Bubble Group > Case Studies > Honeyglider: Revolutionizing Flight Booking with IoT and No-Code Platform

Honeyglider: Revolutionizing Flight Booking with IoT and No-Code Platform

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Aerospace
Cement

Applicable Functions

Procurement
Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Building Automation & Control
Movement Prediction

About The Customer

Honeyglider's primary customers are travelers who frequently use Online Travel Agencies to book their flights. These customers are often frustrated by the time-consuming process of finding the best-priced flights and the perceived bias of OTAs towards airlines. They are tech-savvy individuals who are comfortable using a Chrome extension to enhance their flight booking experience. These customers value both financial savings and time savings, and they appreciate a service that prioritizes their needs over the needs of airlines. They are likely to be frequent flyers, including both business and leisure travelers, who are looking for a more efficient and cost-effective way to book their flights.

The Challenge

The founder of Honeyglider, Mads Schmidt Petersen, identified a significant challenge in the travel industry. The majority of Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) prioritize the needs of airlines over passengers. This is because OTAs receive their revenue from airlines, which over time, drives them to focus on pleasing the airlines rather than creating a better product for the passengers. This situation often leaves passengers struggling to find reasonably priced flights, a process that can take days or even weeks. The Honeyglider team, being expats and avid travelers themselves, experienced this issue firsthand and sought to find a better way to support travelers in their quest for affordable flights.

The Solution

Honeyglider developed a two-tiered solution to address this challenge. In the short term, they built prediction algorithms to determine when a flight will be the cheapest. This feature was incorporated into a Chrome extension, which transforms any Online Travel Agency (currently compatible with Expedia, Google Flights, Kayak, Priceline, and Booking) into a price prediction machine. Users can search for flights as they normally would on any of these sites, and the extension adds a prediction to the results on the sites, advising whether to buy now or wait. In the long term, Honeyglider plans to align even more with passengers' needs by building a service where a passenger pays the full amount of the cost of a flight upfront. Honeyglider will then hold the money until the flight is at its lowest possible price, at which point they will purchase the ticket and return any savings to the passenger.

Operational Impact

The operational results of Honeyglider's solution have been promising. The team successfully built a complete Online Travel Agency in one afternoon, capable of making bookings from virtually any airline. This achievement demonstrated the power and efficiency of their solution. However, they chose to simplify the current site and focus on the Chrome extension for now. The extension is about to be launched on the Chrome Store, and the team has already seen an increase in traffic to their landing page. The team plans to continue iterating on the extension and improving their predictions. Once their predictions are good enough, they will launch the second version of the business, as outlined in their long-term plan.

Quantitative Benefit

Savings in dollars: $200 per flight (based on an example provided in the article)
Savings in time: Several days per flight booking
Increased traffic to the Honeyglider landing page in anticipation of the Chrome extension launch