APRIL 2018 FORBES ASIA | 65and many competitors, such as Google, indicate whether
prices will go up but not whether a better deal is coming.
Experiments were part of Lalonde’s childhood in Que-
bec City, where his father, a biologist, regularly brought
home new computers, which Lalonde used to learn to pro-
gram. Instead of attending college, he moved to Los Angeles
in 199 3 to start an online airfare-ticketing company called
Travel Online before the launch of Expedia. Unable to raise
funding, he moved at age 2 3 to Montreal to be with his girl-
friend (now wife), novelist Dominique Fortier. Soon after,
he built Newtrade Technologies, which replaced faxes be-
tween hotel reservation systems and booking sites with soft-
ware; it was acquired by Expedia in 2002.
As an Expedia executive overseeing hotel products and
deals, Lalonde was struck that there weren’t better ways for
people to discover places, not just prices. In 2006 he left to
build a destination site, taking Ouwerkerk, Expedia’s prod-
uct manager, with him. The journey was a long one: For
the first few years, they lacked the capital to build powerful
servers but began making deals to col-
lect flight-price records and travel data.
In 2011, Series A funding enabled them
to build a long-term data center. By 201 3
they had enough data to start building al-
gorithms. Hopper.com launched the next
year.
Traffic soon flooded the website, but
people were interested only in one small section: flight fore-
casting. Lalonde realized users didn’t want to pick a destina-
tion until they knew flight costs and decided to shut down
the website to work exclusively on airfare prediction. His
other key directive: Hopper would exist only on mobile. In
2015, Hopper released its app.
Hopper has raised $8 3 .6 million in venture funding from
firms such as Accomplice and Omers Ventures (the compa-
ny was valued in late 2016 at about $ 3 00 million), and it’s
poised to become much larger. Purchases driven by AI—for
example, suggestions to travel on different dates or to dif-
ferent locations—now drive 25% of sales, up from 5% in
November. The AI knows, for example, that Hopper users
watching a flight from New York to Hawaii are more likely
to end up purchasing a flight to the Caribbean. Over time,
Lalonde expects AI to generate 75% of purchases.
“If I’m watching a trip for a family of four in Salt Lake
City in February, Hopper knows, ‘Oh, I want to ski,’ ” says
Jeff Fagnan, a partner at Accomplice. “What happens if I
shift you to Denver instead for $100 less? They’re changing
the whole supply-and-demand curve of the industry.”
Most users are spontaneous Millennials, like Morgan
Avery, 24, a retail coordinator in New York City. Avery start-
ed using Hopper after she snagged a $164 round-trip tick-
et from New York to L.A. She got an alert at dinner and pur-
chased on the spot. “Hopper almost guarantees I get the
cheapest option,” she says. “It’s the worst thing to book a
flight and see the next week that it’s dropped $200.”
In late 2017, Hopper extended its forecasting and book-
ing tool to hotels, likely an even larger business opportunity.
The app now offers over 200 hotels, typically sold at a 10%
to 15% discount in five major U.S. cities, and aims to make
hotels available in 15 more cities in the next six months.
Hopper’s flight deals, “Secret Fares,” debuted in Janu-
ary and enable airlines to fill lower-cost seats faster, allow-
ing more time to sell last-minute and business-class tickets,
the main revenue driver for airlines. The tool sells seats at
roughly a 10% to 20% discount.
Today Hopper is focused on international growth (users
can buy flights in more than 160 countries) and adding ho-
tels. Lalonde expects head count to double to more than 200
people by the end of 2018, mainly in data science, engineer-
ing and customer service. In a world that’s becoming more
isolationist, Lalonde thinks Hopper can make travel cheaper
and more convenient.
“Our AI is getting people to start shopping earlier and
buy things they didn’t know they wanted,” he says. “We’re no
longer just a better mousetrap.”TRAVELFlight planners:
Cofounders Lalonde
and Ouwerkerk
envision Hopper
as an always-on
“leisure companion,”
automating how
people find new
activities locally and
on vacations.F