Something I've noticed that's lacking from most aggregators like Kayak and SkyScanner (my current fave), is the ability to increase the price of the ultra-budget carriers by adding their carry-on baggage fees and whatnot. I don't care about checked bag fees, but some of the carry-on fees are ridiculous ($60 per overhead item?). These budget carriers are cheating the system by looking like the cheapest option, when in reality one of the more expensive carriers is actually cheaper once you compare them apples-to-apples.
Hate to piggyback but I noticed that whenever this service gets posted on Reddit there are dozens of accounts that reply addressing Scott by name and have little to say.
Upon checking their comment history, I saw that most users hadn't posted anything for months, or even ever. It was clear that there was some kind of voting manipulation going on, and as reddit goes, if something gains traction it's bound to get upvoted just because.
It's a bit like Candy Japan, who posts here once a month with very little to say, and nothing vaguely technical in his articles. These kinds of posts just seem like blatant advertising. What are the rules for self-promotion of services on HN? It just seems dirty when there is a half-hearted article advertising a service without being labeled as an ad.
Throwaway of course, because I'd rather not get attacked by some bots.
I used Candy Japan for a bit, and I still rather like the articles that they post. I stopped subscribing because I didn't actually eat the candy; now I buy Bento boxes at my local Japanese grocery store, and I have a "Prime Surprise Sweets" Dash Button in my house. But I'd never have been open to the idea of subscription boxes (like the Pusheen Box) if it wasn't for their articles.
Native advertising (where the content is an ad) is increasingly common; just look on YouTube, Instagram, Buzzfeed, or the average newspaper. Done well, it's win-win -- the customer learns about or feels good about a brand or business; the business gets better brand recall or a new customer or whatever. But the root cause is that people are having trouble making money online (banner ads, pre-roll ads, and text ads don't pay what they used to).
I'd imagine several small businesses these days would opt for the "vote manipulation" marketing since its easy. (The Silicon Valley TV show had a similar plot point).
Add-on fees have gotten out of control, both in the hotel and airline space. There is a race to the bottom for having the lowest price to show on booking sites. This is a form of SEO for airlines and hotels.
I am not familiar with any airlines that charge for carry-ons, but for example I know that many hotels in downtown Las Vegas have mandatory "resort fees" that on many nights actually exceed the nightly rate shown in booking engine search results - so the actual cost of staying is more than double the advertised rate. Most booking sites have heard so many complaints about this that they do show the total (including resort fees) just prior to booking. But the "headline rate" - the one shown in search results and used by the sites in arranging results by price - is the one sans resort fees.
Taken to an extreme level, hotels could advertise a $1 nightly rate and a $200/nt "resort fee". It wouldn't surprise me if this actually started happening, given the competition among hotels to show up first in search results. It sounds like some budget airlines are headed in a similar direction.
It's one thing to charge for add-ons if you're taking a flight, because they're technically optional and there is a way to avoid them.
But resort fees are mandatory. There's no way to opt of using the gym or the pool or whatever it is that they're charging for. That they are somehow not included in the list price defies logic.
The resort fee isn't charging for anything in particular if it's mandatory; you can just as well say it covers air conditioning and elevators.
The logic here is perfectly sound. Resort fees haven't decreased customers (or haven't by enough to matter); and the FTC has a long history of not doing their job, so the risk of enforcement is fairly low. Ethics aren't an issue because large corporations tend to be sociopathic. So why not?
And the worst of this is in Vegas. You wouldn't use any of their amenities and there they are collecting resort fee from you and then you end up spending another shit load of money gambling.
Vegas is renown as a low cost travel destination, $5 prime rib, cheap liquor, cheap hotels, but you need to avoid the strip. There is a big immigrant population and there is no shortage of awesome cheap food minutes away.
Spirit airlines. Also many airlines are rolling out "basic economy fares" that don't include food/drink/carry-on and compete with low-cost carriers, but run on normal flights. What used to be "normal economy" now requires an "upgrade" or "add-on" - ugh.
Flew United recently and just after boarding they made an announcement asking if anyone had purchased one of these "basic economy" fares, presumably so they could exclude them from the twelve cents worth of pretzel+soda service. What a ridiculous and insulting system (not to mention poorly-managed!).
The funny thing is that not everyone may even know that they are on a "basic economy" fare and may not raise their hand - not out of a desire to cheat the system, but because somebody else booked their travel (corporate travel department, family member, etc.). That, in addition to the people that just don't want to be called out as cheap, will yield very few people voluntarily disclosing this on a crowded plane.
You really don't see how being called out on the loudspeaker could be insulting even if the ticket buyer was fully aware of the service difference (which they may not be)?
Another ridiculous thing about United Basic economy that doesn't seem like it would save them money is that you can't check in online early you have to do it at the airport...
That was originally a way to avoid ebay seller fees. They didn't originally charge fees on shipping, only the cost of the item, which makes sense. People took advantage of that so they had to change that policy and charge fees on shipping it's not really "fair" to be charged fees on shipping but that's the way they choose to handle the situation. Now most things on eBay have "free" shipping, in other words the cost of shipping is rolled into the price of the item. I think you also have to have "free" shipping to be featured on eBay's daily deals which encourages the practice.
United charges for carry ons. I had to book a flight day of for a family emergency and it was super inconvenient. I couldn't even find a fare class on United with carry ons that wasn't outrageous. You also can't check in ahead of time because they inspect you to make sure you aren't sneaking any carry ons.
