve saved hundreds of dollars on their tickets!
Are you focusing on direct relationships with suppliers for flight inventory or sourcing through 3rd parties?
That is certainly something we’re exploring as a way to further improve the experience of booking a flight, but we haven’t implemented anything specific yet.
The app is currently only available for iOS here.
NB: Takeoff image courtesy Shutterstock.
NB2: Disclosure: Hopper CEO Fred Lalonde is also chairman of Tnooz.