His other key directive: Hopper would exist only on mobile. Lalonde realized users didn't want to pick a destination until they knew flight costs and decided to shut down the website to work exclusively on airfare prediction.
Traffic soon flooded the website, but people were interested only in one small section: flight forecasting. By 2013 they had enough data to start building algorithms.
#HOPPER FLIGHT SERIES#
In 2011, Series A funding enabled them to build a long-term data center. The journey was a long one: For the first few years, they lacked the capital to build powerful servers but began making deals to collect flight-price records and travel data. In 2006 he left to build a destination site, taking Ouwerkerk, Expedia's product manager, with him.
#HOPPER FLIGHT SOFTWARE#
Soon after, he built Newtrade Technologies, which replaced faxes between hotel reservation systems and booking sites with software it was acquired by Expedia in 2002.Īs an Expedia executive overseeing hotel products and deals, Lalonde was struck that there weren't better ways for people to discover places, not just prices. Unable to raise funding, he moved at age 23 to Montreal to be with his girlfriend (now wife), novelist Dominique Fortier. Instead of attending college, he moved to Los Angeles in 1993 to start an online airfare-ticketing company called Travel Online before the launch of Expedia. Meanwhile, Kayak predicts flight prices only seven days out, and many competitors, such as Google, indicate whether prices will go up but not whether a better deal is coming.Įxperiments were part of Lalonde's childhood in Quebec City, where his father, a biologist, regularly brought home new computers, which Lalonde used to learn to program. Hopper says customers save an average of $50 per ticket and claims its airfare forecasts are 95% accurate up to a year in advance. The 120-person company, led by Lalonde, 44, and cofounder and CTO Joost Ouwerkerk, 46, generated about $15 million in revenue last year by selling flights, almost entirely through push notifications.Ĭustomers buy more than $1.5 million in flights per day across more than 300 airlines, and give Hopper a $5-per-ticket fee (airlines pay a 1% to 4% commission). In January, Hopper was the fourth-most-downloaded travel app in the U.S., after Uber, Lyft and Airbnb. The building is powered by a hydrodam, part of a Canadian system that delivers a supply of cheap electricity and a perfect match for an energy-hungry startup making a big-data bet: that AI-driven recommendations can make travel more affordable and personalized than what people can craft for themselves. "As bad as this place looks, it was probably the smartest place to start a data center," he says.
Walking through a maze of sputtering machines and chemical vats, Fred Lalonde, founder and CEO of Hopper, the world's fastest-growing flight-booking app, explains why he has rented the space since 2009. One of the most cutting-edge travel apps in the world makes its home in a decidedly old-fashioned setting: an active zinc factory in Montreal's former garment district. Lalonde is taking on his previous employer with Hopper, an app that finds the best moment for you to book airfare and hotel stays - and might send you somewhere you never expected to go. Hopper cofounders Frederic Lalonde, left, and Joost Ouwerkerk, right.
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