As of when? I've taken a ton of flights on united and never had to pay a carry-on fee. I've seen such fees on airlines like spirit or fronteer, but never on a "non-discount" airline.
United is piloting a new program called "Basic Economy" for flights to Chicago and probably other cities, which effectively turns them into Spirit or Frontier Airlines. It's incredibly crappy. My guess is within a couple years all airlines will be doing this.
Most fliers want the lowest price, full stop. They'll complain about it to no end but will still keep voting for it with their wallets.
Must be an interesting challenge separating out real user issues from the volume of complaints about the service people were advertised and agreed to up front.
Is it that most fliers want that, or is that headline ticket price is the easiest thing to compare with existing tools, and what people can compare easily shapes their selection criteria?
It's not necessary for every single flight to have multiple acceptable flight options for the market forces ("vote with your wallet") to have an effect. You could not go. You could drive. You could fly into another airport and drive the last leg. You could charter.
I go out of my way to choose Delta(/KLM/AF), JetBlue, and Southwest over United, Frontier, Spirit, and Ryan. That works, even if it means I once in a great while fly on United because that's the best choice for that particular trip/leg.
How many markets are served by, say, United and only United? Other than their Micronesia operation, I can't think of any where you wouldn't be able to drive to an alternate airport within an hour or so drive (really just EAS airports).
I like them a lot also. Full credit on cancellations up to 10 minutes before take-off, two bags checked free, and no hubs (point to point, non-stop is the way to fly). At least they are unlikely to be bought by another airline at his point. With a market cap of $37.6 billion, they are the second biggest airline world wide and just under Delta's $39.4 billion.
This does not sound correct at all. A personal item and carry on are always free on legacy carriers like United. Are you sure this was not checked baggage?
Technically, they aren't charging for carry-ons, just disallowing them (for Econ Basic) and leaving checking (and paying the checked-bag fee) as the only option.
But on a practical note, some advice for those traveling on these budget airlines: if you pack your carry-on in a backpack rather than a suitcase, every budget airline in Europe and the US that I have flown on will not give you a hard time about it. I personally use a very large backpack that holds at least as much as a carry-on suitcase, yet the fact that it is in backpack form means they count it as my personal item and don't give me a hard time. When I travel I usually have a smaller laptop bag inside a compartment in my backpack, once I get on the airplane I take that out and keep it with me as a personal item (so I can easily access it inflight) and I put my backpack overhead like I would a suitcase. I have successfully done this on Frontier, Allegiant, Spirit, and Ryan Air within the last year and have not had any issues.
> I personally use a very large backpack that holds at least as much as a carry-on suitcase, yet the fact that it is in backpack form means they count it as my personal item and don't give me a hard time.
Interesting; they always officially state that the “personal item” must fit under the seat in front of you, which clearly a large backpack won't. No airline's ever enforced it that I've noticed, but then I've never flown Basic Economy (and haven't flown since it was a thing.)
I wouldn't rely heavily, though, on that laxity not changing without notice.
I have been doing exactly the same thing for years! But personally I think it also depends on, well, your physical attributes: being tall/big makes the backpack seem always small, and also makes it kind of invisible to the people in front of you (who are the ones that will eventually decide whether to check if your backpack fits into the limits or not). I think the same trick would not work for shorter/smaller persons. But I might be wrong of course.
This is also the best plan if you want to use the Basic Economy level on United and possibly other carriers. They will charge you for a conventional roll-a-board carry on suitcase.
Do they even check if you've paid for a full carry-on as opposed to a personal bag? I've flown Frontier a few times worried about the size of my backpack, and I never saw anything on the computer when I scanned my boarding pass to indicate any of that information. I'm fairly certain the gate agent didn't even look at my baggage.
I have written to Kayak suggesting this in the past. Without such a feature, the hidden charges and nickle-and-diming will just get worse.
The best explanation I heard (from elsewhere) was that if Kayak automatically included any fees, then some users might see a lower price on another site and mistakenly conclude the Kayak didn't actually have the lowest prices. But this seems obviously solvable by making it a non-default option and displaying the price as "$X ($Y fare + $Z fees)".
They could provide a search option to let you plug in what kind of baggage you wanted. So you could say 1 overhead, 2 checked bags, and then it could add in the cost (or show it broken out next to total cost)
If you're comparing round-trip ticket prices, you should double the carry-on fee for comparison purposes, since the airlines that charge fees for carry-ons typically charge it on both outgoing and return legs.
Spirit is an American low-cost carrier with fees in that range. It's $56 roundtrip for a carry-on bag if paid for at booking time, $76 if paid online after booking, or $114 if paid at the airport in person.
Wow does too. They actually make sure it's not too big sometimes as well. That said Wow can be 4-5x cheaper otherwise, so an extra ~$50 bucks for a carry on is still worth it. No entertainment and wifi but you'll sure get there cheaply!
Disclosure: I built a competing tool for finding cheap flights, https://concorde.io.
I think the secret of Scott's success is his incredible writing ability. Finding the cheap flights is the easy part. Communicating with users in a way that consistently wins over their hearts and minds takes a high level of consideration and creativity. This writing ability combined with his co-founder's understanding and application of direct response marketing has produced fantastic results. I am glad to see their success.
Nice website.
Fix this issue:
1) When I search with a date, it loses the depart and return dates every time. Save the dates and remember them.
2) After I select a depart date calender as Month September, it should open September when I select Return calendar.
Thank you for the feedback! Agreed that the depart and return date inputs should be improved as you mention. I am always seeking to eliminate needless repetitive actions! I'll do my best to get this resolved quickly.
