ls_tm
ls_tm on Hacker News
thanks sadface, it sounds like you have a pretty good grasp of how financial service companies think about risk. i should point out though that as a gambling platform, ours would be a poor one. in order to receive any kind of payout when airfares rise you need to book your flight as well.
our service is designed for those whose plans are uncertain. if you are organizing a trip but don't yet know what days you want to fly or whether you will take the trip at all, this service is for you. the price protection we offer enables a person to delay the booking process with peace of mind and confidence they won't be gouged later. the travel industry pricing practices we are all used to are designed to create panic and urge us to book asap. this leads to a lot of canceled flights and changed itineraries. at $200 a pop, changing your plans isn't cheap.
this is really the pain point we are addressing. for a person who knows they will take a trip, has decided their travel dates and knows the flight they want, just buy the ticket. prices tend to go up after all. if you aren't sure, don't sweat it, Level Skies is here for you.
i just checked, we have the technology to build a drop down list.
all kidding aside, that may be something we put in soon but we also plan to add hubs quickly enough that this is not an annoyance for too long
We are currently serving the ten biggest hubs in the US, but we're adding new routes all the time. The beta routes are routes on which we are currently testing/training our pricing algorithm. You can expect to see many of them live soon.
We also run contests everyday so whoever best predicts future airfare on a particular route will get to use our airfare protection for $1.
Yeah, that was a great article and we certainly are hedging our risk. One major difference in how we do things is we don't need to predict the future price of a particular flight, we need to predict the range of prices and the probability that prices will be in different parts of the range. It's a fundamentally different problem although has some surface level similarities.
Posted by
ls_tm on Monday April 21, 2014 @04:18PM
from the levelskies.com dept.