![hopper app hopper app](https://swirled.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/hopper-app-750x549.jpg)
Lalonde recognized that it might be considered a stupid move to take your financial products and give it to your competitors, but that the fundamental reason is behind Hopper’s obsession to lower the cost of travel for its customers. Pointing to Hopper’s recent deal with Amadeus, Skift’s Schaal asked whether the end game for Hopper was to become a B2B company or a consumer company. It’s a better version of buy now pay later,” Lalonde said, adding that what Hopper does is hold the price for the consumer. “About one out of three of our customers that freeze the price say they don’t have the money in their bank account to pay the whole thing. Lalonde said that it might even be a better version than some of the standard fintech products. Skift’s Schaal asked whether Hopper describing itself as fintech was a buzzy way to up its valuation, but Lalonde said that given its revenue does not come primarily from being an OTA but rather from orthogonal financial products. “We understand future prices better than everybody else so we can price the risk in a way that nobody else can do,” Lalonde said. Part of the reason is that the company is innovating a lot, as well as its obsession over consumer travel pricing.
![hopper app hopper app](https://upgradedpoints.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Hopper-9.png)
Hopper has reached 70 million users on its app, and Lalonde sees it growing. Lalonde added that people compare on average 34 websites, and won’t be doing that on apps in the future - consumers will pick one third-party app, and the share between third-party apps and online travel agencies are growing equally, Lalonde added, noting that the aggregators are winning a much larger share. If you slice it generationally and you start to look at millennials and Gen Z, you see it.” If you look at kids today, it’s a completely different behavior. “Our thesis at Hopper is that the East is ahead of the West in terms of customer behavior. Lalonde did not flinch at Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s skepticism on superapps working in the West in the way they do in Asia. “There will be a Western global superapp for travel - it may be owned by Google, Facebook or Alibaba, but it will be a superapp and we’re trying to become that,” said Frederic Lalonde, CEO of Hopper, at Skift Global Forum, in conversation with Skift founding editor Dennis Schaal. Hopper’s long trajectory in the travel industry, going from an online travel agency to venturing into fintech, has led it from barely making revenue to now earning 70 percent from selling financial products to third-party businesses.īut the company has bigger plans ahead in its ongoing mission to continue being the best at lowering the cost of travel for consumers - it’s betting on the future of superapps for travel, which are already popular in Asia.