Hopper: Flights, Hotels & Cars

I’ll start with the reasons for the loss of the star. 1. Sometimes the prediction of when to buy is not accurate. For instance, I was advised to wait for the price to drop to purchase a flight ticket but then when I was advised to “buy now” because the price wasn’t bound to drop, it ended up being $10 more than if I had booked when I was going to initially. A $10 difference isn’t a huge deal; it just felt a bit misleading. Similarly, sometimes the lowest available price shown for a flight is lower than the lowest actual lowest price available, which can be disappointing obviously. Lastly, and perhaps the most confusing for me is how the flight prices are color coded. Naturally one is inclined to think that red mean the flight cost will be most expensive; but I’ve come to learn than red (I think) actually means the cost of the flight is more expensive on that date than I guess it usually is to or from that airport. So in reality, a date color coded red could actually be more cost effective than a date color coded green if that date is usually pretty cheap on average. I haven’t been able to crack the algorithm, so I would just advise everyone to always check all dates regardless of the color coding. In my opinion, it would be most helpful to the buyer if the color coding represented a general price range. All in all, hopper does the leg work for me and saves me a bunch of time which is why despite the aforementioned, I think they still deserve 4.5 ⭐️.

We recently had a house fire and had no choice but to stay in hotels. With us being a family of 5 suites seem to suit us best and hopper came through every time with the lowest rate of all 3rd party hotel apps and sites. Rate do change constantly but that’s what makes it kinda fun. I find that 2AM I can get the lowest rate of the day , although that’s not always the case. Not only that but on top of fire car broke down and Hopper had great deals for a rental for the week. They are always posting cheap flights and housing or hotels for a vacation or in my case ended up finding an apartment to stay in short term till we got are ducks in a row for the next step of are journey. I have never had a problem with them personally or had to call because they made a mistake. Just be careful when booking rooms that your reading the details correctly or call hotel and double check if you’re unsure what a room type is. For example one time I booked us for a king suite. Thing separate king bedroom and sofa bed in living room….. and we walked in the room there was one king bed. What I should have clicked on was 1 bedroom king suite which had the separate bedroom and pull out couch for the kiddos in living room. All in all Thank you Hopper I couldn’t have found a better site to use in this time of need for my family.

Hopper does a great job of finding all flights available and but not so good at forecasting whether the prices will decline or increase. Let me explain. Hoppers forecasting should help you determine whether you should purchase the flight now, or wait. However, Hopper needs more filters to actually make this work for consumers. You see, when you check for flights and prices, the filter allows you to choose Direct Flight or One Layover. Let’s say I chose One Layover. I can further filter the layover time, but only in chunks of 4 hours. Unfortunately, when I was checking flights, many of the flights with One Layover of 4 hours or less were a total flight duration of 8+ hours, while other flights with One Layover were a total flight duration of only 5 hours. I really wanted a filter that allowed for total flight duration as I only wanted those shorter duration flights. Without more specific filters, Hoppers prediction of pricing is useless, as it’s prediction of lower or higher future pricing encompasses ALL those flights, rather than only the shorter duration ones I was interested in. Therefore I’d often find Hopper suggesting I wait to purchase my flight, but ultimately the shorter duration flights would increase in price while only the longer duration flights ( due to layovers close to 4 hrs) decreasing in price. Long story short, I couldn’t use Hoppers price prediction very effectively. If you filter for direct flights the the price prediction works nicely.