Wow! Thanks Derek. Great post; exactly what we were thinking in building the product. Lots of iterating to go to get it working seamlessly, but exciting times ahead. Would love your feedback when you get around to using the product.
This is so useful. I noticed their flexibility options are the usual +/- n days, but it would be more useful for me if there was an option to only + or - but not both. For example, let's say you want to leave on the 7th, but the 8th and 9th are doable, just less ideal because you'll have one or two days fewer to spend at your destination. With the current system you'd have to choose the 8th and then say +/- 1, which screws you over if the finders try their hardest to get the exact day you requested.
I just discovered you need to pay the finder's fee in advance. While this might get more finders to use the site because they won't be afraid of their efforts going to waste, this is going to deter a lot of customers who are still shopping around and only want to fly if they can get a better rate than they expected.
Part of me thinks if you made "starting contests" free for customers, you'd get more traction. On the other hand the other part of me thinks that you've already tried this approach, or at least thought about it. So, which part of me is right?
Also two tiny notes about your front page:
1. I, personally, get really pissed when I'm informed about fees of a service in any step of the process other than the first one. So, I'd suggest show the fees somewhere above the fold.
2. This is more of a UX thing. In the "How it works" box, make the titles clickable.
I love the idea. Simple, yet has a lot of potential. Will be start my own contest someday soon.
Definitely agree with #2, I spent a little too long trying to click the titles. The "Next Step" button should also be a color other than white so it stands out more.
I think this is an awesome idea, though! Will definitely use it in the future.
My first thought was: what's to stop someone from waiting for some responses and then running over to Kayak to book once they know the best dates/airlines.
But it looks like they take the finder's fee upfront. It would be nice if there were an option to only pay the finder's fee if someone significantly beats the best price you were able to find.
Everyone does at least an _initial_ search to get an idea of price when they're considering a trip, right? And presumably the experts have an idea of the typical price on given routes and can decide whether the "price to beat" is attainable?
We tried your suggested method, but there were too many complications in practice. Many people quoted fake prices and, of course, prices and availability change regularly.
Most of all, we'd rather not create a competitive relationship with the customer. The idea of the concept is to relieve you of all the time and stress related to flight search (especially on more complex itineraries). So asking you to first search yourself and post a price is somewhat contrary to our vision.
We may revert to this method in future, because we're constantly testing, but at this stage we think we have a reasonable balance between customer and expert.
I agree....I think there is more than enough incompetence and inefficiency in this industry that you will have plenty of customers who won't think twice about the fee, as long as you can ensure that they are getting a competent person planning their flight, and the result will be the best that can be done.
I think so too. I have a flight coming up and was actually willing to try the service and pay the fee if the price found would be less than I usually pay for the trip. I went as far as entering the details and providing my email address. But as soon as I saw the request to pay, I closed the page. I have reasons to believe that the option I already have (and have used in the past) would be hard to beat. So I'm not willing to pay upfront.
Just my 2 cents.
UPDATE: I think an ideal solution would be if you at least could quote a price before I had to choose whether to pay or not.
I'm also willing to pay, but only once I know what I'm paying for. I can find the flight I want for (say) $500. If this service can get it to me for $400, great! But I'm only going to enter my credit card details _after_ that's been established. Otherwise, what if your "experts" can only find something for $480? Or $525?
This seems totally self-evident to me. Maybe I missed something.
Keep in mind that real people are searching on the other end, so there needs to be a balance between expended effort and income. We tried what you're suggesting, but it just didn't work.
As per your example, let's say I find a flight for $400. Would you pay without seeing details? If not, would you paying seeing the details, but without booking instructions? If not, would you pay after booking even if it meant the hassel of returning to our site, pulling out your CC details and then paying?
Our experience is that only a fraction of people will pay in this scenario.
This aside, we are targeting people who we can help the most. That is, people flying to remote places, or on complex itineraries, or who just want to absolve themselves of the stress. In our testing, these people have no problem paying up front. And if they're not happy, we do everything we can to help.
The real challenge of this business is managing the interactions between the two sides of our marketplace. Most of our early assumptions were proven false. :)
let's say I find a flight for $400.
Would you pay without seeing details?
