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

indiehackers.com

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

#141

Post by blang »

downandout wrote: post #117
chrisballinger wrote: post #64

Something I've noticed that's lacking from most aggregators like Kayak and SkyScanner (my current fave), is the ability to increase the price of the ultra-budget carriers by adding their carry-on baggage fees and whatnot. I don't care about checked bag fees, but some of the carry-on fees are ridiculous ($60 per overhead item?). These budget carriers are cheating the system by looking like the cheapest option, when in…

Add-on fees have gotten out of control, both in the hotel and airline space. There is a race to the bottom for having the lowest price to show on booking sites. This is a form of SEO for airlines and hotels. I am not familiar with any airlines that charge for carry-ons, but for example I know that many hotels in downtown Las Vegas have mandatory "resort fees" that on many nights actually exceed the nightly rate shown…

Frontier airlines charges for carry-ons IIRC

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

#142

Post by stavrus »

breakingcups wrote: post #91
bkidwell wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I'm just going to post the same response I used in the IndieHackers comment section for someone with a similar concern. Here's what I said: "Our subscribers are too important to us to ever sell their information to someone else. We never have and never will sell users information like that. Our only source of income is subscriptions and occasional advertisements in the free emails. Ruining our reputation to make…

What an incredible response, have you not read it yourself? "Our subscribers are too important to us to ever sell their information to someone else. We never have and never will sell users information like that. Our only source of income is subscriptions and occasional advertisements in the free emails. Ruining our reputation to make a few extra bucks would be an extremely stupid decision on our end." Is at complete…

I'm not seeing how the two paragraphs are incongruous. The company is selling their brand, not the user info, when they run the promotions. If no-one signs up for the promotion, no user info gets shared. Ultimately it's the users who choose whether they want to sell themselves as a marketing lead in return for a slim chance at winning.

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

#143

Post by danjoc »

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.

Who says it's not automated?

https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-un...

;)

Seriously though, automation may not be a good value proposition, even if the companies with the data that SCF is scraping manually want to cooperate. It seems the human scrapers are a fixed cost. It's not getting harder to do manual scraping as new customers come on board. The business is already paying this fixed cost. The business is currently doing well. All the business really needs to do is continue growing and the fixed cost will continue to shrink as a proportion of the business.

Why would the business care in that situation? Reduce from 12 mid-range salaries to 3-4 high salaries? They would do well just to break even on salary expense, so why bother? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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

#144

Post by moeamaya »

jpindar wrote: post #116

OK, so how many of us are wondering what other kinds of products this would work for? I've seen similar newsletters for books, for Amazon Subscribe & Save, and for low cost Amazon items.

Solid ideas but I think they may struggle with lower margins. With flights you save X00s but with Amazon X0s. Saw this with all the Airbnb for...since hotel replacement is similarly a higher margin/value purchase.

On that note you may be able to this with cars, hotels, real estate, luxury watches, computers, etc

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

#145

Post by dmalvarado »

downandout wrote: post #117
chrisballinger wrote: post #64

Something I've noticed that's lacking from most aggregators like Kayak and SkyScanner (my current fave), is the ability to increase the price of the ultra-budget carriers by adding their carry-on baggage fees and whatnot. I don't care about checked bag fees, but some of the carry-on fees are ridiculous ($60 per overhead item?). These budget carriers are cheating the system by looking like the cheapest option, when in…

Add-on fees have gotten out of control, both in the hotel and airline space. There is a race to the bottom for having the lowest price to show on booking sites. This is a form of SEO for airlines and hotels. I am not familiar with any airlines that charge for carry-ons, but for example I know that many hotels in downtown Las Vegas have mandatory "resort fees" that on many nights actually exceed the nightly rate shown…

Resort fees drive me crazy.

It's one thing to charge for add-ons if you're taking a flight, because they're technically optional and there is a way to avoid them.

