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

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211–220 of 244 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please try Concorde's First Class membership free for one month using the coupon code "firstmonthfree", which is available to all users.

Is it mandatory to fill my CC details in order to subscribe with the promotion? (I don't really enjoy doing that...)

Yes, sorry, at the moment it is mandatory to add a credit card to sign up for a First Class account. I believe this is actually a limitation with my payments vendor, Stripe.

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

#212
post #148

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?

Not reliant on one particular API but rather a combination of API's that access flight search data caches (provided by Global Distribution Systems), manual searching, blogs, forums, and more.

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

#213

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…

confused. none of the flights are supersonic.

Hopefully some of them will be one day in the future!

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

#214
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most fliers want the lowest price, full stop. They'll complain about it to no end but will still keep voting for it with their wallets. Must be an interesting challenge separating out real user issues from the volume of complaints about the service people were advertised and agreed to up front.

How do you "vote with your wallet" when your flight to see your family (or destination) is operated by a single airline and you have no choice? Do you ever use brain when you repeat this religious mantra?

How many markets are served by, say, United and only United? Other than their Micronesia operation, I can't think of any where you wouldn't be able to drive to an alternate airport within an hour or so drive (really just EAS airports).

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

#215
post #96
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

don't most frequent flyer programs require the name on the ticket to match the rewards account? E.g. I can't buy my sister a flight, she flies it, and I get points for it.

That hasn't been my experience. I buy my wife Southwest flights with my points all the time. It's been a while since I flew United, but I don't recall it being an issue there, either.

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

#216
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't most frequent flyer programs require the name on the ticket to match the rewards account? E.g. I can't buy my sister a flight, she flies it, and I get points for it.

That hasn't been my experience. I buy my wife Southwest flights with my points all the time. It's been a while since I flew United, but I don't recall it being an issue there, either.

I don't think that what OP is saying. He's saying you can't pay cash for your wife's flight and have those mileage points sent to your account.

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

#217

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…

Or credit card fees.

Pay by debit: 0

Pay by credit: 5 to 10%

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

#218
post #202
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Any recommended services for premium-cabin travel? Email is in my profile. Thanks!

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/premium-fare-deals-740/

Set-up alerts by carrier or preferred outbound airport.

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

#219
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, which airlines charge $60 for cabin bag? The most passenger-squeezing-until-recently airline in Europe (Ryanair) now allows two cabin bags for free (one standard ~55cm bag and one small bag). Apparently Wizzair charges 10-20€ for "large" (aka regular) cabin bag though, only small ~42 cm bag is allowed for free.

For a carry-on in addition to one personal item: Allegiant charges $15--50 depending on when you pay. https://www.allegiantair.com/popup/optional-services-fees#ba... Frontier charges $30--60 depending on when you pay. https://www.flyfrontier.com/travel-information/baggage/#info Spirit apparently charges $35--100 (according to many news and other sites online), though maybe the last price is "on the airplane" only?

Wizzair in Europe.

Even Ryanair doesn't charge for carry-ons.

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

#220

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…

Gave it a shot. No results from SIN, my other two "primary" airports (BKK, CGK) don't even match in your interface! Even tried NRT and nothing. I assure you these airports exist and I'm not making them up.

Tried my old haunts of SYD, MEL and ADL - they match but no results. So that's 6 airports I tried with literally zero results, and half the time the (major international) airport wasn't even found. I know you're probably not focussing on my area but still not the most amazing first impression! At least a "coming soon" message would be an improvement.

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