Hopper, a travel app that tells you the right time to book your flight to get the lowest price, says it has leveraged AI to drive significant growth over the last two years. Already, its AI powered notifications drive a quarter of its overall sales, and the company says that portion will grow. More significantly, those AI-driven sales are to customers who were originally looking at traveling to a different destination or on a different date, but who decided to change their mind upon Hopper’s recommendation. “What we found is that users converted 2.5 times better on those recommendations than for the trips for which they had actually searched,” said Dakota Smith, Hopper’s head of growth and business. For example, a customer in New York looking to buy a ticket to Hawaii might be lured to buy a significantly less expensive ticket to another desirable beach location in the Caribbean or Miami, Smith said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Reaching out to the right user, at the right time, with the right recommendation is our key to success.” The app’s growing reputation, and catchy features like “secret fares,” has created strong download momentum. According to Smith, Hopper just achieved 30 million in total app installs since its 2015 launch. That’s up 50 percent from February, when the company first announced it had passed 20 million installs. In April, Hopper shared that AI drives 25 percent of ticket sales, a number that is apparently growing (although Smith refused to share an updated… [Read full story]
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