[todsul]

CEO of Flightfox here. We still absolutely use both technology and humans (that will always underpin our value prop), but we moved from the previous competitive crowdsourced model to a one-on-one model. The short story is that travel search benefits more from depth rather than breadth (at least at the expert level). With multiple travel hackers working at once, they can only invest $fee/n-hackers worth of time and there is a ton of overlap. With a single hacker, they receive all of the $fee and can dig deeper and deeper to uncover better results. The crowdsourced approach was definitely more interesting to consumers, but the results were inferior, especially on the customer service side. Now, we’re actually transitioning behind the scenes from a one-on-one to a collaborative model, which is bringing us new benefits, but requires more systemization.

Today, we target corporate travel, but we still work with individuals; you just need to click the Get Started button and we ask if you’re an individual after that. This pivot of sorts came from the fact we can deliver significantly more value to corporate customers (more customer value = more conversions, retention, referrals = better business & happier team). Consumer travelers typically only want the lowest price. If their “price to beat” is on a low-cost-carrier, we can rarely help. That becomes a dissatisfied customer despite us explaining “we’re here to help with your next trip”. Corporate travelers have greater requirements such as convenience, comfort, miles, hotels, perks, expertise, emergency response, off-site planning, large groups… the list goes on. With consumer travel, we were using a small subset of our tech and expertise; with corporate travel, we use everything and constantly need to expand our tech and expertise.

Hope that explains everything. Happy to answer any specifics about finding travel deals, since that’s what we do every day for 1000s of customers.