LIFETIME OF ACHIEVEMENT

Hopper : Establishing a travel business “ For the first few months working with Hopper , it was absolutely tiny ,” says Smith . “ Our first major hit with consumers was our price prediction on air travel . So we created an algorithm that ingested trillions of price points on data that could reliably predict the future price of flights and released that to the public . This product got some great early traction , so we decided to build the entire company around that .”

Before long , Hopper launched its app in 2015 . A mobile-only company , it ’ s clear to see its fintech capabilities are what set it apart in the travel bookings and marketplace spaces . Selling flights from 2016 , Hopper would offer customers guidance on pricing for flights , alerting customers on price booking volatilities . Although flight sales represented “ a few hundred million dollars of income ” for Hopper at this point , the issue Smith and the rest of the Hopper team found is that in air travel , “ there ’ s a small margin ” for profitability .

Smith adds : “ This is why the largest travel companies in the world , the likes of Airbnb and Booking . com , don ’ t even sell air travel . They mostly focus on lodging , where the margins are typically , in order of magnitude , greater .”

The conundrum of price prediction scalability “ We had this challenge presented to us ,” explains Smith . “ We have this popular price prediction product , but it ’ s not really a scalable business model . How do we build a business around this product feature we made ?”

First up for Hopper was – in the same vein as its industry counterparts – moving into the lodging industry in 2019 . Reappropriating its prediction product ,

Hopper shifted from a flight prediction operation exclusively , to a lodging prediction operation too .

“ We became a hotel booking app ,” adds Smith . Not happy to stop there , Hopper added car rentals in 2020 before adding vacation rentals just last year . Now , Hopper is a place “ where you can book your entire trip for you , your friends , your family , whomever ”. Scaling into different industries is one thing , but Hopper leveraged its proprietary tech to further extend its capabilities as well , embedding additional financial options into its packaged trips .

As Smith explains : “ We started a business unit that we call FinTech , where we started creating risk-based ancillary products that consumers could purchase , that could mitigate anxiety about price volatility or anxiety about the replacement value of their trip .”

18 September 2023