Why We Abandoned Crowdsourcing

Hi brett, we're working madly on this now. We built the new version from scratch (very little in common), so we're a few-week-old startup all over again.

We can imagine these products being their own page with details, testimonials, examples, etc. Something like http://elto.com, whereas our current page is more like the 99-designs one.

Just wanted to mention, "clarifying" our products/pricing is priority #1.

Thanks nlh. First, thanks for the feedback on the pricing. We're talking about the miles product right now and will update it very soon. The high price was to account for most miles trips being fairly complex, but we'll segment a little more and offer you much better pricing.

UPDATE: just spoke to the experts and made it $69 for now. We'll change the pricing to be +$19 to use miles, but that'll take a little time. Reason it's more is that the experts have a few tricks that take considerable time.

Great to hear you received value with the competitive format. We still have the top 0.3% of experts from the previous system, they just get paid more and can spend a lot more time on your trip now. But we'll keep analyzing and make sure it's working well.

(not a flightfox user but my 2 cents)

Booking an award trip can be much harder to do unless you have an easy route like a domestic non-stop. The ITA matrix won't show you those flights, expertflyer.com used to be really useful but right now you can't get access to the United (and most of *A) data, some airlines have vague routing rules that may or may not play in your favor depending on which agent you talk to on the phone (looking at you US Airways), etc.

I think 99$ is steal.

Hi encoderer, we were saying the same thing before testing this format.

However, unlike travel agents, our guys are genuine flight experts. If you travel wide, fly a lot, or use miles, you'll understand why this matters.

Behind the scenes, it's all about commissions. Agents work on commissions and most flights don't pay commissions. So it makes little sense for agents to spend hours on your flights.

This manifests in the wide skill gap between (most) agents and our experts. Most agents won't save you a cent, they'll just be there for good service. But our guys get insane deals you won't find anywhere else. Often they involve shorter flights with fewer stops too.

Hi Ryan, segmenting is our greatest challenge and (planned improvements aside) your experience was intended. It's the old startup adage: better to have 1,000 customers who love you than 1,000,000 who don't care.

What you're suggesting is what we call "gambling against Kayak". That's not our target market because it's not the market we can help most. We often say internally, it's not whether we can possibly help a customer, but whether we can likely help them.

Our idea to create "products" was to help segment customers into those we can help most. For example, complex trips, flying premium, using frequent flyer miles, traveling with pets, euro-city hops, etc. These are the people we can "likely" make happy and will help us grow to then target a wider audience.

Hey aridiculous, we really wanted the economics of the competitive format to be fair. We got to the point where our experienced experts were winning 30-50%, so for them it wasn't so bad. Customers sometimes complained about "only" getting 2 or 3 experts, but we quickly realized it was better for everyone, including the customer.

It's a bit like being a software consultant. Most clients don't pay enough for you to do your absolute best work. That's what happened in the contest format. The best experts didn't make enough to do their best work. With the current format, we see them really sinking their teeth into big trips and having fun.

The problem lay in that some see it as a way to exploit the labor of others.

The real value is in setting it up so that crowdsourcing benefits both parties involved - i.e. CAPTCHAs for human verification and textual image analysis.

Hey CHX, apologies for the blunder with the emails. It was an honest mistake of not BCC'ing and certainly not deliberate. As you saw, a handful of people replied to the whole group and talked about cloning our product, which wasn't really in our interests. We don't get worried about that stuff, we were just a little sad we messed up for you guys.

I think this is spot on. We used to underplay the experience issue, but then we realized a poor user experience often hinders access to the best savings.

What made this worse was the animosity between customers and experts. It was expected between competing experts, but the concept of the "award" (and by necessity "switching award") caused tension in all directions. We still had many great results, but not to the level needed to build a great business. The difference with the current system is night and day. Everyone is on the same side; it's even a little erie since we're so used to the previous animosity.

hi emhart, interesting question. The contest format was certainly novel and helped garner a lot of early attention from press. So there's that. But I think you may be right that the contests helped us a) find experts, but also b) learn what was possible.

