Why I built a flight search that starts with your budget, not your destination
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Why I built a flight search that starts with your budget, not your destination
Why I built a flight search that starts with your budget, not your destination
was posted by Nemanja Grabovac
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Featured on Jul 16, 2026 (1 month ago).
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Hey - I built SkyHopp.
Background: I am a solo developer, not a travel industry person by trade. The idea came from my own frustration trying to plan a spontaneous trip without a fixed destination. I am genuinely curious what I am missing from the perspective of people who work in travel professionally - happy to take any feedback, including the critical kind.
Most flight search tools assume you already know where you want to go.
You pick a destination, enter your dates, and compare prices. That works well if you've already decided on Rome, Barcelona or Athens.
My problem was usually the opposite.
Most of my trips start with a budget and a few free days, not with a destination. I kept opening the same flight websites and checking one city after another just to answer a simple question:
"Where can I actually fly for my budget right now?"
After doing that more times than I'd like to admit, I decided to build something that answers that question first.
SkyHopp is a simple map that shows flight prices from your departure airport to every destination we have fare data for. You can set a budget, filter for direct flights, and browse what's available instead of searching one route at a time.
The prices come from Travelpayouts and are cached, so it's not trying to replace a booking engine. The idea is simply to help people discover destinations first, then book through one of our travel partners.
I launched SkyHopp a few months ago as a solo side project, and I'm still adding new features and improving it every week.
I'd love to hear what people in the travel industry think. Do you see more travellers starting with a destination, or are more people becoming flexible and deciding where to go based on price?
Try it out at skyhopp.app — thanks for your feedback!
Great concept, but how is it supposed to work?.. I ran at least 10 searches, and after the redirect, 0 search mathced the same price that was proposed from skyhopp's site.
I would suggest you try to optimize for a higher match rate between your offer and the merchant site's offer, otherwise if users try it a couple of time but it never works, people may discard it as a tool, since it's not delivering the expected added value.
Just my constructive feedback :)
Thanks for the detailed feedback - this is a real limitation and you're right to call it out.
SkyHopp pulls prices from the Travelpayouts Data API, which returns cached "lowest observed fare" data rather than live inventory. It's designed for discovery - "can I get from Belgrade to Bangkok for under EUR300?" - not as a price guarantee. By the time you click through, the booking site is showing live availability, which has changed.
The gap is real and I'm not going to sugarcoat it. A few things that contribute:
Cached API data can be hours to days old depending on the route
Merchant sites (Kiwi, Aviasales) show the next available seat at that price class, which may already be sold.
Multi-airport city codes (PAR = all Paris airports) create routing mismatches
What I'm working on: replacing the most prominent displayed prices with fresher data on high-traffic routes, and adding clearer "from" labeling so the expectation is set before the click.
Your core point stands though - if the price shown and the price found are consistently disconnected, the tool loses its purpose. Appreciate you testing it thoroughly rather than just writing it off.
Interesting! ;-)
I love that I can search by budget and direct flights :)
That was the core idea behind the app! Nice to hear that you like it :)
I would also like to have "airline" as a search factor or filter. I don't necessarily want the cheapest flight.
Airline filters are something that I will work on in the future, thanks for mentioning it! The tricky part is making it actually useful - the current data layer returns one cheapest fare per destination, so a naive airline filter would hide destinations the carrier clearly serves, which would feel broken. I want to do it right rather than ship something that confuses people.
Maybe have a price range (or the option to choose a price range along with the option for cheapest) instead of just the cheapest?
Yeah, that is a good suggestion and I will add it, thanks!
I think this is a great idea and it would especially be interest to young travellers who want to travel but may not have a big budget to do so.
Thanks Chongyang! That's exactly the spirit behind SkyHopp - set your budget, see what's actually reachable. No endless searching, no sticker shock. Glad it resonates!
Great concept. Looking forward to trying it.
Thanks! Feel free to share your thoughts afterwards :)
Hi Nemanja,
Thanks for sharing SkyHopp with our community and welcome to Travel Massive. Congratulations on what you've built!
