A fascinating interview with Hopper founder and CEO Frederic Lalonde on A16Z’s Future, with a deep dive on his thinking about superapps in travel and Hopper’s potential path into becoming one. In it, a nugget that now 70 percent Hopper’s revenues are coming from their add-on fintech produces, AND 70 percent of ticket bookers through Hopper’s app and site are now adding one or more these products to their shopping cart as part of the buying process, the average being 1.7, according to Frederic.
From the interview:
“With technology, if you’re able to predict things, if you’re able to create a digital experience, in principle, you should be able to cancel out every possible risk that you face when you travel. It turns out that A) you can, and B) that almost everybody has one thing that they worry about when they travel — some people care about prices, others care about arriving on time, some people just are worried the hotel is going to suck. But nobody worries about everything going wrong. Today, at least one of these add-ons are attached to 70% of the travel transactions we sell. When customers buy them, they average 1.7 per booking.”
On his superapp-in-travel ambitions: “I believe it’s a Western anomaly that Amazon isn’t into travel, that Facebook doesn’t sell anything, and that Snapchat does no e-commerce. I think it’s because we’re used to a Western construction for older people that is slowly getting eroded. And just like QR codes, just like text, as people adopt the technologies, we’re going to become more and more Easternized.
It stands to reason that either one of the travel companies will add high-frequency purchases to what they’re doing. We’re one contender for that. Or a high-frequency app that does delivery, like Uber, will get into travel. Or one of the e-comm companies is going to get into travel. It has to end with a couple of companies that offer a lot of things, and travel is just one thing.”