Dohop - Best Flight Search Engine

Dohop is a travel search engine website based in Reykjavík, Iceland. It was founded in 2004 to aggregate and link low cost flight connections. In 2005, Dohop launched the world's first flight planner for low-cost airlines and later expanded it to include all scheduled flights worldwide, amounting to 660 airlines.

Dohop is primarily a long tail aggregation agent that doesn't sell directly to the consumer, but refers the user to airline's booking engines. Dohop's income comes from pay per click advertising and from selling specialized search engines to airlines and airports. The company also operates an analytics department offering route network analysis and optimization suggestions to airlines and airports.

The website won the 2006 Travelmole Web Awards in the category for best technology site, and was selected amongst the Times Magazine 100 best travel sites in 2007. Dohop was also voted the World's Leading Comparison Website by the World Travel Awards in 2014.

Dohop's hotel search engine searches more than 200,000 hotel properties worldwide and compares rates with several online hotel booking sites. Search results can be displayed on a map and sorted and filtered by various criteria.

Search technology

Worldwide, more than 600 airlines operate scheduled flights. The flight schedules typically extend from six to nine months. The schedules include approximately 50 million flights between more than 3,000 airports.

Dohop searches these flight schedules for possible matches for the user's desired city pairs and travel dates. If there are no direct flights available, Dohop calculates possible flight combinations. The number of alternative flight combinations for a two stop flight route can be dauntingly large.

Having identified and ranked the available flight alternatives, Dohop then retrieves and compares offers from online travel vendors; online travel agents and airlines, where the user can complete his booking directly.

Business model

Dohop is a flight meta-search engine. Revenue is generated from publishing adverts for travel and related services and from partners (like airlines) which want to get listed. Dohop is billing the partners on a cost per click (CPC) bases.

Dohop also earns revenue from licensing its search technology for use on third party websites. Main customers are airlines and airports.

Dohop is available in multiple languages and this availability and access is part of the business strategy. The site is available on a number of domains.

In 2012, Dohop opened an affiliate program where anyone can set up Dohop's flight search on their own website and earn revenue from the traffic this generates. This has been very successful and is now an important part of Dohop's revenue stream.

References

External links

• Dohop website
• Taking on the travel giants, CNN edition article, December 1, 2005
• Q&A: Compare prices and schedules of low-cost airlines across Europe, New York Times, June 25, 2006
• Q&A: Useful Web sites for low-cost air travel within Europe, New York Times, March 11, 2007
• Kate Russell gives us her latest selection of the best sites on the World Wide Web, BBC Click, March 10, 2007
• Best websites for booking flights, TimesOnline, March 18, 2009
• 5 best travel sites, MSNBC, June 9, 2009
• Travel Web Sites: A Click-On Showdown, New York Times, June 17, 2009