Sure. I mean, I would have to trust your system, but you're not emitting any scammy signals, so I basically do.
we are targeting people who we can help
the most. That is, people flying to remote
places, or on complex itineraries, or who
just want to absolve themselves of the stress.
While I like the idea, I can see this as a problem too.
Those who want a peace of mind booking are probably running their flights on corporate accounts, are miles collecting or have established flight booking relationships. And price sensitive customers are most likely going to try finding the best deal themselves. Maybe the best way to solve that would be to give for 24h a best-price guarantee. Just for the "peace of mind" for the consumer - I am sure only a very low percentage is ever going to make use of it.
* Flying for the first time to Australia. Expedia gives you a price from Sydney to Perth for $500. Unbeknownst to you, there's a discount airline called "XXXXX" who does this leg for $150. Sure you could find it if you searched enough, but why not just pay $29 to crowd-source it? Most travel agents will not volunteer budget airlines, neither will many OTAs.
* You're flying from Buenos Aires to Toronto. It's Xmas and Kayak is quoting $1400. You can't find better anywhere and seats are disappearing fast. You put up a contest for $29 and an expert suggests booking to Ottawa and hopping off in Toronto to save over $400 each. They also suggest going to Montreal instead, paying $40 for a bus, and saving $900 each. Again, you could work this out yourself eventually, but why not just pay $29?
Consider these edge-case examples:
* You are relocating to another country but need to take your 3 cats. It will take you 5+ hours to find out exactly how to transport your cats. There are lots of regulations, especially when flying during winter. Why not just pay $29 and get someone who's flown with pets to save you many hours. (This is a real example from Flightfox.)
* You are flying with a group of 20 people from the US to Australia. You pay $29 and an expert gets in contact with an agent who has specific consolidated stock with an airline. You save $600 per person compared to the absolute cheapest price online. (This is a real example from Flightfox.)
Then of course there's premium class and using FF points. We've saved $5,000+ on exactly the same flights for business class travellers. Also, people don't realise the power of FF points. You can get RTW for 140k. But most people use 120k for simple return flights. If they do 2x return coach flights with FF points, they could almost have booked a RTW in _business class_ and flown many more segments than the 2 flights put together.
Have you considered allowing people to optimize for something other than cost? I'd be very interested in paying people to find me mileage runs - that is, itineraries that minimize the cost per mile.
Yes, absolutely. You could do that know, but we need to build our expert base a little larger before we target this market specifically. Also, we need to find a way to add these options without confusing the average person. We're pretty obsessed with analytics and we've seen that even just minor details confuse people and reduce conversions. Maybe a separate menu/link/section/subdomain is needed.
Extremely interesting.....a few questions that come to mind for me:
1. Is it worthwhile using for simple flights? Ie: Toronto to las Vegas, direct?
2. Can it handle extremely complex (maybe even almost freeform) scenarios beyond the displayed +\- x days, such as: I have 14 days available (but would settle for an 11 day trip), and I can take travel any time between these dates, and I am willing to travel to a, b, or c - what are my options? (This is getting into the realm of travel agent services....for which I would gladly pay, assuming one might actually be able to find a competent one through this site).
3. Does the service tend to work much less well in Canada compared to the US?
4. Is it conceivable that if this service is successful enough (market penetration wise), that some of the optimizations used may start to disappear, or affect pricing from airlines?
5. Any plans of extending it to vacations (flight, hotel, all-inclusive)?
6. You mention frequent flyer plans on the site - for a person who has no clue, any (long term) plans for offering sign up for those types of things integrated with your service?
7. Are you running some customized search tools in house, or does each person fulfilling contests just using their own secret tips and tricks?
Good luck on this, truly one of the most interesting initiatives I've heard of in a very long time!
1. Depends on your expectations. If the absolute lowest price is found on Kayak.com, then that's the price you'll get. We can't change that, but we can save you lots of time by making sure that's the lowest price. Of course, we do save a lot of people money on short trips, but the longer the better.
2. Yes, absolutely. Just describe your requirements in the comments section and make sure you work with the experts to keep them on the right track. This is really where we can save the most for you.
3. No, not at all. This is a global service. It works best when you're flying to lesser know places because our experts may have local knowledge that helps get better prices than you know.
4. Only a very small percentage of winning flights use loopholes. But yes, they can and do disappear. Luckily, because we're "human-powered" and because these loopholes are discovered by humans, it's more likely you'll get access to loophole savings on Flightfox.