But resort fees are mandatory. There's no way to opt of using the gym or the pool or whatever it is that they're charging for. That they are somehow not included in the list price defies logic.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

breakingcups wrote: post #91
bkidwell wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I'm just going to post the same response I used in the IndieHackers comment section for someone with a similar concern. Here's what I said: "Our subscribers are too important to us to ever sell their information to someone else. We never have and never will sell users information like that. Our only source of income is subscriptions and occasional advertisements in the free emails. Ruining our reputation to make…

What an incredible response, have you not read it yourself? "Our subscribers are too important to us to ever sell their information to someone else. We never have and never will sell users information like that. Our only source of income is subscriptions and occasional advertisements in the free emails. Ruining our reputation to make a few extra bucks would be an extremely stupid decision on our end." Is at complete…

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by buckhx »

downandout wrote: post #117
chrisballinger wrote: post #64

Something I've noticed that's lacking from most aggregators like Kayak and SkyScanner (my current fave), is the ability to increase the price of the ultra-budget carriers by adding their carry-on baggage fees and whatnot. I don't care about checked bag fees, but some of the carry-on fees are ridiculous ($60 per overhead item?). These budget carriers are cheating the system by looking like the cheapest option, when in…

Add-on fees have gotten out of control, both in the hotel and airline space. There is a race to the bottom for having the lowest price to show on booking sites. This is a form of SEO for airlines and hotels. I am not familiar with any airlines that charge for carry-ons, but for example I know that many hotels in downtown Las Vegas have mandatory "resort fees" that on many nights actually exceed the nightly rate shown…

United charges for carry ons. I had to book a flight day of for a family emergency and it was super inconvenient. I couldn't even find a fare class on United with carry ons that wasn't outrageous. You also can't check in ahead of time because they inspect you to make sure you aren't sneaking any carry ons.

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

#148

Post by Toast_ »

jmarbach wrote: post #72

Disclosure: I built a competing tool for finding cheap flights, https://concorde.io . I think the secret of Scott's success is his incredible writing ability. Finding the cheap flights is the easy part. Communicating with users in a way that consistently wins over their hearts and minds takes a high level of consideration and creativity. This writing ability combined with his co-founder's understanding and applicatio…

Do you use a particular api to find these flights?

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

#149

Post by clay_to_n »

jwong_ wrote: post #95
breakingcups wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an incredible response, have you not read it yourself? "Our subscribers are too important to us to ever sell their information to someone else. We never have and never will sell users information like that. Our only source of income is subscriptions and occasional advertisements in the free emails. Ruining our reputation to make a few extra bucks would be an extremely stupid decision on our end." Is at complete…

Thanks for putting my feelings into words. And their partners are extremely spammy at best. They're all trying to force engagement and word of mouth. Here's an excerpt from one of the intro e-mails I got: > Welcome to the #SkimmLife! Here's how it's going to work: > We'll meet you back here, in your inbox, bright and early tomorrow morning (PS If it's Friday or a weekend, > you'll get theSkimm on Monday). We're a com…

FWIW theSkimm isn't outright spam - they're a fairly popular super-short newsletter that I think does a mix of world news and lifestyle / culture stuff, apparently marketed at women. I subscribe to Finimize (financial news) and Casual Spectator (sports), and theSkimm is often referenced as a similar newsletter.

Not to diminish the annoyance of being on surprise email lists. I agree it's frustrating, and it sounds like Scott's Cheap Flights should have been more clear with their users about the price of their contests.

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

#150

Post by oh_sigh »

jessriedel wrote: post #105
chrisballinger wrote: post #64

Something I've noticed that's lacking from most aggregators like Kayak and SkyScanner (my current fave), is the ability to increase the price of the ultra-budget carriers by adding their carry-on baggage fees and whatnot. I don't care about checked bag fees, but some of the carry-on fees are ridiculous ($60 per overhead item?). These budget carriers are cheating the system by looking like the cheapest option, when in…

I have written to Kayak suggesting this in the past. Without such a feature, the hidden charges and nickle-and-diming will just get worse. The best explanation I heard (from elsewhere) was that if Kayak automatically included any fees, then some users might see a lower price on another site and mistakenly conclude the Kayak didn't actually have the lowest prices. But this seems obviously solvable by making it a non-d…

They could provide a search option to let you plug in what kind of baggage you wanted. So you could say 1 overhead, 2 checked bags, and then it could add in the cost (or show it broken out next to total cost)
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