Travel Disruptors: Bringing fintech to travel booking

Hopper has acquired 100 million mobile users by offering consumer-friendly financial products and a gamified app experience

McKinsey interviews Hopper CEO Frederic Lalonde about consumer psychology, the power of gamification and social commerce, and the trade-offs involved in targeting younger travelers.

Key takeaways

• Hopper took its expertise around forecasting airfares and use it to create a suite of financial and protection products - things like freezing ticket prices or creating refundability even when the ticket being bought wasn’t refundable;
• The foundational principle of social commerce is that you reward your customers for engagement. If they are actively promoting your brand, promoting a sale that you might have, playing a game, or just scrolling through your app, you lower the price of their commerce;
• The younger, mobile-first demographic that Hopper targets allows it to pursue strategies like these - engagement models very common in places like China and Southeast Asia, but much less common in the West.

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