Flight Penguin is a browser extension that takes the pain out of flight search. We search more flights, rank them based on how painful they are, and display them in a simple, visual way to make decision making easy... all without ads or other dark patterns.
I was an avid Hipmunk user - Hipmunk made finding a comfortable, affordable flight easy. I was heartbroken when it was shut down by Concur and elated when Adam reached out about an opportunity to bring it back. Building Flight Penguin has been a labor of love - we're working hard to make it easy to plan your flights and get convenient, pleasant trips.
@rickyyean It definitely is from Grumo Media. The original video was my introduction to Hipmunk, and the story behind someone starting their own media company with a loveletter to a product they adored resonated. Even though the Grumo team has professional voice artists these days, we really wanted Miguel to provide the recording as a callback.
The extension works great, but what does the revenue model of this kind of product look like?
You mention "selling information about the user's search intent", how much of my information does a browser extension actually have access to? You can read my location, full browser history and I need to log in to my google account. It's not really clear why i need to log in and what info I'm giving up when using the extension.
Seeing the browser windows pop-up and locally automatically being index is really cool from a tech standpoint, but pretty creepy from a privacy standpoint.
I think this could be improved a lot by being a little more transparent on that subject. The product works great but if i'm paying with all my personal info, I, personally, might rather do a couple extra searches on a different site with a much worse user experience. But i'd love to make an informed decision on it.
@jelmt There's no revenue model at the moment. We'll certainly be communicating when that changes. Our plan is to sell search intent data, and we'll be extremely clear about what data is used. Selling search intent data is our most likely path towards monetization, but we are also considering a freemium model and potentially referral revenue related to bookings. I hear your desire for more complete documentation of what data is collected and shared - I'll see what we can do there. In the meantime, here's a short, informal writeup...
Re: Logins - there are two reasons:
1.) When a user reports an issue to us, it is much easier to find any issues in our error reporting stack. if we have their name and email address attached to the issue as opposed to asking them for all the search terms, time of issue, etc. and then hunting through to see if we've already found (and hopefully fixed) the issue. This practice started when we were a paid subscription, and I've found it useful to continue, especially with a very small team supporting a set of highly asynchronous interactions with scripts running across multiple websites and pushing data back to a common source.
2.) There are contractual requirements for some of the data that we've purchased to be protected from copies of those databases being made. Placing it behind an auth wall and leveraging account based rate limiting for API endpoints met our partners' needs.
Re: any data going back to us
* Errors are sent to us via Sentry, and include the stack trace and your name+email address for easy correlation
* Search progress data (e.g. a search was made, a flight selection was made) is sent to google analytics with no identifiable information. Used for tracking usage data.
* Feature usage data (e.g. filter was applied) is sent via google analytics with no identifiable information. This is used to help us identify which features are being used and how effective our solutions are.
@maxmorlocke exactly the transparency/write-up I was looking for, thanks for taking the time.
Hope monetization in this way works out and it never gets in the way of user experience, which seems to be what all competitors (and hipmunk?) suffer(ed) from. Litigation from competitors and airlines is going to be rough, but that's a clear sign you're doing things right. Kudos!
The only search engine that can pull in Southwest and Frontier too. Can order by travel time and how many stops. I use for every flight I even think about buying.
I clicked add to Safari (because I use Safari) and it flipped me over to Chrome. Looks like there isn't a Safari option anymore. Fine. Edit the site then!
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