That somewhat fits with the idea that crowdsourcing is best when you have less info. Once you have more info, then (at least we think) it's best to work with fewer specialists. Although this is mostly referring to the customer, maybe we can apply the thinking to our product lifecycle too.

Hi nigerian, apologies for the confusing pricing, we're working on that now. Anything more than one destination is multi-city. So your first example is just international, but the second eg is multi. Your second itinerary should be perfect for our guys.

hi coco,

It's definitely better for longer trips, but NYC-Paris is a good one for us because I know our experts have a few tricks up their sleeves with this route.

I often fly Montreal-SF so can also comment on NYC-SF. If you just want the cheapest economy flight AND you have checked bags, no, don't use Flightfox. However, if you have carry-on, then our experts can help.

It gets much more interesting if you want to fly this route in business. I've done it a few times in business for about economy prices (usually a little less). It involves a few little tricks and a slightly complex booking, but for those who do it often, it can reduce the pain of 12 hours in econ. I usually only go to SF for a day or two, so being more relaxed has a noticeable affect on my time there and proceeding. It's not always available, but I'm usually pretty flexible.

I used it a 1.5 years ago, during the competitive phase, for a two destination trip on a different continent. I came away not entirely thrilled by the results of the experts. After paying the fee, what they found was slightly cheaper than what I was able to do independently, but had a funkier itinerary that didn't justify the slight price reduction (that may have been actually offset by the cost of using the service).

That said, I did receive tremendous feedback from Todd. Reading this post has me reassured that he and his team are on the right track.

My wishes—

I wish I had the money and time to seek out such types of fares/trips more often so that I could try the service again. I may have one such trip coming up but I still feel reluctant paying a fee up front for what might not turn into anything.

I wish FlightFox/someone would offer services to deal with the airlines' kerfuffle on multi-destination, multi-carrier flights. I swear, if you have to deal with any inconveniences in a situation like this, it is 100% "Hi, this is ABC Airlines, you'll have to call XYZ Airlines as this leg of the trip is under their control" and vice-versa.

I've used it twice. Once for a Seattle -> Berlin -> Munich -> Seattle trip. Another time for my honeymoon (Seattle -> Krabi -> Tokyo -> Seattle)

Both times I found business class tickets for not a crazy spread over coach retail and significantly below the business class prices I was finding on my own.

I've had great experiences both times. For complex / long haul flights where you want to find a cheap business class seat, I'd recommend them without question. I'm a big fan of flightfox.

Yes, I was big on Flightfox when I heard about it and tried it for an international trip last year (Australia-Malaysia-France-Morocco-Italy-Switzerland-London-France-Malaysia-Australia). Paid for the top tier service but didn't end up using any of the results because I found a better and cheaper series of flights myself. I was a bit disappointed actually and went from telling everyone about it to not considering it since for other trips.

hi fibbery, we made this change exactly for this reason: so customers would get great results more of the time. With the new format, not only do you get one of the best experts, but that expert can spend more time just on you. That last part is key.

This idea that "one person digging deeper" is better than "more people competing" first came to us at an in-office hackathon (flight hacking, not software hacking). We noticed with more "iterations", experts could hack even the most mundane trips. In this particular example, they got NYC<->Berlin (round-trip) for about $400 with rigid dates. The rigid dates part is key because it simulates the real world (we've seen < $300 with flex).

Once we worked closer with some of our experts, we realized the top ones are miles more analytical. They either write their own software or compile huge spreadsheets of their findings.

So this change of format was to put you in touch with one of them, not with someone who does this on the side. We wish we could have created a new income stream for the average person, but to ensure customer value, we had to go this way.

Hi Aloha, thanks for the feedback. We'll try to make this more obvious asap.

To explain, our pricing is "from" $29. That's for the simplest trip. It goes up with complexity because the experts must work harder. This doesn't include the fare, this is the fee for consulting.

As you can imagine, this doesn't make sense for short flights for say $100. But our experts really start to work wonders on trips over $300-500. For multi-continent or business class, the savings often get into the $1000s.

If you click on each product, you'll see tweets from real customers talking about different results.

how many airline tickets are sold a day?