Flightster

What are We Doing Here?

• by Jeff
• on December 1st, 2010
• 4 Comments

Although you’d never know it from reading through our site, we have big plans for Flightster.com that go beyond just bringing together a bunch of great writers to share some cool travel stories.  We’ve actually been working for most of the year on a new airfare shopping and booking engine that will bring a fresh new perspective to the way to book flights on-line.

The reason we haven’t mentioned this before is because we’ve been stuck in this Marketing 101 conundrum.  We’re not marketing people, but the marketing people we talk to all seem to say that we need  to wade carefully and be deliberate.  Before speaking, we need to craft the right message and theme — something “aspirational” — that can define the Flightster brand.

We contemplated some soaring rhetoric.  We were going to be the site for people who don’t leave “mountains unclimbed, waves un-ridden, ideas untested…”  We kicked around some tag line ideas with arguably clever puns like “the sky is not the limit”.   But who were we kidding?

Luckily, we eventually hit on the right question: How about if, instead of trying to evoke grand images that make people feel good about themselves, we just concentrate on building a web site where someone can book an airline ticket without wanting to put a bullet in their head?

Because if there is one thing that today’s flight booking sites have in common, it’s that they all suck.  They make it so freakin’ complicated to find the best combination of flights.  Some are downright deceitful; others are just cumbersome and counter-intuitive.  But virtually all will test the patience of anyone who has better things to do than spend all afternoon on a flight booking.

We’re on a mission to change all this.  We’re working hard to build a flight booking engine that doesn’t suck – or at least not as badly as everybody else’s.

It’s a tall order.  To be fair to the other travel sites, booking flights on-line has some inherent pain points that are beyond the control of a site designer.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of potential itinerary combinations for most searches, and prices can change from minute to minute.  To get up to date pricing, you have to make queries over real-time links to dozens of different airline systems.  Then you have to figure some way to clearly show all these choices, and you have to do it all in about 5 seconds, because, let’s face it, we all have short attention spans.

From a software development perspective, it’s a really cool challenge.  That’s what keeps us motivated.  We know we won’t be able to make it perfect, but we think we can make it a lot better.

And so, at the risk of setting the bar too low, here is our mission — to build the least sucky flight booking engine on the internet.  “We Suck Less” will be our tag-line.  We will deliver a booking experience that, while not perfect, will be refreshingly un-bad.

Keep an eye on this space so we can keep you posted about our progress.  We’d love to hear your feedback about what you like and don’t like about the current crop of travel booking sites.  We promise to try to incorporate some of your ideas.  And in the meantime, we’ll continue to provide a forum for the fantastic group of writers who we are lucky enough to have working with us.

Jeff

Jeff Klee is the Founder and CEO of Flightster. A computer geek with a passion for travel, he got his start in the travel industry selling spring break trips from a dorm room at the University of Michigan. Today, he can frequently be heard rambling about air fare statistics and fare shopping algorithms to anyone who will listen, unless its Sunday in which case everything stops so he can root futiley for the Denver Broncos.