Why You Should Be Booking with FLYR Fare Protection

If you've never heard of Iceland-based booking website Dohop, you should check them out. The company has been nominated for two World Travel Awards—World's Leading Flight Comparison Website and World's Leading Travel Technology Partner—and recently launched an amazing tool called FLYR Fare Protection, in partnership with FLYR.

While some booking websites offer to compensate you after you book your fare if the price drops, Dohop allows you to "protect" a fare for up to 30 days. This means you can reserve a flight at a certain price in order to watch how the fare changes, without actually having to pay upfront.

How Fare Protection Works:

The protected price varies based on the duration you purchase, with anywhere from three to 30 days being covered. For example, a $500 round-trip fare from New York City would cost $12 to protect for seven days. The same protection fee applies to a search I did from London to Boston for $668 round-trip (with a stopover in Portugal), but had a 14-day protection period. You can't pick how many days you want for coverage, the fee and duration for protection is algorithmically-controlled. This roughly corresponds to the booking lead time, but the most common duration I saw offered was 14 days.

Purchasing Fare Protection means that if the price drops during the covered period you'll be alerted and if you book during this period and the price drops, you're entitled up to $200 for any price difference. If you don't end up booking during this period, your out-of-pocket cost is just the Fare Protection fee. Compared to hefty change and cancellation fees, this could be appealing to a lot of travelers when trip planning.

The technology behind Fare Protection comes from FLYR, a San Francisco-based data science company that specializes in price protection, travel finance, and booking techniques, and has created a sophisticated pricing algorithm for airfares.

"For over a decade, Dohop has dedicated itself to making travel as simple and stress-free as possible, all while finding low prices for its users," Co-founder and CEO of FLYR Jean Tripier said in a press release. "With our unprecedented value and flexibility, FLYR's travel products are a natural fit with the Dohop brand."

You Tell Us: Would you pay an extra fee to "protect" a fair?

More from SmarterTravel:

Read the original story: Why You Should Be Booking with FLYR Fare Protection by Ashley Rossi, who is a regular contributor to SmarterTravel.

(Photo: Shutterstock)

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