3 ms·
Still don't see the appeal. I get better and quicker results from theflightdeal.com and flyertalk.
by lavezzi 9y ago
Still don't see the appeal. I get better and quicker results from theflightdeal.com and flyertalk.
- mherdeg 9y agoAs far as I can tell Theflightdeal is basically the same service -- a small army of people searches for fares (HOPEFULLY WITH SOME AUTOMATION!), checks whether there are any results whose price is very low relative to historical prices they have logged for that route, and publishes a blog post if the price is very low. They have little blurbs about each destination prewritten so it's very easy to make the blog post once they see a good fare. ("Good deal" is computed either on a cents-per-mile basis or on a low-price-per-segment basis for certain special routes.) Often a human reads through the fare rules (I'm guessing they just use expertflyer, heh) and adds a bit of extra color like booking class, advance purchase restrictions, purchase-by date, etc. to help save people some time. That blog gets money from affiliate revenue (click thru from their blog post and book travel and they often earn a percentage). Very clever, tremendously successful in the niche. Looker pivoted into doing something similar but with a mobile app (after first trying to do REALLY hard big-data work I think). They seem to perform the same kind of analysis, but with more automation and less reliance on spreadsheet. They use a really interesting input stream (real-time search query results from a GDS -- so, actual booked flights) to alert people when a route they care about is cheap vs typical prices. Other services exist which do the same thing but for premium-cabin travel; these services tend not to be public facing and try to charge ridiculous prices in part because J/F travel carries a certain cachet and also in part because those deals tend to be considerably more fragile. There are afaict somewhere like 10-100 of these "deal newsletter" business models doing basically the same work as the deal blogs but trying to make money on subscriptions. Very clever, I definitely respect the hustle.