(sent out Feb 17th, 2018)
Fast Company named Hitlist one of the 25 best new apps of 2017, which marks the fourth year running we’ve made it onto someone’s ‘best new apps’ list. There’s some ‘I keep getting older, Hitlist stays the same age’ joke to be made here…
Last update’s focus was strategy, and thanks to a lot of great advice we’ve been heads down building a new premium upgrade for Hitlist users. For a subscription fee, users will unlock members-only fares and the ability to filter alerts by alliance, time of departure/return, and number of stops.
This month’s focus: rolling out premium to 10% of the user base.
This month’s asks:
- looking for advice from anyone who’s designed a pricing strategy for a subscription/freemium business
- if you’d like to try the beta, sign up here!
UPDATES
- we doubled our airfare monetization month over month in January thanks smarter routing of traffic, huzzah!
- we’ve shipped a few updates, UX tweaks, and bug fixes for our iOS and Android apps — highlight is direct links into HotelTonight and Airbnb.
- We revamped our company blog to include travel tips alongside the archive of all these updates.
- I spoke at Gary Vaynerchuk’s Agent2021 conference and the Future of Travel Summit in Miami, adhering to a new rule: only attend conferences where we have significant BD relationships and the temperature is above 70 degrees. Next stop is Women’s Travel Fest in NYC March 9–11.
- We threw a happy hour pre-party for the Future of Travel Summit along with Roam, Comrad Socks, and The Lab Miami. Because I love you, $100 off your first stay at any of Roam’s locations at this link, and buy 1 get 1 free of Comrad’s stylish compression socks (yup) with code FLYWITHUS.
HERO OF THE MONTH: Tomislav Filipcic, our iOS engineer, is one of those unicorns who can both design and write gorgeous code. Despite being built on the exact same back end technology, our iOS reviews are fantastic (4.8 stars!) whereas Android lags (3.8). Either Android users are all whiners or Tomislav is a fantastic developer. We think the latter.
WHY WE’RE DOING THIS: a fellow CEO in the travel industry was suggested as a panelist at the premier conference for this industry, and told that she wasn’t a fit because ‘there’s already a woman on that panel.’ When pressed on why there weren’t more female keynote speakers, the conference rep said ‘women don’t draw crowds.’
80% of trips are booked by women, but this industry isn’t listening to them. We smell a whole lot of opportunity because of that.
GIF OF THE MONTH: in honor of Valentine’s Day, a message from the most recognizable face in travel.
