👋 Hey everyone
Wings finds the lowest prices to places you want to travel. We monitor millions of flights every day and let you know when to buy.
The idea for Wings was inspired by popular newsletter, Scott’s Cheap Flights. We’re big fans of Scott’s product, but as engineers we saw an opportunity to build a more personalized and efficient service with software.
We also thought it would be easy! And admittedly, it’s been a lot harder than we thought. 😅
Getting access to reliable flight data and building a system to ingest millions of prices each day proved to be major challenges. But for us as engineers, building reliable marketing channels and getting our first paying customers was the hardest. Props to anyone who is getting out there and making every day 💪
We’ve had a blast building Wings and are glad we stuck with it. Over the last year, we challenged ourselves to build towards something unique in the travel space. After countless conversations with customers, we landed on a product that promises:
👩💻 Personalization
Users can specify when and where they want to travel making our product less spammy and more relevant to our users. Instead of sending a single deal to all our subscribers, each user gets a different deal every day based on what they care about most.
🤖 Automation
Because our system uses software to analyze flight prices, we can find more deals than human-powered services. We look at the prices millions of international flights daily - something that is hard to replicate with a team of human flight finders.
🔥 Deal frequency
Because we find deals more efficiently than our competitors, we can send out more deals. Our free product sends about the same number of deals as comparable paid products.
🙏 Ease of use
We link users directly to the itineraries that are cheapest, instead of requiring them to hunt down the deal themselves.
Hey @rrhoover!
Great question. It comes down to simplifying the problem, and layering in unique personalization.
Hopper's goal is to predict exactly how prices will change in the future. We've simplified the problem by asking: are there any great deals available today? From our research and model development, prices are too erratic to make precise predictions about the future. Our customers have responded well to the simplicity and clarity of our recommendations.
What we're really excited about are the personalization features built on top of the price discovery engine. This is where we see ourselves pulling away from the competition. Today, you can specify broader regions you'd like to travel to, and flexible travel dates. We're introducing Trips (PH launch coming soon!), which will let customers track specific travel plans, much like Hopper. Beyond that, we're building out awareness of airline miles and points, as well as flexible departure cities (think: resident of CT can leave from Boston or NYC). We're working closer with customers to make sure that our trip-planning tools map 1-to-1 with how they think about travel.
We've found it helpful to think of our product as more of a next-generation travel agent. Our sophistication comes from our ability to take more of our customer's needs into account, and understand their priorities beyond price.
Hope that's helpful, and thanks so much for making this awesome community 😻
Hey @amrith!
It's not just clickbait! 😋
In our back-tests, we found that the deals we sent out are, on average, 50% cheaper than the average price for a given route (excluding holidays). It turns out that booking at the right time has a huge impact on price, so sniping the moment when tickets go on sale is essential.
P.S. Thanks again for helping me with my Twitter handle yesterday 💌
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