Articles tagged “hopper”

In Skift’s top stories this week, United sees a potential full recovery in 2022, Kayak launches Kayak for Business, and Canada reopens its borders for fully vaccinated U.S. travelers.

Hopper makes more money on add-on, fintech-oriented services than on selling travel — even the usually juicy hotel business. The business isn't profitable but who cares when grabbing market share is on the agenda.

The impact of Airbnb's new ad campaign seems to be underwhelming to date. But if the idea is to broaden awareness about hosting, Airbnb may be willing to play the long game.

More blurring of the lines between travel technology and financial services, and the latest example of investors seeing potential in the sector's return.

Hopper's survival is a testament to the perseverance of its founders, though it's an understatement to say it takes them a long time to scale their products up. The startup is also now overpriced, based on its funding, for most potential acquirers — except maybe for Airbnb.

Airbnb has sold investors on a growth story based, in part, on adding flights and other products. But selling flights is extremely complicated.

Hopper said it is on track to process about $500 million in gross bookings — a number much larger than actual revenue — this year. Its expansion into hotel bookings would bring fatter commissions and hopefully more engagement. But the company will go up against better-funded players. All bets are off.

Is there a big enough market for travelers to track flights through push notifications and wait weeks or months to buy instead of going to a website and entering their itinerary details? Hopper, Hitlist, and others think Millennials and others will shop this way but there is skepticism about how large these businesses can become.

I hate to see so many talented travel startup people working away at ideas that obviously have little chance to succeed. Do we need another trip-planning app or metasearch company? These are very early days for Uber and Airbnb, but it is totally evident that they have set out to do something different.

The global travel industry is going through a lot of disruption, and the biggest sectors include the sharing economy and ground transportation, as well as one large potential winner in the hotel booking sector.