How the Crowd Can Save You Money on Flights
The Internet may well have made many of our lives easier, but sometimes it’s a little too packed with information, making searches cumbersome and time consuming.
Take cheap flights for example. There’s an ocean of virtual travel sites all promising to deliver bargain basement prices, but most rely on search engines to deliver their results.
Australian website Flightfox.com on the other hand taps into the crowd instead, and it claims to save travellers an average of $AUD 371 on their trips.
The site’s front page contains a list of some of the trips where big money has been saved. At the time of writing this post that includes an $8,518 per person saving off a return trip from Melbourne to Vancouver, and a $4,894 per person saving off a return flight from Los Angeles to Paris.
So how does it work?
Users begin by creating a contest for the trip they plan to take. This includes setting up a time limit of up to five days and a refundable finder’s fee of $AUD 29 (refunded if they are not satisfied with the results).
Then, competing “flight hackers” as they are called (real humans) search the Internet for the best prices. These are people who are clued up on the best strategies to cut fees, taxes and surcharges.
When a flight hacker comes up trumps they are rewarded with the finder’s fee.
Flightfox is a further example of how open innovation and crowdsourcing can help with consumer needs, and they are motivating businesses to think more deeply about how the crowd can help their niche or industry.
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