5. Yes, maybe, probably, not sure :)
6. We need to reach critical mass to really leverage the power of frequent flyer points. We'll get there soon :)
7. At this stage, it's all human powered. We're only a few weeks old, so we hope to evolve. Some of our experts claim to use custom software. There are definitely lots of manual tricks and tips too.
I'm thinking you should quickly rename it to Tripfox, TripBounty, or something else. It seems like the real value here is replacing travel agents more comprehensively than something like Kayak does.
Many thanks. You're spot on. And it's so obvious in hindsight, but alas.
We've already had a contest asking for accomm recommendations and it worked surprisingly well. That person paid a $200 finder's fee and it was great to see experts who'd been to the same places recounting their experiences in detail and giving highly practical advice. Of course you can get this for free elsewhere, but the whole package is worth paying for. This person saved a fortune on the flights alone.
What is the difference in price really going to be, for what option you choose? I'm willing to through away $30 on a gamble of getting a cheaper flight than I can usually find (and I consider myself pretty good at flight finding), but they offer a higher-paid option and it's not clear what benefits that will have.
Flightfox is still very much an MVP. We're changing pricing regularly, including the associated copy. Essentially, you should choose a price based on the value you expect. For a simple overseas flight on which you just want peace of mind (that you're getting the best price), just go for the cheapest option.
At the other extreme, we've had a group of 20 people flying overseas, so paying $200 is not unreasonable in this case. We saved this customer over $10,000. One of the experts achieved this using an agent who had consolidated stock (discounted) directly with an airline. This price was unmatched online, so it made sense for the contest holder to get experts working to this level.
Appreciate the feedback; we're so far finding it a little difficult to articulate our variable pricing.
Some people just want to absolve themselves of the stress, some want the absolute lowest price, some want general advice, and others want complicated itineraries built using frequent flyer points. When we had all of those options set at different prices, people just got confused. :)
Everyone here seems so satisfied, but to be honest I am still skeptical. It would be nice in the "browse flights wanted" screen you showed some baseline price for the requested flight (e.g. automated kayak search, though i'm guessing that is in violation of their TOS. perhaps you can just have a link to the query) so that potential customers could see some samples of the kind of savings to expect.
We used to do this, but there was too much contention around the base price. Imagine if we showed a base price of $1000 and on your favourite search engine you saw $950. This created an adversarial situation with our flyers.
Then we had the issue of a specific requirement in the comments (e.g. I'm relocating to another country with my two pets). The experts would put up the full cost of flying with the pets, but then our base price would undercut them because no flight API handles pets.
Then we used virtual assistants to find the base prices considering the comments, but of course they couldn't interpret the comments properly. E.g. someone said they didn't want red-eye flights, but the VA didn't understand what that meant and gave a red-eye price that was hundreds below the expert prices.
Sorry for the long reply, but would love to hear any suggestions around this. At the moment we're trying to create a better flyer-expert relationship.
May I suggest adding more flexible options? I often find myself wanting to plan a vacation but not knowing where or when I want to go - on traditional travel sites, this is a problem, because everything has to be run through an algorithm, but as a crowdsourcer, you might be able to get away with saying 'two week trip, sometime between August and November', and just give me good options.
Hm, to do this though, you'd need to have a lot more qualifying questions. I have been a travel agent for 10 years, and it is difficult to find the "right" holiday for someone without a lot of information (ie budget, what they like to do, where they have been/stayed before and what they liked/didn't like, etc).
That said, and even as a competitor, it is a really cool idea!
Mmm, that's true. Even if it was just a list of countries, though, I don't think the flight info has to be more detailed than that; you're generally going to be flying into a city anyways, so it's not like knowing that someone likes hiking will help too much. I'd be happy to have someone find me a cheap flight to somewhere-in-south-america-really-I-don't-care-where-or-when.
This needs a little more automation (maybe a tie-in with Expedia/Kayak/whatever) so that the flight can be booked and verified booked.