Gave it a shot. No results from SIN, my other two "primary" airports (BKK, CGK) don't even match in your interface! Even tried NRT and nothing. I assure you these airports exist and I'm not making them up.
Tried my old haunts of SYD, MEL and ADL - they match but no results. So that's 6 airports I tried with literally zero results, and half the time the (major international) airport wasn't even found. I know you're probably not focussing on my area but still not the most amazing first impression! At least a "coming soon" message would be an improvement.
Suggestion for your site. I'd change the front page header text that says: "Discover cheap flights with Concorde."
It's not the text I disagree with it, it's how you're using it. You've made it so that you have to mouse over that text to make it react (segments change color) and figure out that each section may be clickable (how do I know where they go, if I'm an average user and don't necessarily know to look at the url hover at the bottom of the browser?).
Why is it an issue? It's extraordinarily bad usability, because there's nothing above the fold on your site that says: sign up. Not anywhere. There's a weird text in the upper right that says "Discover" that is changing colors, but gives no indication that it links to /sign-up. From a logical usability stand point, why would the "Discover" text be the /sign-up link, as opposed to just having a "Sign up | Login" segment.
You're trying too hard to be clever / creative, you're over-doing it and it's a bad usability outcome.
At the top, I'd keep the large text that is making a clear statement. Then place two or so lines of descriptive text below it, with blatant links to signing up etc. Or some variation on this. You have plenty of room to work with up in the header area.
First I just want to say thank you for your blunt feedback on the sign up flow that I've implemented. Feedback like this is what helps me truly think critically about my assumptions and divert towards more logic-driven choices.
My hesitation for not implementing traditional "sign up" language in the sign up flow is most likely due to my over-emphasis on the personality of the product at the expense of usability. On the flip side, I hope that for at least some set of users they feel as if the product is leading them on a fun adventure.
That said, I like your suggestions. The path to a sign up would be abundantly clear. I'll have to experiment with more traditional language and examine the results.
- since you are using Stripe, allow me to log in and pay without submitting my CC info over again.
- when selecting home airports, how about prefilling it with the list of closest to you / busiest based on geolocation? The picker interface could be improved by allowing autocompletion as well.
I replied to one of his emails and we had a nice back and forth even laughing at a pic response I sent him. He seems like a good person and I signed up for his premium service. I was already very interested in his premium svc but that interaction really sealed the deal for me.
Not reliant on one particular API but rather a combination of API's that access flight search data caches (provided by Global Distribution Systems), manual searching, blogs, forums, and more.
Love the simplistic design of the website to give the information right away! Can you where are you sourcing the data from? I've playing with Flask and Scrapy yesterday and love to build something like it. What I have in mind, [Complete disclosure - I'm a total novice right now] Scrapy to get the data and Flask to integrate it on the web with a Boostrap front end.
Thank you! The deals that I post and distribute are sourced from a variety of sources including manual searching with tools like Google Flights / QPX (like Scott's team), programmatic searching (expensive as others have mentioned in the comments here), forums or blogs, and of course Concorde's "Discover" tool. The Discover tool makes use of a cache of flight search data that is collected from Global Distribution Systems (GDS) such as Sabre and others. Further reading on GDS's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system
Tiny suggestion: I was looking at flights and it was not immediately clear to me that Santa Cruz referred to Bolivia and not California. It almost made me disregard it and not click. May want to put the country name on the homepage as well.
While true (also, all the other flights on the list right now are US<->Not US), in GP's defense the context may not have been clear.
If a fellow Angeleno asks me what I did over the weekend, I could say "I went to Venice" and my meaning (Venice, the neighborhood in LA) would be clear. Not necessarily so to someone from Chicago, or even from elsewhere in California.
Having said that, a flag icon next to the city name to represent the city's country would be cute but also informational.
I like the idea of making use of the city's country flag. In terms of a design element, that would compliment the airline tail icons which I think are important to see from my perspective as a traveler. Thank you!
Thank you for mentioning this. I'm sorry for the unnecessary repetitive credit card input. My plan is to separate the editing of payment and location preference to their own pages in the future.
Yes, sorry, at the moment it is mandatory to add a credit card to sign up for a First Class account. I believe this is actually a limitation with my payments vendor, Stripe.
Ouch, their site triggers one of my pet peeves about travel sites, listing prices without clarity whether the deal is one-way or round trip.
NYC to Paris: $260
Normal Roundtrip Price: $900
So did people who got that deal save $380? Or did they save $640? Which is it?
As feedback to Scott and Brian, this actually makes me hesitate to sign up for premium, because I don't know what level of discount we're talking about here. A 2x difference (one way versus RT) is significant.
Wow, thanks for the feedback!
Almost every single deal we send out is roundtrip. This is actually why we put "normal roundtrip price" instead of just "normal price" to help clarify this.
Maybe instead we should do "Roundtrip NYC to Paris: $260" and then put "Normal Price: $900" to help clear this up.
Yes you should make it absolutely 100% unambiguous because a lot of sites use this ambiguity intentionally for a kind of bait-and-switch design, and I am extremely wary of it. I think a lot of other people would also be very wary. It's a well known trick to make the price look lower by quoting the one-way deal even though most people are looking for roundtrip.
So.. I'm glad to hear you do mean RT in both cases.
If it's a matter of wanting to avoid clunky long layout for the copy, you could consider using RT instead of roundtrip. With a tooltip on hover, or some other accomodation, for people who need to know what that means.
