Creating Separation - Here’s how 2 travel sites are leveraging SMS subscriptions

If you love to travel, then you must know how simple it is to book a flight online. The tough part is searching through every airline and travel deal website to find the best price. Knowing this, would you pay a few dollars per month if you could save a few hundred dollars on your next flight?

Thanks to these two travel deal websites, DealRay and Next Departure, you can now access exclusive deals before anyone else through pre-paid notifications. Similar to their competitors, they share flight deals that are heavily discounted or from pricing errors. Instead of generating revenue from online advertisements or commissions, however, they also offer a subscription-based SMS alert service, which customers can access through one of their pre-paid plans.

According to DealRay’s site, their members have saved an average of US$428 per deal, and they have sent over 1.15 million SMS alerts since 2015. DealRay offers a one-month trial and costs US$9.99 per month after your trial ends. At first, this might seem expensive, but when you’re saving a few hundred dollars on holiday, it’s easily worth the price.

More recently, Next Departure has announced a quarterly and yearly SMS subscription plan. Their plan is much more competitive starting at CAD$2.00 per month.

If you’re now thinking about ways you can charge your customers for SMS alerts, make sure it’s for something that’s scarce, urgent, and valuable, just like a flight deal.