The Data Behind Travel Proves a Worthy Investment
Hopper, an up and coming travel site that has been in development for the past five years, has decided to accept $12 million to grow their team in Boston. Hootsuite, OMERS Ventures (who also invested in BuildDirect and Wave Accounting), Brightspark Ventures and Atlas Venture also invested into the new travel site, bringing the grand total of investments to a whopping $22 million.
The company appears to have a strong team behind it, with former Expedia engineers such as: founder and CEO Frederic Lalonde, co-founder and VP Product Joost Ouwerkerk, VP Technology Andre Coude and CIO Mathieu Patenaude. The team also includes CMO Dena Yahya Enos, the former Vice President of Traffic Acquisition and Revenue Management at TripAdvisor.
According to Lalonde, Hopper stands out from other travel sites because they are a big data company.
“When we started this, we didn’t know we would become a ‘big data’ company. That word didn’t even really exist,” Lalonde said.
According to Lalonde, Hopper learned from the mistakes of other travel sites.
“We were just coming at it from what we’d seen previously, which is that planning a trip…is tedious, frustrating and it’s actually pretty awful. The experience is broken, everything’s fragmented, and you’re jumping around from one website to another.”
Hooper has collected over half a billion travel webpages, none of which include flight or hotel information. But the site does not want to be confused with any travel search engine.
Lalonde said search engines are only helpful if you know what you’re looking for. Instead, he compares Hopper to iTunes, which is a music catalog that has recommendation engines built around it.
Lalonde believes travel sites should not be centered around being social. There should be a catalog in place that comes from big data before the site can be social. For example, he said that even if you have hundreds of friends on Facebook, you wouldn’t trust recommendations from all of them anyways.
Instead of using Facebook, Hopper gets some of its information from blog posts. There are about 2 million blog posts daily and “travel” is the fifth most used tag. But Hopper isn’t solely relying on blogs for their information. They also have deals with other travel partners, but Lalonde has not revealed which partners they are specifically.
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