Crowd-Sourced Flight Search

Keep in mind that real people are searching on the other end, so there needs to be a balance between expended effort and income. We tried what you're suggesting, but it just didn't work.

As per your example, let's say I find a flight for $400. Would you pay without seeing details? If not, would you paying seeing the details, but without booking instructions? If not, would you pay after booking even if it meant the hassel of returning to our site, pulling out your CC details and then paying?

Our experience is that only a fraction of people will pay in this scenario.

This aside, we are targeting people who we can help the most. That is, people flying to remote places, or on complex itineraries, or who just want to absolve themselves of the stress. In our testing, these people have no problem paying up front. And if they're not happy, we do everything we can to help.

The real challenge of this business is managing the interactions between the two sides of our marketplace. Most of our early assumptions were proven false. :)

Consider these simple examples:

* Flying for the first time to Australia. Expedia gives you a price from Sydney to Perth for $500. Unbeknownst to you, there's a discount airline called "XXXXX" who does this leg for $150. Sure you could find it if you searched enough, but why not just pay $29 to crowd-source it? Most travel agents will not volunteer budget airlines, neither will many OTAs.

* You're flying from Buenos Aires to Toronto. It's Xmas and Kayak is quoting $1400. You can't find better anywhere and seats are disappearing fast. You put up a contest for $29 and an expert suggests booking to Ottawa and hopping off in Toronto to save over $400 each. They also suggest going to Montreal instead, paying $40 for a bus, and saving $900 each. Again, you could work this out yourself eventually, but why not just pay $29?

Consider these edge-case examples:

* You are relocating to another country but need to take your 3 cats. It will take you 5+ hours to find out exactly how to transport your cats. There are lots of regulations, especially when flying during winter. Why not just pay $29 and get someone who's flown with pets to save you many hours. (This is a real example from Flightfox.)

* You are flying with a group of 20 people from the US to Australia. You pay $29 and an expert gets in contact with an agent who has specific consolidated stock with an airline. You save $600 per person compared to the absolute cheapest price online. (This is a real example from Flightfox.)

Then of course there's premium class and using FF points. We've saved $5,000+ on exactly the same flights for business class travellers. Also, people don't realise the power of FF points. You can get RTW for 140k. But most people use 120k for simple return flights. If they do 2x return coach flights with FF points, they could almost have booked a RTW in _business class_ and flown many more segments than the 2 flights put together.

We love this stuff! Can you tell? :)

The experts tend to keep their methods to themselves. Some have trade secrets, but in the simplest cases, it takes time to find the best airports and connections, so they'd rather not share the info. They've even suggested we hide the dates because it takes time to find the cheapest dates when someone has flexibility.

MrHyde is relatively new. The winners go in waves. As you can imagine, our experts keep flying around the world and neglecting Flightfox :)

I just added detailed examples to another comment on this page. Please see below (or above).

Most of the best examples involve better routing, special offers or FF points. We've saved people $10k+ on group bookings, $5k+ on premium class, $1k+ on multi-city, etc, etc, etc. And in one case, a customer beat our experts by $700 by finding a glitch on Expedia. Of course we refunded him and offered a free contest if he dared to return.

On average, we save people 20%+ on long-haul multi-city flights. This isn't a guarantee, but the results from a test we ran on real flight contests.

We have a lot of work to do to find the best balance between the amount of info we show. We're looking for another engineer right now in the hope of being able to iterate much more quickly.

Awesome work and best of luck!

That seems to be accounted for with the three 'flexibility' questions contest creators are asked; whether they will fly with any airline including discount airlines, whether they'll consider ground transport to nearby airports, and whether they'll consider multiple stops and long layover times, respectively.