Level Skies – Price protection on airfare. If fares go up, we pay you. | Hacker News Reader

Level Skies – Price protection on airfare. If fares go up, we pay you.

levelskies.com

13 pointsls_tm17 comments

Interesting to contrast this business with the recent 538 article on Bing pulling their air travel ticket prediction engine because it wasn't accurate enough (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/when-to-hold-out-for-a-l...)

Would be interesting to know how they hedge their risk, which they are hopefully doing)

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.

This product is certainly pretty interesting, but it protects you from upward price movement only.

Because the price changes of flights are not the kind of catastrophic loss for which insurance programs make sense it becomes more of a gambling paradigm than an insurance situation. Level Skies's algorithm tries to make them money. In terms of pure dollars you have to make a rational purchase here your expectation needs to be that your planned purchase parameters will be outside their model.

The ONLY way this can be a win for a consumer is if the utility they gain from the satisfaction of having some certainty around price is worth the fee level skies charges because on average you shouldn't expect to make money on the purchase.

A change in price of a few tens-hundreds of dollars in an airline ticket is not subject to the same kind of loss function that makes home owners insurance a smart idea. IMHO.

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 like the concept quite a bit. Average consumers (read: chumps like me) are already familiar with search engine analytics stuff like Bing's flight price trackers, but that's merely an informational chart type service.

I like that this service presumably looks at similar data, but finds a way to help aforementioned average consumer directly benefit from the data!

EDIT: Oh whoa. I didn't see bluedevil2k's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623622) about Bing pulling the flight data stuff. Interesting and somewhat troubling! I also hope that LevelSkies has some hedging in place, but I think it also makes their service seem even more important.

The UI seems a bit broken. I entered some airport codes, and chose dates, but it was not until the next screen that I was told "An error occurred" and neither airport is "supported". I had to click Back to proceed, and completely lost my original query. It should tell me as soon as I enter my airport codes if they are not supported.

Also, on https://levelskies.com/flights/ I clicked "Add my city", filled out the popup form, and it refused to submit the feedback form because the underlying search form fields were not completed. Seems like more thorough UI testing is needed.

This should be a standard feature / option on all travel websites. Ready to book a flight? Checkbox for insurance. One suggestion on the pitch / positioning of this -> The current pitch makes sense if I haven't bought a ticket yet. If fares go up AFTER I bought a ticket, I feel pretty good. If they go down, I feel kind of stupid. I'd be interested in the option of having a payout when that happens so I'm basically locking in a fair market rate when I get on the plane.

>Ready to book a flight? Checkbox for insurance.

My gut agrees with this implementation, but my gut also forgets that my brain sees similar checkboxes on, for example, Expedia right now about flight/trip insurance, blows a raspberry, and declines.

I feel like there's got to be a way to roll this into the current online bookings workflow that still communicates the seemingly-novel way that a service like LevelSkies works so that it doesn't become another ignored checkbox.

This is pretty cool, having to constantly buy tickets to travel abroad for the holidays this is a huge problem for me. I am definitely going to give it a try, especially for those tickets that I know I will need to purchase in the future but cannot do so until a later date when I know the details.

Interesting product, nice looking website design as well.

thanks! we like it too

We also run contests everyday so whoever best predicts future airfare on a particular route will get to use our airfare protection for $1.

Why are certain routes in beta only? I want to get a flight out of Denver.

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.

If you only serve 10 airports, could you please just give a dropdown list instead of making me guess at what airports are supported and then disappointing me 99% of the time?

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

damn I would use this all the time

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