Honestly the pricing is the real unnerving part here and it's definitely going to be a deal breaker for much of your audience.
Personally I'd prefer something like this: I enter my current flight details and the price I was going to pay (your experts should be able to verify this price as correct pretty quickly?), and then your experts would give me a better flight plan and I'd pay you 10% of the difference or something, and nothing if your experts don't find a better plan. This way I'd always feel like I'm 'winning' by using your service and not taking an expensive shot in the dark.
Hi Ryan, segmenting is our greatest challenge and (planned improvements aside) your experience was intended. It's the old startup adage: better to have 1,000 customers who love you than 1,000,000 who don't care.
What you're suggesting is what we call "gambling against Kayak". That's not our target market because it's not the market we can help most. We often say internally, it's not whether we can possibly help a customer, but whether we can likely help them.
Our idea to create "products" was to help segment customers into those we can help most. For example, complex trips, flying premium, using frequent flyer miles, traveling with pets, euro-city hops, etc. These are the people we can "likely" make happy and will help us grow to then target a wider audience.
Comments
Honestly the pricing is the real unnerving part here and it's definitely going to be a deal breaker for much of your audience.
Personally I'd prefer something like this: I enter my current flight details and the price I was going to pay (your experts should be able to verify this price as correct pretty quickly?), and then your experts would give me a better flight plan and I'd pay you 10% of the difference or something, and nothing if your experts don't find a better plan. This way I'd always feel like I'm 'winning' by using your service and not taking an expensive shot in the dark.
Hi Ryan, segmenting is our greatest challenge and (planned improvements aside) your experience was intended. It's the old startup adage: better to have 1,000 customers who love you than 1,000,000 who don't care.
What you're suggesting is what we call "gambling against Kayak". That's not our target market because it's not the market we can help most. We often say internally, it's not whether we can possibly help a customer, but whether we can likely help them.
Our idea to create "products" was to help segment customers into those we can help most. For example, complex trips, flying premium, using frequent flyer miles, traveling with pets, euro-city hops, etc. These are the people we can "likely" make happy and will help us grow to then target a wider audience.