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May 03, 2006
Dohop = Travel Search +660 Airlines - Focus on Price + Reykjavik Cool
We're going back to Iceland again today for a look at Dohop.com, a new travel search engine startup founded by Frosti Sigurjonsson in 2004. We picked it not because the founder's name is memorably apt, coming as he does from Iceland, but because it's a bit different from the competition. It is a fast search engine and checks hundreds of airlines (660 says the founder) and supports multiple currencies, which is important when targetting the European and other international markets.
We talked to Sigurjonsson about the competition and how dohop.com generates sales.
Even with its use of new web development technologies, Dohop has plenty of competition from other young rivals, including Kayak, Sidestep, Mobissimo, Skyscanner and allcheckin. How to compete with all that?
These are all price comparision sites, several with a strong focus on the USA travel. dohop has much in common with the competition, it finds flights, checks the price and links the user to the airline or OTA to do the booking, but what sets it apart is its ambition to be a comprehensive Flight Planner -- for planning connected itineraries.We have developed a unique routing engine that uses the timetables of more than 660 low-cost and legacy airines to find the best flights and connections for any given route worldwide, in only three seconds.
The price comparision engines are by contrast limited to search only the airlines that publish their fares in GDS systems [third party provider] and will only show connections with legacy airlines. They must rely on third parties like the GDS or ITA software to do the routing and pricing. Skyscanner.net has the benefit of including low-cost airlines but it does not offer a routing engine.
Dohop is barely registering on the Alexa radar, compared to Kayak.com and eBookers. Why is that?
The reason for lower traffic counts is simply that dohop.com has not yet done any marketing whereas both Kayak and ebookers have had the budgets to do quite a bit of marketing and PR. Almost nobody knows about dohop yet.So far the traffic we do get is by luck. A couple of days ago the Times Online published its list of the 100 best travel sites and put dohop.com as #2 on their list of Flight Essentials. This is now driving unusual amounts of traffic our way.
The target market is travellers that want to manage their own trips. What is the offer?
We take the pain out of planning. By searching ALL airlines rather than just the legacy ones, dohop is often able to find more efficient flight routes and because it includes low-cost carriers the price of the trip can sometimes be very cheap.Flight planning usually involves a lot of information. dohop employs Web 2.0 technologies to make the planning more intuitive for the user. Results can for example be sorted, filtered and drilled into with instant effect.
Another difference is that dohop does does not display live prices for all results, whereas the price comparision engines do display prices upfront. Why is it set up like that?
When we decided to include all 660 airlines worldwide we had to accept that it would not be possible to display the live price for every possible flight combination and travel dates all the time. Fares change too frequently, often several times a day. To make matters even worse, prices for the same flight number can differ by user's country of residence.Dohop suggests that once a user has refined the results to a single itinerary, he or she can then check the price with more than half of the airlines in the system, and more are being added each week. A price lookup only takes a few seconds. Each price is then stored in case it can be shared with another user asking for the same flight later.
But how will dohop make money? One thing is that it offers "sponsored links" in the search results, e.g. searching for a flight from basel to Paris, Air France's sponsored link displays its offer at the top of the list. Anything else?
We offer custom flight planners for placement on the websites of low cost airlines. Results are of course optimised to show only results that include at least one flight from that airline. You can see one example here: http://search.icelandexpress.com This airline flies to 10 destinations but the custom flight planner will find convenient onward flights to at least 100 more. A great sales tool for them and a source of traffic for us.We are now talking to major portals about powering white label flight-planners for their travel sections.
As for financing, it has some angel and founder funding, but the founder will be looking to raise some venture capital. "We are now starting to talk to VCs about funding dohop's global rollout," Sigurjonsson said.
Posted on May 3, 2006 09:58 AM | Posted to Online services | Web 2.0 | Permalink
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