Redundancy and specificity are slippery slopes. Why not say "Normally $XXX roundtrip coach redeye" because someone might think you're comparing a coach fare to first-class prices?
I think the "$XXX roundtrip, normally $XXX" clarifies it enough without the redundancy. You wouldn't benefit from comparing a roundtrip price to a normal one-way fare.
I'd actually rather put "Past Roundtrip Deal" above the deal info just because of how big the word "Roundtrip" is. We have to keep design in mind... and if we just put RT that would likely lead to confusion as well.
"NYC to Paris and back: $260" is only one fewer letter but I feel it reads more clearly and you don't need to include the "and back" in other lines of the message to get the point across you're comparing RT to RT.
One thing I'd like to vent about is that Scott seems to be making a lot of money selling e-mail addresses.
I signed up for a couple different contests using unique e-mail addresses generated specifically for the contest (Yes, they were separate e-mails for separate contests; No, I did not double-dip my entrees). I was then signed up for 2-3 e-mail lists for 3rd party companies over the course of a couple weeks. These companies weren't even doing anything tangentially related to what Scott writes about(cheap flights). I wish it was more transparent that he was going to sign you up for these random companies.
Hey, I'm just going to post the same response I used in the IndieHackers comment section for someone with a similar concern. Here's what I said:
"Our subscribers are too important to us to ever sell their information to someone else. We never have and never will sell users information like that. Our only source of income is subscriptions and occasional advertisements in the free emails. Ruining our reputation to make a few extra bucks would be an extremely stupid decision on our end.
With that said, we do run promotions with partners where we give away awesome vacation packages (Mexico and Tokyo recently). If anyone signs up for one of these promotions they are agreeing to the terms and conditions, which clearly state that by signing up for the giveaway the email address will be distributed to all of the partners involved in the giveaway (typically 4-5 other companies)."
And their response:
"Thanks for the reply!
I looked through my emails and found that the emails started right after I entered a giveaway from you. So that explains it! You're right, it does say for the giveaway offer that you're signing up for emails.
Sorry that I jumped to conclusions. It's just that I get a lot of spam and it's very annoying. Also, your partner emails provided no value to me at all."
--
With that said, it looks like we could do a better job making it even more explicit (which we try to do in the emails announcing the giveaway). We'll work on this on our end and never intended to mislead anyone.
And these two comments (the parent and grandparent) capture the tension between money and principles. I don't know anything about the insides of your business but we dealt with this crap all the time at Blekko.
Realistically, how many of your customers are going to make a custom email for your giveaway promotions? Its going to be small, and they are 100% going to get spammed and abused by that part of the Internet industry that slams unwanted apps in your face or hijacks your search page for sideloads an advertising rootkit on to your phone. Because that is what they do, they get away with it and make a lot of money at it, and yes they offer you a small piece of the action and all you have to do is give them validated email addresses.
The local Taqueria had a jar that said "Put in your business card for a chance for free lunch, awarded monthly!" and the jar had dozens of business cards in it. I asked about it and the restaurant had nothing to do with it, except that the restaurant was paid by a local recruiter $100 a month to have that jar there.
So one of the Internet scumbags makes a deal with a web site, "Here is a contest you could run which is tangentially related to your web content, all you have to do is run the contest and we'll pay you $x." Free money right? No, it just makes you one of the Internet scumbags too, maybe you didn't know they were going to click jack Grandma's PC but at some level everyone who gets into these deals know there must be some catch otherwise they wouldn't be giving you all this money right?
If you are in the airport and someone says "Oh, are you on the flight to Chicago? My sister-in-law just left for there and forgot this bag, if you'll check it through to Chicago when you get there she will pay you for your trouble. How about $500 ?"
You have to ask; Why is it worth $500 for me to pretend this is my luggage when it would cost less than half that to go to FedEx and just ship it? Why is this person paying me to run a free lunch contest for them? Why is this internet company paying me to run a giveaway contest for them?
At Blekko we tried several times to find the people who weren't scumbags and were actually trying to provide a real service or value to our customers. They may be out there but if they are, they are outnumbered by scumbags at least 1000:1, maybe more.
The only winning strategy was to just not deal with them at all.
> The only winning strategy was to just not deal with them at all.
A pattern I've seen in business is similar: when there's a bad actor who is able to pay exorbitant amounts for user acquisition, but then offers a bad product/experience, it's a losing startup strategy to go compete by offering a better product/experience. Just avoid that particular market / niche / channel entirely.
The bad guys who are paying a super-high CAC and still successfully monetizing it are going to outspend you, and the customers who keep taking the bait from the bad guys have already signaled that they can't be reached.
So anytime you (as a startup) see the equivalent of "quick weight loss pills" being hawked successfully through some channel, and your product is "eat right and exercise," go around that trap and not through it. Otherwise the bad guys will drive you broke as you throw pearls before swine.
The major qualifier here might be that big incumbents, NGOs, or governments should not necessarily ignore these bad guys. Not what I'm saying. Just that if you are a good guy with limited money, attacking a profitable channel dominated by bad guys is a losing strategy.
I don't know if you've looked at what gets sent out, but the e-mails sent for the Giveaways are extremely spammy.
I get that you probably added it somewhere in the giveaway text, but from a post somewhere, it was indicated the giveaways were more to garner attention, not as a profit-making venture. It turned me off completely when I started getting those. It gave me a negative impression on both Scott's Cheap Flights and on any companies that started sending me cold emails.
Maybe you can be more selective in your partners, or perhaps work with the partners in what gets sent out. I'm very judicious in what I let get my attention, and seeing these kinds of random sales pitches with no actual value proposition was annoying.
