Show HN: HopOn – Simple and Social Way to Book Travel | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HopOn – Simple and Social Way to Book Travel

hopon.com

43 pointsdougzor24 comments

Social/group travel booking services like these have always interested me, and this one in particular looks really slick, but they all suffer from the same, major, challenges: customer acquisition costs and timing.

First, potential customers need to find you. And you're competing against big players running national TV ads (if I see that Trivago guy one more time...) and whose addressable market – not to mention resources/revenue – is larger than yours (i.e., their market is Anyone Who Travels as opposed to Those Who Travel in Groups).

Second, even if you are the kind of person who travels with friends somewhat regularly, you're doing it, what, maybe two times a year, three max? Not only do you have to get in front of potential users' faces, you have to do it exactly at the moment (of which you have three) they need you, and once those precious few moments have passed, you've likely lost them. (Or you have to spend a crapton of money to advertise constantly. See above.)

The way to make this a success IMHO is to target businesses. Forget consumers for now. It is really really hard to change behavior one person at a time. It's slightly easier (different kind of challenge) to sell this to the enterprise as a way of driving corporate compliance, where the benefits are clear: (policy compliance + cost savings + simplified booking process) * many trips a year.

While what we've built works great for consumer groups, it goes way beyond that. We've also built:

* Small/medium business features (https://www.hopon.com/why/business)

* Features for recurring solo trips (https://www.hopon.com/why/recurring)

* The ability to share past trips with friends/colleagues for easy copying (https://www.hopon.com/why/vacation)

Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

Love the concept. There is definitely a need for social travel planning. Love that you guys use pyramid and backbone btw ;)

I guess my only criticism is on my initial experience. It feels like a better expedia, nothing more.

The core value of your site is that it lets people plan their trip together. But that's not the impression I am getting when I start using it. Maybe the first step should be: Where are you planning your trip? What for? and Hopon would create a unique URL for my trip and everything I do from there gets saved at that URL. Maybe I can customize that page too, create a Facebook private event (with my hopon trip URL linked on that fb page somehow). Then from there, I can invite friends, etc. Get the idea?

I tried the web version, maybe the ios version is different. Hope this helps!

So fundamentally we think we have built a better Expedia, that also happens to have a lot of social features. The core value of the site is that it's a much simpler way to plan a trip than currently exists. If you happen to be traveling with friends or colleagues, you can also invite people and they can customize and book a similar trip in a few clicks. There is a unique url that you can share with all the info on your trip so that people can check it out and decide to join - here's a example: https://www.hopon.com/triplists/1982?l=26e564b1e19b85ecf8106...

Gotcha. Looks great. Should get that page created right after the GET STARTED.

So, as others have said, nice UI. Seem to be missing iceland air for Norway-Canada, but that could be me looking too far ahead.

What I don't get, is how do you compose group/family trips? Eg. say I'm booking for me, a friend books for his/her family of three etc? Or my brother wants me to order for him and obviously doesn't care about creating a user: I'll just book and pay for two and we'll settle up... did I overlook where I can add travellers and children to "my" part of the booking?

Ditto for booking a trip to a conference where I book for my team/company and want to (have the option to) invite other teams from the same city to join us for travel?

Just did a search from Oslo to Montreal, and do see some Iceland air options (see link below). https://www.hopon.com/add/flight/results#dates=2015-06-10%2C...

In terms of how to book group/family trips there are a couple ways supported right now, and we're adding more workflow paths regularly:

1) You can invite friends/colleagues who can customize and book their own trips themselves - just click the big red "Invite" button in your triplist and invite the other teams to join you.

2) You can also ask to plan and book travel for a friend/colleague (See Account/Profile/Authorized users - they get an email, add their own password and approve you), then you can book for them using their profile information (you can add their profile info yourself if you want to) and your payment information - perfect for admins/team leaders managing a group of business travelers, or a parent buying for older kids. Booking for children that don't have an account is something we're planning to add. Here are details about how Authorized Users work: http://support.hopon.com/hc/en-us/articles/201240029

Hope that helps! You can always reach us directly at support@hopon.com

I'd say that's pushing the network effect a little too hard (only able to book for people with accounts) -- not to mention that you slow down booking to a halt, effectively blocking new users (If I plan a trip with 10 friends, I'll have to wait for all of them to get an invite before I can pay for the trip etc...). I'd strongly recommend making it easy to pay you as much as possible (assuming you take a cut).

