Why I built a flight search that starts with your budget, not your destination

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 :)