Dohop is a travel search engine website based in Reykjavík

Reykjavík

Reykjavík is the capital and largest city in Iceland.Its latitude at 64°08' N makes it the world's northernmost capital of a sovereign state. It is located in southwestern Iceland, on the southern shore of Faxaflói Bay...

, Iceland

Iceland

Iceland , described as the Republic of Iceland, is a Nordic and European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland also refers to the main island of the country, which contains almost all the population and almost all the land area. The country has a population...

 originally founded to aggregate and link low cost flight connections. In 2005 dohop launched the world's first flight planner for low-cost airlines and later expanded it to include all scheduled flights worldwide, amounting to 660 airlines.

Dohop is primarily a long tail

The Long Tail

The Long Tail or long tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a 'normal' or Gaussian distribution...

 aggregation agent that doesn't sell directly to the consumer, but refers the user to airline's booking engines. Dohop's income comes from pay per click

Pay per click

Pay per click is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market...

 advertising and from selling specialized search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

s to airlines and airports. The company also operates an analytics

Analytics

Analytics is the application of computer technology, operational research, and statistics to solve problems in business and industry. Analytics is carried out within an information system: while, in the past, statistics and mathematics could be studied without computers and software, analytics has...

 department offering route network analysis and optimization suggestions to airlines an airports.

The website won the 2006 Travelmole Web Awards in the category for best technology site and was selected amongst the Times Magazine 100 best travel sites in 2007.

Dohop's hotel search engine searches more than 200,000 hotel properties worldwide and compares rates with several online hotel booking sites. Search results can be displayed on a map and sorted and filtered by various criteria.

Search technology

Worldwide, there are more than 600 airlines that operate scheduled flights. The flight schedules typically extend from six to nine months. The schedules include approximately 50 million flights between more than 3,000 airports.

Dohop searches these flight schedules for possible matches for the user's desired city pairs and travel dates. If there are no direct flights available, Dohop calculates possible flight combinations. The number of alternative flight combinations for a two stop flight route can be dauntingly large.

Having identified and ranked the available flight alternatives, Dohop then retrieves and compares offers from online travel vendors; online travel agents and airlines, where the user can complete his booking directly.

The business model

Dohop is a flight comparison site. Revenue is generated from publishing adverts for travel and related services and from partners (like airlines) which want to get listed. Dohop is billing the partners on a cost per click (CPC) bases.

Dohop also earns revenue from licensing its search technology for use on third party websites. Main customers are airlines and airports.

External links

• Dohop website
• Taking on the travel giants, CNN edition article, December 1, 2005
• Q&A: Compare prices and schedules of low-cost airlines across Europe, New York Times, June 25, 2006
• Q&A: Useful Web sites for low-cost air travel within Europe, New York Times, March 11, 2007
• Kate Russell gives us her latest selection of the best sites on the World Wide Web, BBC
  BBC
  The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
  
   Click, March 10, 2007
• Best websites for booking flights, TimesOnline, March 18, 2009
• 5 best travel sites, MSNBC
  MSNBC
  MSNBC is a cable news channel based in the United States available in the US, Germany , South Africa, the Middle East and Canada...
  
  , June 9, 2009
• Travel Web Sites: A Click-On Showdown, New York Times, June 17, 2009