If you click on the “Travel and Flight” section on Singpromos or Singsales, you will see a whole bunch of airlines and their “limited time” promotion. Travelling has become increasingly more affordable over the years with its highly competitive air ticket prices and the wide variety of accommodation available. However, with plentiful options also comes a desire to be picky and find the cheapest price possible.
If we were to go the same place with the same experience at a cheaper price, why not? Hence, leading to the emergence of many comparison sites/apps online such as Skyscanner, Trivago, Kayak and even Google Flights.
As far as I am aware of, however, there’s no one app that compares ALL flight variables – the choice of airline, dates, price and extra surcharges.
This is what the app, Hopper can do for you. Hopper is a mobile travel app that predicts the best time for you to travel and notifies you whenever there are valuable deals.
Not just that, Hopper reveals the hidden fares even before you choose to book the ticket, hence helping to guarantee the cheapest tickets possible.
Your pre-travel itinerary
Simply click on their app and specify your departure and arrival destination. Filter your choices—decide whether you only want the “basic fare” or with add-ons.
Hopper then calculates and generates the price trends on a calendar with different colour indications —yellow, red and green. This allows you to easily see, in a single glance, when it is the best time to visit the country of your choice. How efficient is that!
Hopper will scan and skim through over 250 airlines worldwide and recommend whether you should “wait” or “book” based on their analysis and trends.
En-route to payment
When you presumably choose your best dates, you will be brought to your travel date-to-price summary and analysis. The analysis is shown under “price prediction”.
In addition, they provide “travel tips” that will rearrange/suggest better choices for you—including details such as layovers!
The booking process is similar to that of any sites online. You can save your passenger details for a quicker and smoother process for future bookings.
If they recommend you to “wait”, simply click on the binoculars icon and they will send you notifications whenever there’s a price drop. Or, take note of the “watch” section of the app that consolidates all your “want-to-visit” destinations
How Hopper does it
The vast amount of big data in the form of trillion of flight prices and power of the internet allows Hopper to build and substantiate their app. As such, they are confident to ensure 95% accuracy for maximum customer satisfaction.
Hopper adopts a more uncommon business model as they provide recommendations in the best interest for users and recommend their passengers to “wait” instead of book instantaneously when the prices are not optimal.
The Hopper team reflected that this is exactly the advantage that mobile-app businesses should leverage on given its “very high push-notification-enabled rate”. Furthermore, in exchange for giving passengers pricing truth, Hopper wins back trust and loyalty from their customers. Hopper currently sells $1 million worth of flights and 90% of their revenue comes from push notifications.
As of now, Hopper doesn’t seem interested in bringing their app to desktop anytime soon. Besides, mobile app experience would be more accessible and convenient.
Cons:
No business and first class—only offers economy class. If you’re booking business, first-class tickets, high chances are that you downloaded this app out of curiosity 🙂
There is also a USD$5 additional fee for using this app.
