Flight Penguin - Take the pain out of flight search

@maxmorlocke Great job , Great promo video ! well done thank's for sharing

@rickyyean It definitely is from Grumo Media. The original video was my introduction to Hipmunk, and the story behind someone starting their own media company with a loveletter to a product they adored resonated. Even though the Grumo team has professional voice artists these days, we really wanted Miguel to provide the recording as a callback.

@jelmt There's no revenue model at the moment. We'll certainly be communicating when that changes. Our plan is to sell search intent data, and we'll be extremely clear about what data is used. Selling search intent data is our most likely path towards monetization, but we are also considering a freemium model and potentially referral revenue related to bookings. I hear your desire for more complete documentation of what data is collected and shared - I'll see what we can do there. In the meantime, here's a short, informal writeup... Re: Logins - there are two reasons: 1.) When a user reports an issue to us, it is much easier to find any issues in our error reporting stack. if we have their name and email address attached to the issue as opposed to asking them for all the search terms, time of issue, etc. and then hunting through to see if we've already found (and hopefully fixed) the issue. This practice started when we were a paid subscription, and I've found it useful to continue, especially with a very small team supporting a set of highly asynchronous interactions with scripts running across multiple websites and pushing data back to a common source. 2.) There are contractual requirements for some of the data that we've purchased to be protected from copies of those databases being made. Placing it behind an auth wall and leveraging account based rate limiting for API endpoints met our partners' needs. Re: any data going back to us * Errors are sent to us via Sentry, and include the stack trace and your name+email address for easy correlation * Search progress data (e.g. a search was made, a flight selection was made) is sent to google analytics with no identifiable information. Used for tracking usage data. * Feature usage data (e.g. filter was applied) is sent via google analytics with no identifiable information. This is used to help us identify which features are being used and how effective our solutions are.

@maxmorlocke exactly the transparency/write-up I was looking for, thanks for taking the time. Hope monetization in this way works out and it never gets in the way of user experience, which seems to be what all competitors (and hipmunk?) suffer(ed) from. Litigation from competitors and airlines is going to be rough, but that's a clear sign you're doing things right. Kudos!

@don_partlan Our user experience is largely modeled on Hipmunk, but some changes to the business model were necessary. Our goal is to learn from the mistakes of Hipmunk too. As part of that, we operate as a browser extension so we can avoid entering directly into relationships with airlines, online travel agencies, metasearch sites, etc. This allows us a great deal of flexibility *and* ensures we can show all flights available. The flipside to this is we don't handle booking ourselves. We instead direct you to the site that is offering the best possible price for a flight.

@maxmorlocke Just got a call from Cheapoair, wanting to do $ add ons. This is so not like Hipmunk. I have doubts that I have a real ticket. I will hurry to uninstall the extension.

@don_partlan I'm sorry you feel that this is not a real ticket and that you're not getting the experience you want. If you go back through the early history of Hipmunk - you'll note that the experience there was also a redirect to handle booking (https://www.forbes.com/sites/bru...). Booking on external sites is a normal activity for a metasearch site - Kayak, Momondo, & Google Flights are all examples of companies that provide a similar booking experience and work with Cheapoair. All that being said, we choose who we interact with carefully. Cheapoair has been in business since 2005 and is currently owned by Fareportal. They're a legitimate business clearing $745M USD in revenue each year, and we've had Flight Penguin users book thousands of tickets with them without issue.

@martinboller Historically speaking, web extensions came out from Chrome as a pilot, then a fairly reasonable standard evolved from that prototype used by Firefox, Safari, and a few smaller others. We started building using Chrome specific API's, and candidly, we made a mistake by not building using the webextension polyfill to make it easy to target both. We used a lot of Chrome specific API's that are implemented differently in Firefox and Safari. As a developer, it's extra-frustrating as the Promise based API's used by Firefox are a lot more dev friendly. We're slowly working through those with the goal of having Firefox and Safari live by the end of summer on desktops.

@maxmorlocke I feel your pain. Great to hear that you are considering FF and Safari as well. Will test it in Chromium, thanks for everything you do.