All our deals for the next two weeks in one place
Launching Deals Calendar
Almost every airline has a student programme dating back a couple of decades or more. But only 1 in 20 students know that student flights exist. So the only way we can drastically increase familiarity and awareness is by being as transparent as possible.
First step: Student Benefits Label
We knew we couldn't onboard every airline at once and that it would take time to explain the huge upsides launching student flights have to airlines, particularly on routes that are competing not just with other airlines but other modes of transport. So while pursuing integrations with all the airlines and negotiating student fares we also offered non-student flights. For our customers to understand which were and which weren't student flights we simply included a label:
Second step: Strikethrough Prices
We repeatedly got told that it was unclear if students were saving at all and how much they were saving. So we rebuilt our requests to handle not one set of flight details which automatically would just filter the top flight sorted by price to the top but to separate sets of flight details: one set containing student flights, the other containing non-student flights, and our system would compare the prices. If the non-student flight is more expensive (which it usually is) we now show it on the search results page as a strikethrough price.
Third Step: Deals Calendar
Armed with our ability to tell the student exactly how much they are saving we set out to show the student all routes and days on which they are saving the most which tend to be the two weeks before take-off. We built a colour-coded Deals Calendar to give our customers an overview of what dates those flights are still available and where to. As every airline operates with slightly different rules, e.g. flexible rebooking and varied age restrictions, our first version is displaying Deals airline by airline.
Dozens of customers have already used this function all the way to a completed booking and we're hoping that while we improve it even more we're adding transparency to this opaque world of student flights.