Gone are the days when the meta-search engine just gives us price and flight details by querying various websites. Now, there are many innovative meta-search engines in market. Superfly is a great example. Superfly, founded by Jonathan Meiri and Zviki Cohen, is a meta-search engine that takes into account the travellers loyalty program details and offers discounts on fare. This might look simple. It is not just a direct connection from Superfly to all the airlines frequent flyer systems. Lot of maths goes into the Superfly engine before displaying discount fares. So, what all factors does Superfly system take into consideration?

Here it is: Superfly calculates a base mile value for every airline, then the frequent flier status / points of a customer, customer’s buying pattern (whether a customer is upgrading or redeeming). Right now, Superfly supports only Airline loyalty programs. Soon, the Hotels and Cars are on the cards (proposed in 2012). That’s at a high level detail on what Superfly is into.

This is pretty useful product for frequent fliers. Let’s do a deep dive on the product functionalities.

User will be able to login with his/her Social login (Facebook). Now, that’s +1. But, nowadays social login has become a norm.

The search widget is pretty neat and simple to use. Interesting feature here is – the various color coding (explained in detail later) highlighted in image below. A person (say an agent) can manage profile of multiple customers. Say – An agent can mark the customer Jack as ‘Blue’, customer Peter as ‘Red’ color. In the “Accounts” section, agent also has the option to define frequent flyer data for each color coding.

Customers can quickly perform a search by accessing the “Previous Searches” section. Pretty useful.

No ads. No distractions. Another +1.

Below is the search result page. Here,

• “Price” is the price of the route that’s fetched from the airline.
• “Rewards” is the magical number that Superfly calculates by considering various parameters explained above.
• “Net Value” is the final discounted amount the user has to pay.

We performed at least 10 different searches, considering all the discounted numbers that we saw – on an average Superfly offers ~12 to 20% discount. This is good.

The small red icons that has numbers in it – indicates the number of connecting flights. The icon display is too small to view and the icon as such isn’t connecting to what it is supposed to convey.

In image below, the search result page navigation isn’t very user friendly. The concept of dots is nice, but little hard to place the already small mouse pointer on the small dot to click it. Also, the Previous and Next buttons shall be made bigger.

Below page provides lot of flexibility for users. Customers can enter their frequent flyer account details and have all of their accounts synched/updated in one place. Also, if the customer forgets the password, Superfly provides functionality to retrieve password.

Agents can manage accounts for multiple customers. They can create a same airline again (note the Delta box highlighted below). Because, the agent can manage two customers – Peter and Jack – and agent has to key in the FF data of Delta for both customers. This is pretty cool feature. Also, agents can color code the airlines for easy reference.

Another neat feature is – Superfly knows the customer’s country and automatically displays the reward programs that are popular in their country. Cool eh?

Below is the master page where all partners of Superfly are listed. What is interesting to note is the list of non-air partners like Hotel Chains, Car and Credit Card companies. But, integration to these non-air partners are an upcoming feature.

Overall – Superfly is a lovable product for frequent fliers. According to us – Superfly has a niche product and the scope for growth is looking very positive and great. Many new product features can be rolled out by marrying Superfly with social media content. Meta-search engine landscape is clearly changing. All the simple and straight forward meta-search engines have to wakeup and they have a tough run!
Author: Karthick Prabu