I went back to the giveaway and found the e-mail consent in the tiny text under the consent checkmark for signing up, so I can give you that for having the warning there now. It was not noticed when I signed up, however.
Yeah I hear you. I really appreciate the feedback as well.
We only try to partner with high quality companies. For example this Tokyo one were running right now is with journy, ProductHunt, theSkimm, The Wirecutter, and Conde Nast Traveler. All legitimate companies. It's unfortunate that their emails are seen as spam because that's not good for anyone.
We'll keep this in mind moving forward. Thank you again :-)
I haven't gotten any spammy messages (or gmail has caught them). I've only gotten emails from theSkimm, which is not in my interests but it looks like they put a decent amount of effort in their email. This one guy's terrible terrible experience is not necessarily indicative of anything.
Again, sticking opposing thoughts into two consecutive sentences does not create a good impression of your business. "high quality companies" !== "legitimate companies".
If I want you to email me, I will give you my address. If I haven't done that, there's no legitimate reason to pay a third party for it. 100% of your partners are spammers.
You're confusing the email subscription terms with the giveaways terms. "ever have an never will" refers to the email subscription. You have to specifically sign up separately for giveaways, and they have different terms and conditions from the email subscription.
What an incredible response, have you not read it yourself?
"Our subscribers are too important to us to ever sell their information to someone else. We never have and never will sell users information like that. Our only source of income is subscriptions and occasional advertisements in the free emails. Ruining our reputation to make a few extra bucks would be an extremely stupid decision on our end."
Is at complete odds with:
"With that said, we do run promotions with partners where we give away awesome vacation packages (Mexico and Tokyo recently). If anyone signs up for one of these promotions they are agreeing to the terms and conditions, which clearly state that by signing up for the giveaway the email address will be distributed to all of the partners involved in the giveaway (typically 4-5 other companies)."
You literally sell their information to advertisers (oh no, sorry, your "partners") to make a buck. Acknowledge it, don't preface it with PR bull.
What do you see as the difference between the first and the second paragraph? The fact that you only do it with people entering your promotions? Because that's still your users information.
Yes it's in your TOS, you are still selling personal information to third parties and their unknown partners.
And their partners are extremely spammy at best. They're all trying to force engagement and word of mouth.
Here's an excerpt from one of the intro e-mails I got:
> Welcome to the #SkimmLife! Here's how it's going to work:
> We'll meet you back here, in your inbox, bright and early tomorrow morning (PS If it's Friday or a weekend,
> you'll get theSkimm on Monday). We're a company that respects brunch, so we won't be with you on Saturday and
> Sunday. Can't wait? Here's the most recent Skimm
> Also, download our new app theSkimm for iPhone. It has a service called Skimm Ahead that makes it easier to
> be smarter about the future. Never again will you miss moments like when you vote in a primary or when your
> favorite show is back on Netflix. Best Part? It can integrate directly into your calendar.
> Lastly, good things happen when you share theSkimm! (read: winning prizes, swag, being a Skimm'bassador).
> To get credit for sharing, use your unique link: http://www.theskimm.com/?r=3cbcb2df OR our fancy invite page
> to have friends sign up. See how many people listen to you by checking this page.
> Your morning just got better. Trust us.
Yeah further down they note: "We only try to partner with high quality companies. For example this Tokyo one were running right now is with journy, ProductHunt, theSkimm, The Wirecutter, and Conde Nast Traveler"
I looked at theSkimm and can't figure out how it's related either. Just seems like an email acquisition bartering scheme.
People who want to grow lists quickly all get together. The smaller lists pay for the prizes, the bigger lists pay with exposure. They all pitch a sweepstakes to their subscribers, all entrants end up subscribed to all lists.. everyone wins (allegedly).
I was talking with a younger relative this weekend who is in college and she mentioned TheSkimm and I immediately thought of this thread. Maybe the younger crowd who spends so much time with social apps and other noise find it highly valuable. There's probably a big distrust for mainstream sources which is not unwarranted.
FWIW theSkimm isn't outright spam - they're a fairly popular super-short newsletter that I think does a mix of world news and lifestyle / culture stuff, apparently marketed at women. I subscribe to Finimize (financial news) and Casual Spectator (sports), and theSkimm is often referenced as a similar newsletter.
Not to diminish the annoyance of being on surprise email lists. I agree it's frustrating, and it sounds like Scott's Cheap Flights should have been more clear with their users about the price of their contests.
The difference is that they're not selling people that sign up with them directly on SCF.
They're using a promotional strategy to solicit signups in exchange for a giveaway (people have been doing this for years). They partner with several sites to promote this so everyone grows. Users are explicitly signing up for the giveaway & those TOS state the email will be distributed to the partners.
They are not selling their current users information to partners.
In other words, you might not like the promotion strategy, but that's a one-off, easy-to-change thing. They are not selling email addresses that they got directly via scottscheapflights.com - which is what the GP was insinuating (a bit dishonestly too).
There's a big difference as what's actually happening can be a strategy that you dislike (and they might as well, depending on the outcome), but what the GP is insinuating is that SCF is actually SELLING the data, is completely incorrectly.
I'm not seeing how the two paragraphs are incongruous. The company is selling their brand, not the user info, when they run the promotions. If no-one signs up for the promotion, no user info gets shared. Ultimately it's the users who choose whether they want to sell themselves as a marketing lead in return for a slim chance at winning.
Posting this from below because you're making sound as if they're selling emails, when the terms of the giveaway are stated quite clearly.
