Planning a holiday trip? Airfare prices can swing a lot around holidays, and if you don’t monitor fares regularly, it’s hard to know when it’s a good time to buy a ticket. Today, we’re introducing a free mobile app that predicts fare changes, automatically tracks prices, and sends you instant phone notifications when discounts appear. It’s a great choice for people who want to travel but don’t want to overspend on flights.
Download and install
You can click the download links: iPhone, Android
Hopper supports Android and iPhone. Users on other phones can only take a look.
How to use Hopper
Using Hopper is very simple. First, enter your departure and destination, then a calendar appears, and you can choose your preferred departure and return dates on it. Hopper then instantly shows the current lowest price, and you can also see all candidate flights.
For example, I randomly picked a one-day NYC-LAS round-trip flight. Just below the cute bunny on that page is Hopper’s suggestion: 'You should watch this trip,' meaning it thinks fares are likely to continue dropping and recommends waiting.
Below that, it also shows a reference fare for what Hopper estimates to be the lowest price.
There is also an official video that walks you through Hopper step by step. If you’re interested, you can watch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyTSpT55h8E&feature=emb_logo
Hopper limitations
Due to airline limitations, Hopper cannot access data for every airline. For example, Southwest (WN) and Delta (DL) are not available in Hopper’s data, so if they run promotions Hopper won’t send alerts. On the plus side, competition among airlines is intense, and airfare trends are still highly correlated, so using Hopper to track overall fare trends is still useful.
For the China-U.S. routes, I tested it and Hopper can also find Cathay Pacific (CX), China Southern (CZ), China Eastern (MU), Air China (CA), Air Canada (AC), Japan Airlines (JL), and almost all major international carriers. The coverage is quite broad. It is also fully capable of tracking fares for return-to-China routes. But because of the data volume, it may not be as accurate as its predictions for U.S. domestic routes.
Summary of Hopper
The core function of this app is fare prediction and fare monitoring. For most people, those functions are already enough. As long as you remember to add your planned trip to this app far enough ahead of time (for U.S. domestic flights, it’s best to add at least 2 months in advance; for international routes, at least 4 months ahead to secure the lowest fare), you can wait for Hopper to tell you when to buy your ticket. I used Hopper’s prediction twice for domestic routes, and its predictions were fairly accurate.
Have you used Hopper? How accurate is Hopper? Feel free to share your experience.