Here's my problem (going with one of the examples quoted, flying from Buenes Aires to Toronto): one of the suggestions is to fly to Montreal and take a bus. But what if I _don't_ want the hassle of going from airport to greyhound to bus, only to be dropped into the middle of T'o in the middle of the night? As it stands currently, I can get a refund only if I can find a cheaper flight; but in many cases it's hard to beat the price of a shitty flight + slumming it for 12 hours on the road. So you're SOL.
A better solution, IMHO, is to offer the option of booking right there. Then you can also verify if the expert's suggested itinerary is valid or not. Then you also know that the customer booked and the 'expert' can get paid. What about abuse, you say? Three strikes and you're out: if a person puts up a bounty and doesn't book the flight 3 times, just kick 'em out.
Here's my problem (going with one of the examples quoted, flying from Buenes Aires to Toronto): one of the suggestions is to fly to Montreal and take a bus. But what if I _don't_ want the hassle of going from airport to greyhound to bus, only to be dropped into the middle of T'o in the middle of the night? As it stands currently, I can get a refund only if I can find a cheaper flight; but in many cases it's hard to beat the price of a shitty flight + slumming it for 12 hours on the road. So you're SOL.
That seems to be accounted for with the three 'flexibility' questions contest creators are asked; whether they will fly with any airline including discount airlines, whether they'll consider ground transport to nearby airports, and whether they'll consider multiple stops and long layover times, respectively.
I think this seems like a fantastic idea. I really hope it continues to expand.
I am taking the family on a US domestic trip in a few months and have already started the process of flight-searching. I'd be willing to try out something like this, even just for the novelty. However, with so many international flights, the list inadvertently seemed to alienate simple domestic flights.
I wanted to see more examples of my type of trip (business class, simple domestic flight), but wasn't really sure how to do that. I searched through the first 3-4 pages before deciding I would have liked some filter controls on the list. I wanted to see what kind of savings people were finding and what types of trips were being posted. Basically, a way to determine if my trip met the right criteria for a contest and if it was feasible to use the service.
That said, I understand my trip may not be the immediate target market. Nevertheless, I'm going to keep watching this because I really like the concept.
If you think you could get value from experts do the searching and giving suggestions, then give it a try and we'll refund you if you aren't satisfied. But if you're just flying between two large cities, you really are better off going to AA, Southwest or whomever.
Flying domestic in your home country really is not the best use of Flightfox. You know all the airlines, you've heard the anecdotes regarding cheap prices, and prices are already low for domestic.
On the other hand, if you fly RTW, to a different continent, using FF points, to many cities, etc, the expert skill and local knowledge of our experts can save you a small fortune.
As a potential expert/buyer, I'd love to see what the results look like (and the comments on the entries as well), but it looks like those can only be viewed by the contest owner. Any way to post some examples?
(and who is this MrHyde fellow who wins everything?)
The experts tend to keep their methods to themselves. Some have trade secrets, but in the simplest cases, it takes time to find the best airports and connections, so they'd rather not share the info. They've even suggested we hide the dates because it takes time to find the cheapest dates when someone has flexibility.
MrHyde is relatively new. The winners go in waves. As you can imagine, our experts keep flying around the world and neglecting Flightfox :)
I just added detailed examples to another comment on this page. Please see below (or above).
Most of the best examples involve better routing, special offers or FF points. We've saved people $10k+ on group bookings, $5k+ on premium class, $1k+ on multi-city, etc, etc, etc. And in one case, a customer beat our experts by $700 by finding a glitch on Expedia. Of course we refunded him and offered a free contest if he dared to return.
On average, we save people 20%+ on long-haul multi-city flights. This isn't a guarantee, but the results from a test we ran on real flight contests.
We have a lot of work to do to find the best balance between the amount of info we show. We're looking for another engineer right now in the hope of being able to iterate much more quickly.
Since you are asking for fees when a user creates a contest, you should provide case-studies of savings on similar flight searches in the past (also include cost-benefits over other flight search engines). May be, even allow the user to extend the contest duration (with some constraints). Doing this should give a better assurance to the user.
I believe your service has the potential to do well in this market, particularly considering there are many variables involved in flight searches.
Make this for group travel arrangements and you will be golden. Personal travel is good enough right now, but the hassles of group traveling still exists. I would definitely pay you a finders fee to book a cheaper Vegas trip for my 10 friends.
I daydreamed of something like this 2½ years ago. See http://sivers.org/semi-expert
Thanks for making this come true.