We here at Uproxx love cheap airfare. Travel is great, but paying buckets of cash just to get someplace is not so great. And while we may have relied on timing tricks combined with Travelocity in the past, there’s a new game in town that we’re excited to try out: Skypicker.
The company is not actually new—it’s a three-year-old Czech-based startup that just made its entrance into the U.S. market this week. Skypicker’s founders, Oliver Dlouhý and Lucie Brešová, initially started the company as a means of offering travelers the lowest-priced tickets to the places they need to go.
Dlouhý first dreamed up the idea after he and his girlfriend, broke students at the time, were trying to travel from Prague to Portugal, but didn’t want to pay the $500 the search engines quoted them. So, they got creative: for $80 and a whole lot of hassle, they cobbled together a bunch of cheap connecting flights and eventually made it to Porto, Portugal.
The strategy worked great for him, but he realized it wasn’t practical. Not only was booking each individual flight a waste of time, but what happened when one flight got delayed or cancelled? The meticulously-planned trip would be all but ruined with re-booking fees.
There had to be a better way, right?
Dlouhý invented that better way—although, it took time. When he started, he was combing other travel websites for flight fares using a search engine he built himself. Now, Skypicker has 300 employees and has been profitable for most of this year.
The website still relies on cheap connecting flights, and the risk of missed flights is gone now. Thanks to the Skypicker Guarantee, customers are able to re-book missed for free.
Which is great, because it means we can focus on all the awesome adventures our flights are going to take us to, and not on whether we’ll have to pay an arm and a leg to get there.
