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Flight Search Startup And Disrupt Contender Superfly Adds Personalized Hotel Booking Service
Superfly, which helps travelers take advantage of frequent flier miles and airline rewards programs, is expanding its services to include a mobile app for finding and booking hotels.
Superfly first launched at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2010 and uses big data to personalize flight results based on consumer travel records. In April, Superfly developed Superbox, which allows users to organize all travel-related emails. This makes it easier to track rewards and frequent flier miles. Now the company is using the same model to help users take advantage of hotel rewards programs and promotions: Superfly Hotels.
Available for iOS, Superfly Hotels delivers personalized hotel results, including hotels you or similar customers have stayed in before. Superfly will also offer cash back on hotel spendings, starting from five percent for all users, and increasing up to 10 percent based on booking frequency.
With the launch of Superfly Hotels, Superfly is catching up to travel sites like Expedia, Orbitz and Priceline that already have mobile hotel booking apps available. However, Superfly has an advantage over its competitors– a large data set of hotel bookings collected from travel emails from Superbox.
“The word big data is thrown around a lot, but for us big data is all about identity, context and location,” Superfly founder Jonathan Meiri tells me. “Knowing this about the consumer, we’re trying to get all this massive data and help consumers make really simple choices around which hotel is best for them.”
Meiri says Superfly has collected information on billions of dollars in hotel bookings. With this information, Superfly can recommend hotels where you are a regular patron or can use rewards programs. Or if you usually travel with one airline, Superfly will display which hotels are preferred by that same airline’s customers.
Superfly has attracted investors such as former Kayak CFO Bill Smith and TravelPort Chairman Jeff Clarke. The company also recently added another recruit from Kayak. Jacqueline LoVerme, Kayak’s former director of business development-mobile, connected with Meiri through Smith and is now Superfly’s vice president of business development.
Meiri says Superfly Hotels is working on versions for Android and web. You can download the iPhone app here.
