Hopper offers real-time alerts on airfares to give users a head’s up when a ticket is likely at it’s cheapest, but until now the app sent travelers to airline and booking sites to actually buy a flight. Not anymore.
The airfare alert app added “quick tap” booking on Monday, giving users the ability to “complete your entire flight shopping process — researching, comparison shopping, and booking — in under a minute.”
Traveler and payment information can be saved in the app, and once that’s set up it’s a streamlined process that makes desktop airline sites look like relics. “This sets us up to create a much better way of shopping and watching an airfare,” Hopper CEO Frederic Lalonde told Mashable.
The booking feature has been in the works since January, and has posed several challenges, as this marks Hopper becoming a travel agency — a much different business than a data analysis service. Hopper is partnering with a call center company to provide customer service.
“We’ve tried to look at what it is to service a customer,” said Lalonde. Payments are processed by Stripe; Lalonde said Apple Pay could be integrated in the future.
The app compares airfares from different carriers, lets users set alerts, and will send a real-time alert when a fare goes down; adding booking completes the booking cycle within the app.
Hopper doesn’t completely remove the need for any other app, though — Lalonde suggests always downloading the app for the airline you are flying.
The company also released an Android app Monday, something they said they’ve had requests for for some time. Hopper’s Android app is available on Google Play, and for current iOS users Hopper 2.0, with QuickTap booking, is available in the App Store.