Hopper Expands Fintech Across Verticals, Offers Flexibility Before and During Trips

Summer 2022 is well on its way to being the busiest travel season we’ve seen since 2019. In fact, since January of this year, search demand has grown 18%. And while demand usually rises during the warmer months, searches for domestic travel this summer have grown 50% faster than in the first four months of 2019. The surge in demand, rising jet fuel costs and limited capacity are putting upward pressure on airfare, along with hotel and car rental rates, leading to the highest prices for summer travel we’ve seen in years.

It’s clear that travelers are eager to get out there this summer, but high prices, frequent delays, and lingering uncertainty are heightening consumer anxiety. Hopper has created a full suite of fintech products to address these pain points, and today, the travel booking app is announcing new flexibility products across its travel verticals. Currently, almost 60% of app customers purchase at least one fintech product when making a booking, and a user who has previously bought one of our fintech products is between 2.5x and 7x more likely to purchase that product again.

Hotel Flexibility Before and During Your Trip

Whether it's a staycation or a trip to another country, staying somewhere new can be thrilling, but sometimes things don’t go as planned. With Hopper’s new hotel fintech products – Cancel for Any Reason and Leave for Any Reason – you don’t need to worry about that. The best part is that these new products give you flexibility not just before the trip, but during! 

Cancel for Any Reason, which is already available on flights, gives you the power to instantly cancel your stay for any reason up until check-in and receive 100% of your room cost back. If a traveler ends up utilizing this plan, Hopper pays any fees due to the hotel.

Leave for Any Reason, a brand new Hopper product, lets you leave the hotel for any reason at or after check-in and book a new hotel of the same star category with 100% of the rebooking costs covered by Hopper. Were you hoping for a waterfront view? Or is the room not as clean as you hoped? No problem. Just open the app, tap a few buttons, and you are rebooked instantly at another hotel nearby at no cost to you.

Lock in Car Rental Deals with Price Freeze™

Already available on flight and hotel bookings, Hopper is launching Price Freeze™ for Cars. Price Freeze™ protects customers from pricing volatility by enabling them to freeze prices for up to 21 days. It allows customers to take more time to finalize their plans before they book. If the cost goes up, Hopper pays the difference up to $100; if the cost goes down, you pay the lower price.

Car rental prices are averaging just around $80 per day, during times of increased demand we’ve seen them reach nearly $100 per day. See a great deal in the app? Lock it in while you confirm your road trip plans for this summer. 

Standalone Fintech – Disruption Guarantee No Matter Where You Book

Between airline staffing shortages, bad weather, and limited capacity, delays have been on the rise as the travel industry scales back up. Currently, around 20% of flights are delayed, and around a third of those are delayed by over an hour. 

Hopper users have come to love the app’s Flight Disruption Guarantee to help ensure they get to their destinations on time. But what if you used existing credits and booked directly with an airline? Or what if you booked on another OTA that doesn’t offer the same immediate and no-hassle flexibility? Well now, with Hopper’s new Standalone Trip Protection, non-Hopper bookers can add Flight Disruption Guarantee to their booking they made elsewhere. If you need to reschedule a delayed flight, Hopper will cover any fees.

The Hopper app has over 70 million downloads and ranked as the most downloaded travel booking app in the United States last year (according to Apptopia). Hopper is #3 largest online travel agency in the U.S. and currently offers flights, hotels, car rentals, and most recently short-term rental homes. 

Check out these new features and all our existing ones by downloading the app today – available for iOS and Android. These fintech products will also be available to other travel brands via Hopper’s B2B initiative, Hopper Cloud.