Flight Fox

Flight Fox launched in 2012 as a contest-based crowdsourced travel service. A customer posted a trip, such as the cheapest flight to Paris, and multiple experts competed to find the best price. Co-founder Lauren Sullivan explained that the model did not hold up: a small number of experts were winning most of the contests. Around 2013 or early 2014, the team switched to a one-on-one model that matched each customer with the expert most likely to win the contest anyway.

The pricing model is pay-as-you-go. Customers authorize a credit card, with a minimum fee of $50 for a standard one-way or round trip. A multi-city trip to three places costs $100, or $25 extra per place. For companies, the fee is a $30 search fee plus a $20 booking fee per person per place. Experts are contractors who receive 65% of each fee, and Flight Fox keeps 35%. The company offers a guarantee: if a customer brings a valid quote and Flight Fox cannot beat it by enough to cover its fee, it charges nothing. At its peak the platform had about 5,000 experts, and the team later handpicked the best 20 to 25.

Flight Fox's early consumer business was constrained by economics. Lauren said that on a $50 trip the company keeps about $15 to $20, and that a typical person travels only once a year. That made it too expensive to acquire consumers online while competing with Kayak and Expedia. The company shifted toward businesses that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on travel and book every week. By January 2017 it had at least 50 companies booking at least one trip, and a core group of five to 10 companies booking about 30 trips a month.

The company's main advantage was its human, expert-driven service, and customers kept returning. The pivots were costly. The team ran a large office in Canada and later had to fire everyone there. Lauren said the team had not planned for an economic downturn that would cut travel budgets and had not found a repeatable customer acquisition channel for companies yet.

As of the interview, Flight Fox had four full-time remote team members and roughly 25 expert contractors. Total 2016 revenue was about $700K to $800K, with most of it paid out to experts. The team had not decided whether to raise another round and said it would not raise until it found its sweet spot for customer acquisition.