That's a really good point - we're just trying to make sure that bad actors can't be spammy and create accounts they have access to for lots of people without their approval (hence the approval step). It's very possible that we can find a happy balance between the two, and we are actively looking into it.

I'm not really sure what the problem is here: if I can book tickets for people without accounts, then those people won't get spam from you, as you don't have their email address... On the other hand, right now, I can sign up all my friends with their email address through your form (or from my account) -- and by so doing send them an email (even if it is a registration email) -- so you're already allowing me to "spam" my friends/every email address I can think of?

Drop the social bit. Bold the colleagues part.

Once every two years I might book a trip with friends and it's not a big deal. Six times a year I am going to conferences with workers and it's extremely painful doing the coordination. We always end up at different hotels and flights and all that.

The only way I would remember this site is if I had to use it somewhat frequently, and the only way I'll ever use it frequently is if it helps me coordinate work travel.

The social part just sounds... 'icky'. Like you don't have a good product so you have to throw in an old buzz term.

Yep - "social travel" has earned a bad reputation because previous companies haven't delivered on the promise of being able to easily book travel with friends and colleagues. We've spent the last year and a half building the tool we wish existed for our own personal and work trips - and think we're delivering the goods. Check it out and tell us what we could be doing better!

This is one of those rare occasions where the UI looks so good that I feel compelled to organize a trip for my family now. For personal and family trips, the only thing that might prevent me from using it would be the prices for flights. As long as they're comparable to Orbitz, Kayak, etc, I'd much rather book through your app. And as long as you provided clean itineraries and receipts, it seems like a no-brainer for corporate travel.

Are there plans for an Android app?

Thanks for the comment!

We are plugged into exactly the same systems for flight booking that Expedia, Orbitz, etc use for flights, so our prices are identical in 95%+ of the cases.

Yes - we're planning an Android app, but for now we have a (we think) very responsive and feature-complete mobile web app, in addition to the iOS app and desktop site.

Some feedback: the way you invite and share with others via the web interface does not feel that intuitive. For example, I'm having a hard time understanding when and how you split hotel costs with other users. Also, it would be really nice to get an idea of how much the trip will cost in total per person on the trip page.

I'd also echo the suggestion made by the other commenter about having a dedicated page for each trip rather than having to add an itinerary to your own list of trips each time. That page could be more easily shared and could break down costs for each section.

Thanks for the feedback!

1) Once you create a trip - just click the big red "Invite" button on the right side (desktop site) and you'll get options to invite friends/colleagues by email, share a link where people can see the trip details and decide to join, etc.

2) We just fixed the triplist page so you'll see your cost to book the trip - you ran into an edge case there, sorry!

Looks pretty great!

My experience: installed it but couldn't figure out how to import existing itineraries, and nothing at https://hopon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us, so uninstalled after a few mins.

Best of luck!

Thanks! Importing existing bookings from other sites (tripit style) is a feature that we have been working on for a while. Not quite ready for prime time yet, but we'll get there!

Looks awesome! Why backbone instead of angular though?

Thanks! Choose Backbone.js mostly because of personal experience in using it beforehand/being comfortable with it.

where do you get all the data for planes, hotels from? are you scraping it? do they block it after a while?

For flights, we're plugged into exactly the same systems (called GDS's or Global Distribution Systems, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Distribution_System) that Expedia, Orbitz, etc use for flights. For hotels, we're using the Expedia Affiliate Network right now.

can you explain a bit more about the costs of getting data from those sources? How do websites like Kayak get all the price data for tickets, hotels?

How does hopon actually make money, is it from affiliate programs? What affiliate programs are you signed up with?

Seems like these ticket, trip websites are dime a dozen, how do you stand above the crowd?

It's actually a fairly complicated business development process - we make money the same way the other travel booking/OTA (online travel agency) sites like Expedia/Orbitz do, but we think our differentiation is the simplicity of the site and social features we've built. If people have a good experience and share the site with their friends, then we will grow organically without a lot of expensive advertising.

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