>Here's a version that's hosted on ProductHunt - https://giveaway.producthunt.com/landing?promo_id=83848bb5-f...
> By entering this campaign I agree and consent to recieve emails, communications and promotions from Product Hunt Inc., theSkimm (a daily email newsletter to stay in the know), Scott's Cheap Flights, Journy, The Wirecutter and Conde Nast Traveler.
>You can hate the promotion, but you're certainly not required to join it. And, it's certainly not the same thing as Scott selling addresses of people already on his mailing list.
As a consumer, the relevant word in that sentence is not "sell". The point is my email is being given to someone else, to do whatever they feel with it. Why would I care what in what form the original business is compensated?
Well in that case, by signing up for the giveaway, you're consenting to "giving" your email address to ALL of those companies that are sponsoring it.
So in that case, you should have a nice little talk with yourself about whether the trip you want to win is worth 5 new services having your email address.
Either way, the person making that call is YOU, not SCF (or any of the other companies participating).
Can you show me exact notification on the website where he consented to sharing the email address?
And you REALLY believe that using a search on a site suddenly is enough for your private data to be just given to any shady exploitative company on the planet? You really want to live in a world where you're badgered constantly and without pause by ads, scammers and phishers just because you want to use the internet?
Specifically, you might be interested in this text right before the big "enter" button:
> By entering this campaign I agree and consent to recieve emails, communications and promotions from Product Hunt Inc., theSkimm (a daily email newsletter to stay in the know), Scott's Cheap Flights, Journy, The Wirecutter and Conde Nast Traveler.
You can hate the promotion, but you're certainly not required to join it. And, it's certainly not the same thing as Scott selling addresses of people already on his mailing list.
As for this:
> And you REALLY believe that using a search on a site suddenly is enough for your private data to be just given to any shady exploitative company on the planet?
Using your words, can you show me the exact phrasing where that is happening anywhere in this example?
This is amazing but is it the kind of business that can last for more than a few hundred thousand users? At a certain point people get none of the free deals, because too many are trying to book at once, right?
That's a great question. At a certain point... yes. But I think that number is much higher than a few hundred thousand users. If you think about departure cities X destination cities X available dates and times X number of seats, the number is huge. I'm not saying it won't happen, but I think we have a long ways to go before we reach that level.
Yeah, if they're pulling $5/mo from each premium subscriber, that's... well, some pretty easy math. They could put a cap on the userbase if they wanted and still be pulling millions per month just off subscriptions, not even accounting for ad revenue.
I hate to be the one to ask, but how much moat does this actually have? Couldn't Kayak literally just add a subscribe or alert me later input and have their massive infrastructure automate this very thing?
Some deals require specific starting and end destinations to work properly with a specific carrier. Others can require a stopover in a certain city before continuing on.
The really good deals will even be site specific. All this can be done via good expertise. With scraping and this type of logic, you'd get blocked quickly from the major sites.
The thing is that if you're looking for a very specific destination, you'll almost never get the best deals. Flight deals work best for people who are very flexible about destination and timing.
Second this. Some of my friends and I use Scott's emails to discover cheap fares to any destination. We typically don't have any specific destination in mind.
When one of us sees Scott's email with attractive deal, we check Google flights for appropriate dates (typically 7-10 days trip) and ping each other to see who is interested in that trip and dates. Then we just book flights typically within 2-6 hours of receiving email. Afterward we research the destination, decide rest of the itinerary for the trip, and book AirBnBs.
I use Kayak and Google as starting points for every flight search, and I still spend hours and hours finding good fares on good routes.
This is just anecdotal, but if neither Kayak nor Google gets it right enough for me to use them end-to-end, I suspect there's a lot of room for a high-touch, human-intervention kind of searching.
What fascinates me with this story is how low tech everything was. A simple landing page, email list/newsletter, and "value" in the form of travel deals. Anyone can do it, and the barrier of entry is minimal.
So, Scott originally accumulated all those miles working for ThinkProgress? How does that work? You buy the flights and expense them back to the company, pocketing the miles?
Frequent flyer miles (and hotel points) are a massive perk for traveling employees. Most consultants I know finance annual vacations completely on points. Every once in a while, a big company will try to pocket the points for themselves, usually to great outcry--because it's akin to cutting benefits.
The corporate thinking is: "Points are a reward for buying travel. And I'm the one footing the bill." The employee thinking is: "Points are a reward for traveling. And I'm the one on the damn plane."
Personal perks on a corporate card are similar, and again, do the math of how many points you get by channeling $60-100k/yr worth of corporate travel expenses through a credit card.
In Sweden, if you accumulate points while travelling on business but use them for personal flights, the tax department wants you to pay tax on the value of the benefit (likely: how much you would have paid without points). How they can know about it is another matter.
I think at least the larger employers will ask that you keep separate work and private frequent flyer accounts for that purpose, and use your work points only for work flights.
don't most frequent flyer programs require the name on the ticket to match the rewards account? E.g. I can't buy my sister a flight, she flies it, and I get points for it.
That hasn't been my experience. I buy my wife Southwest flights with my points all the time. It's been a while since I flew United, but I don't recall it being an issue there, either.
Yes, it's completely 100% standard practice as other replies already mentioned. What's funny is that the tone of your question suggests he's doing something fraudulent. If you were the company auditor or a government prosecutor, and you didn't know about the standard practice or simply wanted to be a jerk, you could absolutely make a case for fraud. If you were fired or prosecuted for keeping the miles, what would be your counterargument? Everyone else was doing it? That doesn't work for speeding tickets. This is an example of how arbitrary laws can be.
