Dohop lets you book flights without worrying about price changes

Dohop (as in “Do hop on a plane and bring those human transplant organs with you, would you, dear?”) is a newly reorganized flight, hotel, and rental car search service that was launched in 2005 but relaunched worldwide a few years ago.

The service now offers FLYR Fare Protection, as well, which means you can “hold” a fare for 30 days without worrying about price fluctuations.

Frosti Sigurjonsson founded DoHop in 2004 after trying to reduce the cost of flying home to Iceland from France. His search engine launched in 2005 and focused on Iceland and the Nordics, becoming a go-to spot for travel searchers. The service offers “best-priced” destinations in dollar amount order, letting you pick the best spots for a cheap weekend trip or an inexpensive vacation. The new CEO, David Gunnarsson, was head of marketing and brought new features and double the staff to the company over the past year.

The company recently raised $4 million from Jon von Tetzchner, Iceland’s NSA Ventures, and others. They are seeing 1.5 million searches per month and have white label deals with Yandex and London’s Gatwick airport.

“Dohop’s flight search is schedule based. While it presents itineraries you’d see on other travel search sites, we also analyze flight schedule data from airlines and airports directly to create unique ‘self-connecting’ itineraries between any two airports that you may not find on other sites. This can potentially save customers time and money,” said Gunnarsson.

These self-connected flights are called non-interlining itineraries and can connect cheap airlines with more expensive ones automatically, improving the chances of finding an inexpensive flight.

While the travel market is obviously highly saturated, services like Dohop with a small but loyal following fill a nice niche for non-frequent flyers and weekend trip goers. They work in a space that is roundly ignored by the big guys and, if all goes according to plan, they’ll soon grab a bit more of the lucrative world of weekend jaunts.