Special thanks to @jonrussell for featuring us on The Next Web: http://tnw.to/q3db

Today, Hubskip presented at TNW Conference 2013 in Amsterdam. We showed our latest Beta to the public and released our plans for the future.

Airfare Fluctuation

We’ve all experienced it firsthand, massive price fluctuating of airfares. It’s even a fact that the people sitting next to you in the plane paid a different price for their seat than you did.

Hubskip set out on giving you complete peace of mind when it comes to booking airline tickets and the price you pay for them.

Prediction

In order to get you the best price for your airline ticket, we analyse millions of price records every single day.

Our prediction engine can accurately determine when and by how much the price will change in the near future.

Price graph from a flight between Amsterdam and Istanbul

Once we’re confident that your airline ticket will become cheaper at a later point in time, we can delay issuing the ticket from the airline and only do so at a lower price point.

In case our prediction is not correct and prices would go up, we will still get you a seat at the same price, even if we have to upgrade you to business class because of availability.

Besides leveraging the arbitrage on expected price drops, we can also provide full cancellation insurance to travellers based on expected price increases in the future.

Business Model Performance

Considering that long-distance roundtrips are priced at an average of $1240, we can achieve a maximum arbitrage of $171 and a ROI of 0.26.

We completely cover our costs with revenues coming from our airfare price prediction and cancellation insurance.

Go-to-market

When it comes to getting bookings, we rely on three pillars.

The first one is Hubskip.com, our own online travel agent that allows anyone to make a booking and serves as the perfect platform to implement and test technology improvements.

The second one concerns existing Travel Agents, both offline and online. We can tap into their existing customer funnels.

The third is our API, which we will release to developers later this year. With the API anyone can build applications with native search and booking features for airline tickets.

The complete pitch

About a week ago, Hubskip launched it’s beta at LAUNCH Festival in San Francisco. It was overwhelming to talk to all those great startups and people with visions that will help shaping the future of technology.

The way the festival was setup was like no other event I ever attended.
A massive amount of startups, almost 6000 attendees, inspiring keynotes and even the lunch was perfectly organised!

As a launching company, we received incredible support by the LAUNCH team in forming the perfect pitch throughout the weeks leading up to the festival.

Thank you Jason, Tyler, Kirin and all the others that made this possible!

During the next couple of months, we’ll be working on getting our prediction and booking technology up and running, so keep track of us on Twitter (@hubskip) or follow this blog for regular updates.

Until next year!

Alex

A word from our founder

For the past few years, I’ve been playing around with an idea. It was about making online travel more personal and transparent again by coming up with new ways for airline ticket pricing…

I got rid of pretty much all of my remaining positions, shares and activities and was ready to start planting the seeds of this new idea. I set out on a quest to assemble a team of the best developers, designers and researchers I could possibly get my hands on.

I was trying to assemble a team of people that were looking for more than a monthly paycheck. People that would function great as a team and would passionately work on the project that was presented to them.

After months of searching, ‘I’ became ‘We’. We would consist of 6 bright minds in our own respective areas of expertise. We came from Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Pakistan and The Netherlands and all traded our existing jobs with solid salaries and conditions for a much lesser pay and longer working hours, which we didn’t mind at all.

The first few weeks we were working from my apartment and spend our days brainstorming at my kitchen table on the essence of our company and ideas. We were looking for our ‘why’ (Tip: read the book “Start with why” from Simon Sinek). From there, we would start going forward and really start building.

Today, our team is running strong and we have surrounded ourselves with people that have a background in travel, marketing, mathematics and startups in general. We love showing the outside world what we’re working on and this blog will serve exactly that purpose. To top it all off, we will be documenting the whole startup process on camera with the final goal to share our story to all of you.

Cheers!