We help customers spend less and travel better. We aspire to be the world’s best — and most fun — place to book travel.
Hopper’s mission is to build travel products that save customers money. Full stop.
Customer Obsession
Speed and Innovation
Best Prices
Grow Revenue
Many companies claim to focus on their customers, but true customer obsession is something different and much more far reaching. Hopper innovates by starting with the customer and working backwards. We discover what delights customers through the scientific process — forming hypotheses through existing, qualitative, and surveyed data, and then A/B testing ideas to see what works.
Listen to what customers say
Understand customer wants & needs
Focus on customer satisfaction
Provide better product than the competition
Balance customer satisfaction and margin, to build a business.
Continuously test, measure and learn via consumer science
Invent and deliver on unanticipated needs
Obsess about long term customer delight
Invent completely new products that have no competition
Lead with customer delight and ensure that product is hard to copy. Revenue will follow.
Embrace uncertainty. If you know something is going to work, then it is not an experiment. Furthermore, deciding that you’re going to do only what you know will work leaves a lot of opportunity on the table. There will always be serendipity involved in discovery. Experiments, by their very nature, are prone to failure, but a few big victories can compensate for dozens and dozens of experiments that don’t work. We tolerate failure and expect that our leaders learn from it, as there are just as many learning opportunities in failure as in success.
Optimize for speed. If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your innovation. While it’s important to make high-quality decisions, Hopper stresses the importance of making these decisions at high velocity. Speed matters in business! Slow and passive decision making is not only de-energizing, but a competitive disadvantage.
We do this by maintaining a strong bias towards action. Most decisions should be made with close to 70% of the information needed. Waiting to gather 90%+ of the information will only slow us down.
Make decisions with data. We don’t pretend to speak for the customer, we use real data to discover what customers crave. True innovation is not based on what customers ask for — it’s based on their needs. Hopper understands that as a company, we must invent on their behalf.
Gathering data is the best way to truly discover what customers need. The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy. Instead of asking “What do customers say?” we embrace innovation by saying “Let’s test it!”
Trust the process. Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in and have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort.
We are perseverant on the vision, but flexible on the execution. Our hotel business is a great example of this: it took three tries to get it to work, but we just kept trying! Lack of perseverance leads to giving up on experiments prematurely. If you aren’t flexible on the implementation, then you risk missing the alternative solution to the problem.
There are two kinds of companies: those that work to charge more, and those that work to charge less. By working to make travel more affordable for everyone, Hopper will be the second. This is key to creating long-term relationships with our customers as we know that any time a customer overpays for travel on our platform that it is merely a short-term gain.It’s counterintuitive, but it’s through lowering prices and saving customers more money that we grow our revenue — this leads to more sales and a faster annual growth rate. Our innovation culture is therefore highly focused on coming up with new and unique ways to save customers money, like the price prediction.
There are two kinds of companies: those that work to charge more, and those that work to charge less. By working to make travel more affordable for everyone, Hopper will be the second. This is keyPercentage margins don’t matter — what actually matters are margin dollars (the dollars earned). Companies are not valued by their percentage margins, but by how many dollars they actually make and a multiple of that. This is why this works in concert and not in opposition with our objective to lower prices for our customers, as lower prices lead to more sales which lead to more margin dollars.
We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us — we wouldn’t be in business if it wasn’t. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital. to creating long-term relationships with our customers as we know that any time a customer overpays for travel on our platform that it is merely a short-term gain. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s through lowering prices and saving customers more money that we grow our revenue — this leads to more sales and a faster annual growth rate. Our innovation culture is therefore highly focused on coming up with new and unique ways to save customers money, like the price prediction.
We intentionally designed our culture to give leaders ownership and autonomy, empowering them to make decisions based on a set of guiding principles and tenets to achieve maximum impact for the customer.Sounds like a fit? Check out our open roles!
