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

I've been on the list for a little while. I havnt booked any flights from the deals yet because I've got a fair bit of traveling planned already this year but I'm starting to look at flights for next year. Check out the list if you havnt. I live in chicago and flights anywhere are usually $500 or less.

Still don't see the appeal. I get better and quicker results from theflightdeal.com and flyertalk.

Hate to piggyback but I noticed that whenever this service gets posted on Reddit there are dozens of accounts that reply addressing Scott by name and have little to say.

Upon checking their comment history, I saw that most users hadn't posted anything for months, or even ever. It was clear that there was some kind of voting manipulation going on, and as reddit goes, if something gains traction it's bound to get upvoted just because.

It's a bit like Candy Japan, who posts here once a month with very little to say, and nothing vaguely technical in his articles. These kinds of posts just seem like blatant advertising. What are the rules for self-promotion of services on HN? It just seems dirty when there is a half-hearted article advertising a service without being labeled as an ad.

Throwaway of course, because I'd rather not get attacked by some bots.

Can you post some of these reddit links?

I'd imagine several small businesses these days would opt for the "vote manipulation" marketing since its easy. (The Silicon Valley TV show had a similar plot point).

As 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.