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Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

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Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#51

Post by basseq »

triangleman wrote: post #30

So, Scott originally accumulated all those miles working for ThinkProgress? How does that work? You buy the flights and expense them back to the company, pocketing the miles?

Frequent flyer miles (and hotel points) are a massive perk for traveling employees. Most consultants I know finance annual vacations completely on points. Every once in a while, a big company will try to pocket the points for themselves, usually to great outcry--because it's akin to cutting benefits.

The corporate thinking is: "Points are a reward for buying travel. And I'm the one footing the bill." The employee thinking is: "Points are a reward for traveling. And I'm the one on the damn plane."

Personal perks on a corporate card are similar, and again, do the math of how many points you get by channeling $60-100k/yr worth of corporate travel expenses through a credit card.

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#52

Post by LarryPage »

bkidwell wrote: post #46
natch wrote: post #37

Ouch, their site triggers one of my pet peeves about travel sites, listing prices without clarity whether the deal is one-way or round trip. NYC to Paris: $260 Normal Roundtrip Price: $900 So did people who got that deal save $380? Or did they save $640? Which is it? As feedback to Scott and Brian, this actually makes me hesitate to sign up for premium, because I don't know what level of discount we're talking about…

Wow, thanks for the feedback! Almost every single deal we send out is roundtrip. This is actually why we put "normal roundtrip price" instead of just "normal price" to help clarify this. Maybe instead we should do "Roundtrip NYC to Paris: $260" and then put "Normal Price: $900" to help clear this up. Thoughts?

I had the exact same question and hesitation.

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#53

Post by piptastic »

bkidwell wrote: post #46
natch wrote: post #37

Ouch, their site triggers one of my pet peeves about travel sites, listing prices without clarity whether the deal is one-way or round trip. NYC to Paris: $260 Normal Roundtrip Price: $900 So did people who got that deal save $380? Or did they save $640? Which is it? As feedback to Scott and Brian, this actually makes me hesitate to sign up for premium, because I don't know what level of discount we're talking about…

Wow, thanks for the feedback! Almost every single deal we send out is roundtrip. This is actually why we put "normal roundtrip price" instead of just "normal price" to help clarify this. Maybe instead we should do "Roundtrip NYC to Paris: $260" and then put "Normal Price: $900" to help clear this up. Thoughts?

Why not just put Roundtrip in both to be as clear as possible?

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#54

Post by natch »

bkidwell wrote: post #46
natch wrote: post #37

Ouch, their site triggers one of my pet peeves about travel sites, listing prices without clarity whether the deal is one-way or round trip. NYC to Paris: $260 Normal Roundtrip Price: $900 So did people who got that deal save $380? Or did they save $640? Which is it? As feedback to Scott and Brian, this actually makes me hesitate to sign up for premium, because I don't know what level of discount we're talking about…

Wow, thanks for the feedback! Almost every single deal we send out is roundtrip. This is actually why we put "normal roundtrip price" instead of just "normal price" to help clarify this. Maybe instead we should do "Roundtrip NYC to Paris: $260" and then put "Normal Price: $900" to help clear this up. Thoughts?

Yes you should make it absolutely 100% unambiguous because a lot of sites use this ambiguity intentionally for a kind of bait-and-switch design, and I am extremely wary of it. I think a lot of other people would also be very wary. It's a well known trick to make the price look lower by quoting the one-way deal even though most people are looking for roundtrip.

So.. I'm glad to hear you do mean RT in both cases.

If it's a matter of wanting to avoid clunky long layout for the copy, you could consider using RT instead of roundtrip. With a tooltip on hover, or some other accomodation, for people who need to know what that means.

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#55

Post by bkidwell »

piptastic wrote: post #53
bkidwell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, thanks for the feedback! Almost every single deal we send out is roundtrip. This is actually why we put "normal roundtrip price" instead of just "normal price" to help clarify this. Maybe instead we should do "Roundtrip NYC to Paris: $260" and then put "Normal Price: $900" to help clear this up. Thoughts?

Why not just put Roundtrip in both to be as clear as possible?

I'd actually rather put "Past Roundtrip Deal" above the deal info just because of how big the word "Roundtrip" is. We have to keep design in mind... and if we just put RT that would likely lead to confusion as well.

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#56

Post by accountyaccount »

piptastic wrote: post #53
bkidwell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, thanks for the feedback! Almost every single deal we send out is roundtrip. This is actually why we put "normal roundtrip price" instead of just "normal price" to help clarify this. Maybe instead we should do "Roundtrip NYC to Paris: $260" and then put "Normal Price: $900" to help clear this up. Thoughts?

Why not just put Roundtrip in both to be as clear as possible?

Redundancy and specificity are slippery slopes. Why not say "Normally $XXX roundtrip coach redeye" because someone might think you're comparing a coach fare to first-class prices?

I think the "$XXX roundtrip, normally $XXX" clarifies it enough without the redundancy. You wouldn't benefit from comparing a roundtrip price to a normal one-way fare.

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#57

Post by gorkonsine »

gruturo wrote: post #15
SadWebDeveloper wrote: post #10

Just wondering if the guys can automate the scraping part, seems unlikely this is usually information that needs to be handpicked or "moderated" by one or more humans.

Speculation: it's possible that the source sites are actively hostile to scraping and intentionally mess with the layout regularly, or may even have ruled out any kind of automation in their ToS - so if you don't want to get sued or blacklisted, you can do no kind of (detectable) scraping.

>so if you don't want to get sued or blacklisted, you can do no kind of (detectable) scraping.

So why would it be hard to make scraping undetectable, anyway, unless you do it particularly incompetently? In theory, it seems pretty easy: use a browser string that matches an existing popular browser, and make sure to not load anything faster than a human would.

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#58

Post by joering2 »

If you receive Scott's emails for longer than one week, you will quickly have the answer to your question "why not to scrap".

I think enough people turn to premium member exactly because a personal touch of Scott and his team. You have this feeling this is not simple aggregate -- I always enjoy reading Scott little tips "when you buy ticket to certain city, don't forget to visit specific point of interest". I end up researching those and always came up with fun info, making me believe Scott is pro and knows what he is doing/researching for me. A scrapper will be inhumane and you will quickly realize that and most likely convert 1% of what they convert.

Scott - I am very curious how did you initially advertise your newsletter? First weeks/months you were live - how did you get your initial traffic?

Thanks!

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#59

Post by bkidwell »

natch wrote: post #54
bkidwell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, thanks for the feedback! Almost every single deal we send out is roundtrip. This is actually why we put "normal roundtrip price" instead of just "normal price" to help clarify this. Maybe instead we should do "Roundtrip NYC to Paris: $260" and then put "Normal Price: $900" to help clear this up. Thoughts?

Yes you should make it absolutely 100% unambiguous because a lot of sites use this ambiguity intentionally for a kind of bait-and-switch design, and I am extremely wary of it. I think a lot of other people would also be very wary. It's a well known trick to make the price look lower by quoting the one-way deal even though most people are looking for roundtrip. So.. I'm glad to hear you do mean RT in both cases. If it…

Cool I like the tooltip idea. We're working on a lot of changes right now so I'll definitely keep this in mind.
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