I’ve long been a fan of Kayak.com for all of my flight booking needs, but there’s a new sheriff in town.
Hopper is a free iOS app that helps you find the best prices for flights. It’s a bit different from other apps and services because it uses algorithms to constantly check flight prices. You can set “Watch Trips” which alerts you the minute prices drop or if Hopper thinks prices will go up soon. Other services only do daily searches and send email digests, while Hopper is at work constantly.
Here’s what makes Hopper better than Kayak.
Tips
Hands down the best feature of Hopper is its ability to give tips on how to get cheaper or better flights via:
- changing your travel dates
- changing the airport you depart from or arrive into
- suggesting you pay a bit more for more desirable departure times
The Tips feature makes Hopper par excellence in the realm of finding the best flights (whatever that means for you).[footnote]Kayak enables you to search for flights from “nearby” airports but it’s even close to as intuitive or easy to navigate as Hopper’s cut-and-dry Tips system.[/footnote]
Interface
We don’t have any air travel plans for the foreseeable future, but I’m so enthralled by Hopper’s interface that I can’t help but search for random flights for friends and family.
Hopper color codes upcoming dates to show you when the cheapest and most expensive times to fly. The running rabbit while results load is mesmerizing, too.
It’s incredibly easy to set your dates and adjust them. Adjusting dates to find the best deals is one of the most frustrating parts of using most services, but Hopper makes it a breeze.
Prediction
Depending on your flight pattern, Hopper estimates if prices are likely to rise or fall in the future, going as far as saying, “Prices will probably rise by $160 after May 6.” The proverbial question is, “When is the best time to buy,” and while it’s still not fully answered, Hopper gives you a better picture of the best buying window.
A Quick Example
We’re not planning on traveling in December to the States[footnote]Sorry, mom.[/footnote] but I thought I’d look at December flights from Ljubljana (LJU) to Akron / Canton, OH (CAK). Both airports are tiny–as in less than 10 gates.
Kayak, with alternate airports and +/–3 days enabled, gave me a best price option of $734.
Hopper, with its suggestions, told me to snag a flight from Zagreb, Croatia (ZAG) which is only about an hour away from us and suggested alternative dates as well, and I found roundtrip flights for $560.[footnote]$560 for transatlantic action is out-of-control cheap, in case you were wondering[/footnote] That’s a $174 savings!
Drawbacks and Wrapping Up
Right now it seems you can only book roundtrip flights (but they can be so cheap they could be better than one way flights).
Also, setting up alerts for flights isn’t the most intuitive process. You have to do a search and then click on Prediction to watch the flights.
Not all flight patterns have predictions available (especially from one tiny airport on the other side of the world to another tiny airport), so although Hopper still gets you a great price, you don’t necessarily have clues on the best time to buy.
Finally, Hopper kicks you out to other websites to book the actual flights, and at times the flights I found on Hopper didn’t appear on the third-party website. I wish you could book through Hopper, but for now it merely functions as a search engine, albeit a beautiful one.
Get Hopper free on the App Store[footnote]and only has an iPhone version, but you can snag it for the iPad by changing to iPhone only search results[/footnote] but doesn’t have a full-featured website, so your locked into using your iOS device for now.
I’ll still reference flights on Kayak, but Hopper is my new homeboy when it comes to flight booking.
PS I’d love to know how much cash Hopper saves you.