Many years ago I created a travel startup that tracked sale airfares in Australia, and presented a similar map to help people see where they could travel. I sourced my data from airline websites (not OTAs) and deep linked directly to their booking engines. This partly solved the availability problem that Yasser mentioned. It was a fun project but I learned that you need a lot of traffic to monetize airfares, so I eventually moved on to other things (including building Travel Massive!)
The questions I would ask are:
1. How does your product differ from similar features offered by KAYAK or Google flights?
2. How can you acquire enough traffic to monetize very low conversion of flight search?
3. How can you build your product to not be dependent on one data source?
You need some good answers to the above to turn this from a fun side project to an investor friendly startup.
Also, there's nothing wrong with a fun side project that earns a bit. It really depends on what you want to achieve and what you enjoy working on.
In terms of my own flight search needs, I'm yet to find a good website that can either:
A) Show me "long way there" options (eg so I can explore a new country) in out of the way routes. Eg Sydney to London via India or South Africa.
B) Cheap long return flights with valid fare classes (eg Y class) for mileage run from an origin point. This would be great for FF to get their status for lowest cost/mile.
Hope all the above is helpful feedback and keep on building!
Best, Ian
Hi Ian,
Thank you, this is genuinely useful feedback, and your background makes it all the more valuable.
1. How SkyHopp differs from KAYAK/Google Flights
Those products are destination-first: you already know where you want to go, and you're checking the price. SkyHopp is built for a different moment - when you don't know where you want to go yet. You set a budget, pick your home airport, and the map shows you everything reachable. The question it answers is "I have €200 and a free weekend - where can I go?" rather than "how much is London to Paris?"
Google Flights does have an Explore feature, but travel discovery isn't what Google Flights is built for - it's a price comparison tool at its core, and Explore shows. SkyHopp is built around that discovery moment from the ground up. That's the whole product, not a tab buried inside something else.
2. Monetizing low flight conversion
You're right that flight affiliate alone won't scale without massive traffic. That's why flights are just the entry point - the goal is a full travel platform where users can book everything they need for a trip: accommodation, insurance, SIM cards, transfers. Flight search gets people in the door; the rest of the journey is where the monetization compounds.
On traffic - the app launched in April and impressions are already trending toward 30,000+ in July, and I have meaningful referrals coming from AI search engines like ChatGPT. Still early, but the growth curve is real.
3. Data source dependency
Fair challenge. Currently single-source on Travelpayouts/Aviasales. The plan is to integrate additional providers - KAYAK, Skyscanner, etc.. - to diversify data coverage and reduce that dependency. I've already reached out to KAYAK about their API. Short term it's a known risk; medium term it gets solved by layering sources.
On your own needs - these are actually interesting:
Your point A (long-way-there / stopover discovery) is something I haven't seen done well anywhere. It's on my radar as a potential differentiator.
Your point B (mileage run finder) is a niche I haven't targeted - but frequent flyers are a passionate, vocal audience who share tools publicly. That's the kind of organic growth that compounds. Something I'll dig into in the near future.
I agree with your comments in general, these all are known issues/risks, but I am working on improving what I can, some things will take time as positions on google grow, there are potential collaborations with some travel influencers in the pipeline as well, and I have a clear roadmap with what I want to do at certain thresholds (impressions/visits...). We will see how it all goes :)
Thanks for taking the time, let me know if you have more questions!
Nemanja
It looks promising. I’m probably not the right ICP, as my travel habits are quite different, but I can clearly see the value for solo travelers and budget-conscious customers. I tried it, and my main suggestion would be to speak with someone from the travel industry(specifically from this field) who can help you build a smoother and more intuitive flow based on real customer experience.
I like the idea. Feel free to ping me, and I’ll be happy to connect you with the right people. :)
Thanks :)
I think this is a GREAT idea. When I was single I was much less budget conscious. Now, married with two kids, often our trips are 100% planned on a strict budget (this is how much we have for flights, this is how much we have for hotels, etc... and we do a lot of our planning based upon how far we can stretch a dollar. I think this is an excellent niche to explore, the big booking engines really don't provide anything of the sort.
Glad you like it!