Monthly Archives: September 2011

Thanks for loving Flocations!

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Over the course of our launch, we have had some excellent feedback from our community. We’d like to show you some of the ones that make us look good (of course), and would like to say, from the whole Flocations team; Thank You, we love you too!

On Twitter:

“Best travel site ever” @osamaehgol

“The easiest way to book cheap last minute flights (and damn beautiful website)” @40square 

“Golly, I quite like this site’s UX. Cheap flights at your fingertips literallywith just one click. Bookmarked it” @brendalogy

“Flocations is now my first stop to look for inexpensive trips” @preetamrai

“@CSRworldtour is looking into #flocations to organize their south-east Asia #trips!” @CSRworldtour

Through messages:

“Wow guys, your site looks and operates better than Google Flights” Rick

“I actually benefited from flocations last Friday. I needed to get a flight back from KL and I found out an airline that I did not even think flew KL-SG – JetStar. I did get a ticket on that and made the trip.” Harish Pillay

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Someone using Flocations. Photo by mengwong

 

We love to hear form you (even if you don’t like us!), let us know what you think about Flocations in the comments below!

Going to Penang, Malaysia: A Flocations experience

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It was time to do some travel planning again when my girlfriend was pushing me to take some days away from Singapore (and my computer) together. Luckily, this time Flocations would save us the 4-hour hassle of searching for a destination and comparing prices.

In a matter of seconds, the Flocations map was showing us destinations to fly to from our airport (Singapore) for less than $150. I reduced the budget to $50, and among the six available destinations was Penang, for $42. We had never been there, the price was affordable, and a zoom on the map showed it was a small island with nice coastal areas. I love islands. I was sold! (she was too).

Penang-sgd42-_-screen-shot-

Flocations also made it easy to get a hotel: I just clicked the “search hotels in Penang” link, which sent me to Agoda with a wide variety of hotels at different price points within Penang.

Everything was settled in just a few minutes! Compare this with the long and frustrating process of checking AirAsia, JetStar and Tiger Airways’ websites I was used to… Flocations took my price considerations into mind and inspired me to a new destination.

I’m proud that we released Flocations!

 

And you, what is your experience with Flocations?

 

Florian.

Welcoming Google in our playground!

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Since Wednesday, many of my friends are sending me the link to Google Flights. Initially slightly upset to have such a big player coming with this product just two weeks after we released ours, I regained confidence while trying it.

Google Flights proves how relevant the idea behind Flocations is!
- Searching for flights should be fast (bye bye dear “we’re searching for results” loading screen.
- A map is indeed the best way to explore potential destinations.

Additionally, as people discover Google Flights, they see that it’s only showing flights from the US currently. For flights in the South East Asia region, travellers will use Flocations! We cover the three main low cost carriers around Singapore: AirAsia, JetStar and Tiger Airways; which gives us a pretty good coverage from Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.

Indeed, we did not spend USD 750m to acquire ITA, a leading company developing flight search technologies, so, in comparison, we are missing some features and data, but our vision for leisure travel planning is quite ambitious and we’re excited to bring it to market.

Florian.

 

WIT – WEB IN TRAVEL : HED Flocations maps a new approach to flight booking

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Flocations is slick and the map interface delivers immediate visual impact. The idea, Cornu said, is to create an interface that helps to “inspire” leisure travelers by providing them with a price ceiling and destinations.

via webintravel.com

Our main man, Florian, did a little email interview with WIT. The article gives the viewpoints of two people; a traveler and a UI designer. While the traveler likes Flocations and uses it, the UI designer is not too sure of how well it will do in the long run for several reasons but one thing he mentions are user’s capacity to use a new UI in a vertical that hasn’t had innovation in decades. I guess the best example I can use to rebuttal that is our good friends Hipmunk.com. ‘Nuff said :)

Flocations is here to innovate and get you to your travel adventure quick.

Flock on!

Tudor

Lessons in revenue management and an OTA experiment

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What he found was that traffic to the branded website did not increase during the week the OTA channel was switched off, and consequently there was no increase in bookings. In fact, he suspects that he may have lost customers who may have been searching out there on the OTAs for hotels in Singapore.

via webintravel.com

Poor hotel owner tried to switch off his OTA channel during the F1 week to “cut out out the middleman”, which in this case was the OTA. Bottom line, didn’t work out for him even in a guaranteed high booking week. I think this proves that people are engrained in their OTA search habits. Not sure why we had to create an article about this since it’s so obvious anyways (that’s why we’re in this business ;)

Tudor

What Next for Online Travel?

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Product innovation in the travel space will emerge for the first time since the entrance of OTA’s in the late 90′s. When you look across the phases of the travel cycle – Dreaming, Researching, Booking, Experiencing and Sharing – the potential for innovation, particularly in the early stages of dreaming and researching is astounding. In 2012 you will see quite a few travel start-ups emerge that attempt to capitalize on this opportunity.

via eyefortravel.com

Okay so a bit similar to my previous post but this article highlights a few more things that are changing in the travel industry.
1. Mobile is going to be huge – Of course, our website is all done in HTML5. Sure we haven’t optimized perfectly for smart-phones, but tablets work beautifully. Doing this well on smartphones will have to be of course, programmed natively but Venkat is a rockstar so we’ll leave it up to him.
2. Deals deals deals! People still loving deals. We love deals too! Don’t worry, we foresee some amazing partnerships in SEA.
3. Product Innovation – This is our core strength. OTAs haven’t innovated in a long time and the user experience is lacking. We intend to fix this, of course.

By the way, any feedback that you have on Flocations, please feel free to send us an email info at flocations dot com.

Tudor

Ex-Googlers Launch Mobile Travel Guide To Kill Lonely Planet; Raise Funding From Chris Sacca & More

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Simply put, Triposo is based on the simple idea that travel guides can be designed in the same way that Google based its aggregation and search on some kick ass algorithms. And a little bit of indexing and semantic icing to boot.

via techcrunch.com

Very cool idea about aggregating trip data. I guess this is another layer into the mapping/travel cake. Book with Flocations then plan with Triposo, not bad!