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Wings — Save 50% on your next international flight
Tell us where you want to go, and when you're free to travel. We'll get you there for 50% off.
Our software monitors millions of flight prices daily and emails you when prices are lowest. You’ll save $200-$500 on every flight you book.
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Hey @rrhoover!
Great question. It comes down to simplifying the problem, and layering in unique personalization.
Hopper's goal is to predict exactly how prices will change in the future. We've simplified the problem by asking: are there any great deals available today? From our research and model development, prices are too erratic to make precise predictions about the future. Our customers have responded well to the simplicity and clarity of our recommendations.
What we're really excited about are the personalization features built on top of the price discovery engine. This is where we see ourselves pulling away from the competition. Today, you can specify broader regions you'd like to travel to, and flexible travel dates. We're introducing Trips (PH launch coming soon!), which will let customers track specific travel plans, much like Hopper. Beyond that, we're building out awareness of airline miles and points, as well as flexible departure cities (think: resident of CT can leave from Boston or NYC). We're working closer with customers to make sure that our trip-planning tools map 1-to-1 with how they think about travel.
We've found it helpful to think of our product as more of a next-generation travel agent. Our sophistication comes from our ability to take more of our customer's needs into account, and understand their priorities beyond price.
Hope that's helpful, and thanks so much for making this awesome community 😻
Hey @amrith!
It's not just clickbait! 😋
In our back-tests, we found that the deals we sent out are, on average, 50% cheaper than the average price for a given route (excluding holidays). It turns out that booking at the right time has a huge impact on price, so sniping the moment when tickets go on sale is essential.
P.S. Thanks again for helping me with my Twitter handle yesterday 💌
👋 Hey everyone
Wings finds the lowest prices to places you want to travel. We monitor millions of flights every day and let you know when to buy.
The idea for Wings was inspired by popular newsletter, Scott’s Cheap Flights. We’re big fans of Scott’s product, but as engineers we saw an opportunity to build a more personalized and efficient service with software.
We also thought it would be easy! And admittedly, it’s been a lot harder than we thought. 😅
Getting access to reliable flight data and building a system to ingest millions of prices each day proved to be major challenges. But for us as engineers, building reliable marketing channels and getting our first paying customers was the hardest. Props to anyone who is getting out there and making every day 💪
We’ve had a blast building Wings and are glad we stuck with it. Over the last year, we challenged ourselves to build towards something unique in the travel space. After countless conversations with customers, we landed on a product that promises:
👩💻 Personalization
Users can specify when and where they want to travel making our product less spammy and more relevant to our users. Instead of sending a single deal to all our subscribers, each user gets a different deal every day based on what they care about most.
🤖 Automation
Because our system uses software to analyze flight prices, we can find more deals than human-powered services. We look at the prices millions of international flights daily - something that is hard to replicate with a team of human flight finders.
🔥 Deal frequency
Because we find deals more efficiently than our competitors, we can send out more deals. Our free product sends about the same number of deals as comparable paid products.
🙏 Ease of use
We link users directly to the itineraries that are cheapest, instead of requiring them to hunt down the deal themselves.
@shreyaa_ratra For now we only serve consumers. Feel free to DM me though, I'd be happy to discuss what you're looking for further
@chrismessina Hitlist allows you to setup trips with basically any criteria you want - any set of dates, regions, any departure city etc. This is pretty awesome as a concept, but in my experience Hitlist has struggled to deliver on the promise of it's trip feature - it tends to notify me with a lot of deals that aren't very good and frequently aren't reproducible when I log into the app.
By being so flexible to user preferences (you can live anywhere in the world and use Hitlist to search for trips to anywhere else!) I think it's harder for Hitlist to control the quality of the user experience.
To avoid the consistency issues we've seen with Hitlist, we're taking a bit of a different approach. For one, we're only in a few major US cities which makes it easier for us to focus on creating a great user experience for our subscribers. Two, we ask users to trade flexibility for price - we don't allow users to pick specific days of the week they want to travel and our destination list is relatively fixed. This helps us focus our resources and ensure our pricing data is really reliable.
I should note that the Hitlist team is trying to solve a hard problem and we have a ton of respect for what @gillianim and co are doing. We're just trying to carve off a very small piece of that problem and solve it really well. Hope that makes sense!
@mostlymarius Thanks Marius. We got a TON of signups from Toronto today, so maybe you won't have to wait too long 🙃
I'm in Europe, but there are only options for the US as starting point for your journey. I hope this changes in the near future, since I really like the concept of the service...
Pros:Sounds like an awesome idea.
Cons:But apparently it's a US privilege...
Hey guys, Wings looks promising indeed! I would like to publish an interview with you at https://startupradius.com/ :) at no cost, fill the "Submit Your Story" to contact me and let's make it!
@paul_shuteyev Sounds great! Thanks for reaching out - we'll shoot you a DM.
@nikos_efthias1 Sadly yep, US only for now. London seems promising though! There's more nonstop international flights from London than just about anywhere else in the world.
@nikos_efthias1 @fscof I'd love if this was active in Sweden as well. Simplicity and functionality - just like Scandinavian design.
@coolastekatten Would love to open up Sweden! And that's high praise coming from a Swede - all credit goes to @arityzero, I do exactly zero percent of our design 😂
@abadesi haha thanks! I'm working on a gif picker for product hunt
https://twitter.com/HarowitzBlac...
@harowitzblack Thanks Ben! If you signup, let us know if you have any feedback 🙏
Amped to recommend to friends!
Pros:Powerful fare-patrolling software = perfect purchase timing 👏👏
Cons:None if you like saving cash 🚀
Wishing yoi to expanse in short period)
Pros:Sounds very cool
Cons:Just tried to sign in, but it’s for US only(
Been using this product for quite some time, the premium deals are laughably cheap! Highly recommend!!
This is a really cool alternative to more expensive cheap-flight options. The makers are also very communicative.
Pros:Awesome UI, great selection of cities, awesome deals, low price.
Cons:Isn't accessible in every city yet but the expansion has been tremendous!
Great service, keeps evolving to match users' needs. Customization and filtering is a welcome addition.
Pros:Great flight deals.
Cons:Flights can be hard to plan or prices may be ephemeral
So excited for more people to check out Wings.
Pros:Amazing flight deals to all the places you want to travel around the world with a streamlined UX in your inbox
Cons:Legit can't think of a single thing
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