How a Travel App Raised $96 Million

Creating a travel app that contains information about flights, hotels, homes and rental cars?is not easy.

Getting people to download the app is even more challenging.

But Hopper managed to do both.

They have evolved into one of the largest travel apps in North America, with more than 80 million downloads and sales of flights, hotels, homes and rental cars on the platform set to exceed $4.5 billion this year.

Although they started off as an aggregation tool (like many other travel apps) they pivoted into something different.

Hopper devoted their engineering resources to flight prediction, building a tool that continuously monitors airline prices and sends price change alerts via push notification.

Once they became good at that, Hopper began to differentiate themselves from rival travel services like Travelocity with features such as airfare price freezes, free cancellations and flight disruption guarantees.

They built a moat around their business using these tech advantages and moved to the B2B segment with Hopper Cloud.

This is a partnership program that allows travel providers to resell Hopper’s fintech and travel agency products through a white-label portal.

Hopper was last valued at $5 billion and just raised $96 Million.

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