Flight Penguin

Name: Flight Penguin
Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)

Take the pain out of flight search.

4.5•2 reviews•

23 followers

Take the pain out of flight search.

4.5•2 reviews•

23 followers

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Flight Penguin is a browser extension that takes the pain out of flight search. We search more flights, rank them based on how painful they are, and display them in a simple, visual way to make decision making easy... all without ads or other dark patterns.

Free

Launch tags:Travel

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?makers Does it not include Southwest Airlines in the options? Since it takes a while to load all of the airline choices, is there a way to easily know when it is finished loading all of the airline choices? I want to wait until it is done to review the results but I don't know when it is done.

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4yr ago

Flight Penguin

Maker

@mary_magouirk At this current point in time, Southwest is not in the search results. Southwest is notoriously litigious, and I think it's wise to pick the right time to leverage the capability to index their flights. Our resources are extremely limited at the moment in comparison to one of the most aggressively litigious entities in our space.

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4yr ago

hackerpet

The extension works great, but what does the revenue model of this kind of product look like? You mention "selling information about the user's search intent", how much of my information does a browser extension actually have access to? You can read my location, full browser history and I need to log in to my google account. It's not really clear why i need to log in and what info I'm giving up when using the extension. Seeing the browser windows pop-up and locally automatically being index is really cool from a tech standpoint, but pretty creepy from a privacy standpoint. I think this could be improved a lot by being a little more transparent on that subject. The product works great but if i'm paying with all my personal info, I, personally, might rather do a couple extra searches on a different site with a much worse user experience. But i'd love to make an informed decision on it.

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4yr ago

Flight Penguin

Maker

@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.

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4yr ago

hackerpet

@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!

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4yr ago

Flight Penguin

Maker

I was an avid Hipmunk user - Hipmunk made finding a comfortable, affordable flight easy. I was heartbroken when it was shut down by Concur and elated when Adam reached out about an opportunity to bring it back. Building Flight Penguin has been a labor of love - we're working hard to make it easy to plan your flights and get convenient, pleasant trips.

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4yr ago

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

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4yr ago

Read Across The Aisle

Thanks for building this much-needed product! I just took my first flight post-covid and had forgotten how terrible most travel sites are. So glad to have this as another way to visualize flights and making plans!

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4yr ago

Used to love using Hipmunk and now I am glad to see Flight Penguin coming onto the scene. Highly recommend

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4yr ago

some of us were dying a little inside every time we booked a flight without Hipmunk. Flight Penguin may just revive us.

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4yr ago

Doesn't quite seem like the old Hipmunk..seems like I've booked through 'CheapoAir'?

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4yr ago

Flight Penguin

Maker

@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.

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4yr ago

@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.

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4yr ago

Flight Penguin

Maker

@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.

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4yr ago

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