Travelers who dig the spontaneity that services like Hotel Tonight afford will be happy to hear that the last-minute booking game has expanded to airline apps as well.
Flight Tonight, a new digital application from the flight data company Hopper,provides travelers who with a single-search service want to find the most affordable flight leaving from a nearby airport in the next 24 hours.
For instance, if Friday’s long lunch turned into a long weekend, a search on the app would turn up flights leaving in the late afternoon, early evening and throughout the night. A happy-hour-inspired search might show late-night flights and those leaving early the next morning.
Either way, the app was built to factor in a two- to three-hour buffer so that travelers can pack and get to get to the airport on time.
In its first weeks, the app turned up flights on some popular routes, like Dallas to Denver or Houston to New Orleans, for less than $200, Patrick Surry, Hopper’s chief data scientist, said in an email. It also revealed some fares less than $250 on more exotic getaways, like Newark to Montego Bay.
Although Hopper does not negotiate with airlines to offer users a discounted fare (as Hotel Tonight does with hotel companies), the company is interested in approaching airlines with the idea, Mr. Surry said, as it could be of use in getting rid of leftover inventory.
Flight Tonight includes data on international flights as well as domestic and is currently available on iOS 7 devices and throughapp stores in the United States and Canada.
For those planning a long-term trip, Hopper also recently started aFlight Explorer tool on its website, which notifies users of daily flight deals, ranks fares according to whether they are good (the lowest-priced 25 percent of flights for that route) or great (the lowest-priced 10 percent of flights for that route) and offers charts for comparison shopping by destination.
Contributed by RACHEL LEE HARRIS, http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/
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