Most companies I have worked for/heard about have the option of 1) using a company card with the company keeping the perks, 2) using your own card and getting reimbursed or, less often, 3) using a company card that is in our name, paid by the company, with all perks going to you. I've seen 3 most often with Diner's Club cards that cover only meals and 2 most often with travel, if you opt for it. I have seen a surprising number of people who do not want to deal with another bill though, and opt for 1, leaving all the perks with the company. I never understood that, but I enjoy any perks I can get.
Yes. This happens in pretty much every company, even if the company has a corporate card. Employees rather buy the tickets themselves and expense the costs.
Just wondering if the guys can automate the scraping part, seems unlikely this is usually information that needs to be handpicked or "moderated" by one or more humans.
Seriously though, automation may not be a good value proposition, even if the companies with the data that SCF is scraping manually want to cooperate. It seems the human scrapers are a fixed cost. It's not getting harder to do manual scraping as new customers come on board. The business is already paying this fixed cost. The business is currently doing well. All the business really needs to do is continue growing and the fixed cost will continue to shrink as a proportion of the business.
Why would the business care in that situation? Reduce from 12 mid-range salaries to 3-4 high salaries? They would do well just to break even on salary expense, so why bother? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Human labor has always been seen as an expensive "disposable" business resource (primarily in the US) and for bussiness to grow that "big" they will need to scale globally, so they have three paths "optimize" human performance, automate web scraping or outsource to a 3rd party country.
From the last three m inclined to think that this will be their answer to scale and only have 3-4 teams with high salaries moderating what gets published and what not.
Speculation: it's possible that the source sites are actively hostile to scraping and intentionally mess with the layout regularly, or may even have ruled out any kind of automation in their ToS - so if you don't want to get sued or blacklisted, you can do no kind of (detectable) scraping.
I tried to build a flight search site a few years back and many sites have measures in place to actively mitigate scraping. It quickly became obvious that I was going to spend more effort getting data than working on the product, so I scrapped the idea.
Like you said, scraping is against ToS so as soon as you get caught, you're cut off until you shell out $$$$ to buy a feed. I suspect the reason they've succeeded here is that they've stuck with a human-based approach.
Can anyone recommend scraping adapters (businesses or tech) that are robust to this sort of thing? I'm talking about something higher level than, say, Beautiful Soup -- something you can configure to point at an endpoint, essentially request a sql row subscription from it, and not have to mind it too much.
Both the traversal/retrieval and data-interpretation parts seem to have interesting aspects when you consider current website design. Some websites make themselves hard even for humans to read (consider why safari reader mode exists).
This seems like a potentially valuable service, in the sense of being a schlep. I wonder how many places have home-grown scraping efforts as part of their business and how annoying it is for them to maintain.
At work we use Mozenda[0] with success, though I can't tell you much beyond that because I'm not involved with that project. I've also heard of Agenty[1].
Maybe you're in a better position to negotiate this if you're them though?
Skyscanner scrape to keep their partner's honest (which has always sounded pretty hostile to me but I guess they're approaching a pretty user hostile marketplace) and with their market share they're able to force their partners to comply with reasonable demands.
>so if you don't want to get sued or blacklisted, you can do no kind of (detectable) scraping.
So why would it be hard to make scraping undetectable, anyway, unless you do it particularly incompetently? In theory, it seems pretty easy: use a browser string that matches an existing popular browser, and make sure to not load anything faster than a human would.
Have you done much scraping in the past? There's normally a lot more to it when javascript is involved, captcha systems etc.
This is obviously helped recently by the relatively new headless modes for Chrome & Firefox, but before that it was using buggy headless implementations or Selenium. These weren't well suited to operations at scale.
That's my main issue with this type of business... can't it be automated? probably a huge NO without legal implications therefore the "human" expenses are high and if we start to think "globally" like the Silicon Valley startups type guys always do, the next logical step is to make a mutual benefit business partnerships with the Airlines. This will end in a war like Airbnb vs Travel Agencies vs Hotel Chains vs Everyone else, were the best price in town will be to go directly to the source rather than to 3rd parties.
If you receive Scott's emails for longer than one week, you will quickly have the answer to your question "why not to scrap".
I think enough people turn to premium member exactly because a personal touch of Scott and his team. You have this feeling this is not simple aggregate -- I always enjoy reading Scott little tips "when you buy ticket to certain city, don't forget to visit specific point of interest". I end up researching those and always came up with fun info, making me believe Scott is pro and knows what he is doing/researching for me. A scrapper will be inhumane and you will quickly realize that and most likely convert 1% of what they convert.
Scott - I am very curious how did you initially advertise your newsletter? First weeks/months you were live - how did you get your initial traffic?
I recently subscribed to the UK version of this (https://www.jacksflightclub.co.uk). I didn't know there was a US version, I guess there might be lots of similar services. I wonder who came first.
We have plenty of copycats out there (one of the downsides of us trying to share our learnings online haha). I'd just look at when the domains were purchased if you want to know who was first ;)
Also, we send deals from almost every continent (launching Africa by the end of the year).
Still looking forward to you having dedicated emails for international business class tickets. I know the tickets won't be cheap that the total cash savings on cheap seats can be significant. Here's hoping!
It's interesting that they employ a dozen flight searchers who manually look all day. Are there any flight prices APIs that can be scraped, looking for significant outliers?
> Great question. We get this one a lot and have been approached by quite a few developers who say they could easily build us something like this.
