Rethinking the flight ticket industry ✈️

We love to challenge the status quo at 3drops. When we stumble upon an interesting idea we sometimes spend around one week on articulating and prototyping our vision.

Assumptions

• What if instead of finding a ticket, a ticket found you?
• What if researching airline tickets was so easy you could do it in your sleep?
• What if you could find inspiration to visit new destinations, without having to plan your trip at a traditional brick and mortar travel agency?

A lot has changed in the flight ticket industry over the last 10 years. Not too long ago, buying a ticket typically began at a brick and mortar travel agency and was associated with layers of service fees stacking up on top of the ticket price. It was also a time consuming and tedious process that involved driving to the city center and standing in line at multiple travel agencies, just to get an idea of how much a flight ticket should cost.

Today the majority of ticket purchases take place on the Internet. According to market research institution GfK, 90% of travel bookings in 2014 involved going online. Airlines still sell the majority of tickets, but finding and comparing them now takes place on third-party ticket search engines that offer flights from thousands of suppliers globally.

This means great news for all travelers and bad news for the flight ticket industry since higher competition means lower profit margins, which translates to cheaper tickets for the end-consumer. Yay! But with all this availability and literally thousands of options to sort through, searching for and finding the right tickets has become a time-consuming and tedious process. Again! In fact, a study conducted by GfK shows that the average online ticket purchaser visits 22 websites before committing to a purchase, and disregarding if the purchaser buys the ticket online or offline they will have spent nearly 3.5 hours researching online.