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Airline travel is becoming increasingly modernized with travel metasearch engines such as Skyscanner and Kayak collating airfares and allowing customers to find the cheapest deals. The Hopper app provides an innovative service, via a new feature called Flex Watch which was launched on 14 September. This differs from other travel search engines by allowing customers to search for very personalized flight deals and adapting recommendations according to user preferences. Flex Watch also alerts users of the best moment to book their flights, helping them to get the lowest prices.

The app provides consumers with information about flight prices from over 250 airlines across the globe and is available for download for iOS and will soon be available for Android.  Consumers can be very vague in their preferences, for example they may specify a month or a range of months in which they would like to travel, the ideal length of their trip and the destination. Furthermore, the destination need not be as precise as a city and the consumer can choose to search for states, countries, regions, continents or simple anywhere. The app will notify customers of flights matching their preferences, and inform them as to whether they should buy now or wait for prices to lower. This is achieved through a huge amount of data collection, which is gathered and analyzed by Hopper’s data-science team, who develop algorithms that analyze pricing trends. These algorithms are then used to predict flight prices. Based in Montreal, QC, and Cambridge, MA, Hopper was founded in 2015. The innovative company is changing the way consumers plan and book flights by taking advantage of vast quantities of data in the form of flight prices. With the new feature Flex Watch they go one step further, recognizing users likes and dislikes and thus providing increasingly personalized recommendations over time.

There is a trend for increasingly varying ways for people to plan their vacations, be it by integrating the reality experience into browsing, or providing 360-degree videos of potential destinations. Is the way we think about travel being revolutionized by the advance of technology? How else could the travel industry be innovated to enhance the consumer’s experience?