Is it possible? Sure.
Would it be better? I doubt it.
Say we use Google's flight API. The cost per query is 3.5 cents. Departure airports X destination airports X available dates X 3.5 cents = a ridiculous amount of money.
Or we build a scraper. It would be cheaper than the API, but we'd still need the human element to make sure it's actually a good deal. We take into account number of stops, airlines, etc.
I see potential for a computer/human combo in the future, but right now our flight searchers are doing great and we don't feel that automating the process would make the business significantly better.
Interesting that they have been able to raise prices over time - a fixed number of cheap seats available at any moment means the more users on the email list, the less likely an individual user will be able to extract value from the list - hence list growth actually reduces the value it delivers.
I guess fear of missing out is a strong sales tool!
I've been on the list for a little while. I havnt booked any flights from the deals yet because I've got a fair bit of traveling planned already this year but I'm starting to look at flights for next year. Check out the list if you havnt. I live in chicago and flights anywhere are usually $500 or less.
>We actually don't do a ton of A/B testing or worry much about open and click rates, and here's why: Our revenue model is subscription based. We don't take any commissions or have any ads in the premium emails. Our only incentive is to keep premium subscribers happy.
I find this a surprising statement -- aren't the emails the primary channel for trying to convince a free user to upgrade to paid? Why not try A/B testing to try and boost that percentage from the ~10% to something higher?
He did say they "don't do a ton," so they are definitely doing some, maybe that's where?
That said, I do appreciate the sentiment here. This is a different context entirely, but in my ecomm past a/b testing was often employed by those seeking the politically safest growth path. I considered it proactive CYA where Product Managers would prefer premature optimization over having an opinion on what's best for the user.
I witnessed what I considered an unhealthy amount of a/b testing resources spent on micro adjustments eg moving a buy button a few pixels or changing the color slightly. There was very little calculated risk taking, which can be enabled with A/B testing employed differently. There's absolutely a place for those kinds of optimizations but I think they come much later in product maturity than when many organizations actually begin using them.
Then there's an entire other discussion about understanding the math behind building a relevant test and interpreting the results.
You're right. We do some A/B testing when we're running promotions (test headlines, CTAs, etc.) but that's about it. There is a lot that goes into correctly running split tests on the website and interpreting those results. We decided that once something is working good enough we'd focus on other areas of the business. However, now that the team is larger and we have resources to dedicate to testing and optimizing we will likely start doing this by the end of the year.
Like you said, moving buttons and changing colors is really just a waste of time. You have to spend the time to do the analytics research, get customer feedback, etc. to first understand the problem so you can come up with a solution. Changing the color of a button doesn't solve a problem. Rather than wasting resources on doing conversion optimization the wrong way, we've decided to hold off until we can do it the right way.
And I would bet in a large subset of those cases it's because the person implementing those tests and the person interpreting the results aren't the same. And that neither understands basic statistical hypothesis testing.
Solid ideas but I think they may struggle with lower margins. With flights you save X00s but with Amazon X0s. Saw this with all the Airbnb for...since hotel replacement is similarly a higher margin/value purchase.
On that note you may be able to this with cars, hotels, real estate, luxury watches, computers, etc
Awesome writeup. It's great to see companies that can make this work without taking any funding. I had no idea there were so many people behind this.
I have nothing to add except that I've been a very happy paid customer for several months now. These guys run a fantastic service that has been worth every penny. Yes, some travel companies that have extensive infrastructure could probably do what is being done here, but they don't.
I'm not a fan of the fact that on their website the testimonials are the same (with the currency changed) no matter what location I choose.
The destinations in the locations are of course also the same, so it just kinda seems like they are trying to trick me. Kind of reinforcing the feeling I generally get from this kind of business. If they have that many happy users, they could at least get real testimonials from each place.
I'm not a fan of the fact that on their website the testimonials are the same (with the currency changed) no matter what location I choose.
The destinations in the locations are of course also the same, so it just kinda seems like they are trying to trick me. Kind of reinforcing the feeling I generally get from this kind of business. If they have that many happy users, they could at least get real testimonials from each place.
As far as I can tell Theflightdeal is basically the same service -- a small army of people searches for fares (HOPEFULLY WITH SOME AUTOMATION!), checks whether there are any results whose price is very low relative to historical prices they have logged for that route, and publishes a blog post if the price is very low. They have little blurbs about each destination prewritten so it's very easy to make the blog post once they see a good fare. ("Good deal" is computed either on a cents-per-mile basis or on a low-price-per-segment basis for certain special routes.) Often a human reads through the fare rules (I'm guessing they just use expertflyer, heh) and adds a bit of extra color like booking class, advance purchase restrictions, purchase-by date, etc. to help save people some time. That blog gets money from affiliate revenue (click thru from their blog post and book travel and they often earn a percentage). Very clever, tremendously successful in the niche.
Looker pivoted into doing something similar but with a mobile app (after first trying to do REALLY hard big-data work I think). They seem to perform the same kind of analysis, but with more automation and less reliance on spreadsheet. They use a really interesting input stream (real-time search query results from a GDS -- so, actual booked flights) to alert people when a route they care about is cheap vs typical prices.
Other services exist which do the same thing but for premium-cabin travel; these services tend not to be public facing and try to charge ridiculous prices in part because J/F travel carries a certain cachet and also in part because those deals tend to be considerably more fragile.
There are afaict somewhere like 10-100 of these "deal newsletter" business models doing basically the same work as the deal blogs but trying to make money on subscriptions. Very clever, I definitely respect the hustle.
