Big Data Can Now Tell You When to Book That Flight

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We’ve all heard plenty of advice about when and how to book travel plans: never book a flight on a Thursday, use Kayak, use Expedia, flying Christmas day is the cheapest option for the holidays, etc. But now one big data startup is backing up advice with real evidence.

Cambridge-headquartered Hopper uses a back-end combination of Apache HBase, Apache Hive, and Elasticsearch to enable users to find the cheapest available travel options from across the web. Hopper takes traveler data already entered into sites like Expedia and Priceline, and analyzes that data on a massive scale. The result? You get the cheapest possible ticket.

’Every time you check a price, it’s different, it changes day-to-day, and people have no idea whether they’re getting a good deal. What we’re trying to do is bring some transparency to that, and the way we’re doing that is by working with billions of flight prices that we collect everyday,’ explained Chief Data Scientist Patrick Surry.

The real-world applications of big data have a bad habit of getting lost in translation. With Hopper, the services big data enables are clear to users. With that simplicity, Hopper has secured several rounds of funding from VCs and operates offices in both Cambridge and Montreal.

Surry said Hopper is not looking for another round of funding, but did not disclose whether they would issue an IPO in the near future. He did indicate that the company plans to roll out a mobile application very soon.