Travelport this week announced a partnership with Hopper, the app that tells travellers "when to fly and when to buy". Quite simply Hopper is an app that makes use of airline revenue management algorithms in reverse to predict when to buy an air ticket and when waiting is a better option. If you have an option of when to fly, it can tell you which date is likely to be the cheaper option.
It's a brilliant app for leisure travellers who want to visit New York in November. Hopper will look at your travel dates and advise when a price is good and therefore to buy or when the odds are on getting an even cheaper fare if you wait.
Its business model is to take a booking fee from users of the app and a payment from the carrier on which flights are booked. Until now this has been through direct connects and a few carriers, such as easyJet, have been notable for their absence. The Travelport deal means that Hopper will have access to Travelport's API, its content in other words.
The news of the relationship with Travelport comes barely a week after Google Flights announced that it would start advising users when fares were about to rise.
Hopper is primarily a leisure product but its spectacular growth in popularity and this deal, following those with some airlines, might just be heralding trends for business travellers.
First of all, Hopper is a mobile only business. Unlike most businesses that use legacy systems and incorporate mobile as another option, Hopper has no desktop version of its technology.
Next, it is using the same techniques that the carriers do, namely predictive algorithms.
Hotels and airlines use complex revenue management systems to ensure that they get maximum revenue per night or per flight. Airlines and hotels want to maximise the revenue per day from a property and per flight from a route. That means getting the highest price possible for each unit.
By the same token corporates want to pay the lowest price possible but buyers do not have access to similar departments focused on calculating when the best price might be available.
Hopper does exactly that and claims 95% accuracy.
Prior to this, buyers have had to rely on general guidelines such as the further out you buy, the more likely you are to get a discount. But clearly this advice can clearly only ever be general and what happens most often. Carriers will raise fares sharply close to the day of travel on business routes such as LHR-FRA because business travellers tend to book close to departure.
Leisure travellers, however, who often have to book leave far in advance, book their flights far in advance once they know the dates. This means that routes that also have leisure traffic often drop their fares closer to the departure date.
It's a complicated business and Hopper has a team working with the same collection of algorithms that airline RM departments do.
The result is the guidance that any buyer — leisure or business — wants to have.