Nate and Kara Buchanan built Fair Drop, a flight-deal service that sends customized alerts based on your home airport, destination region, travel dates, and budget. They tested it for months and now offer a free trial for users in the U.S., UK, Australia, and Canada.
Questions this video answers
12 countries.
Over 100 people (for six weeks).
US→Thailand for $255; US→South Africa for $325; business class Brazil→Hong Kong for $700 (stated as normally >$7,000).
A 30-day free trial; a small yearly membership fee thereafter; 25% off the yearly fee if you sign up the launch week and keep the account after the trial.
Four countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.
Chapters
Since the end of last year, we have been to 12 different countries.
And all the while, behind the scenes, we have been working on a secret project that we are so excited to.
Finally be able to share with you.
It's not a baby. We teased this on Instagram last week and I don't know why everybody thought it was a baby. One day it's a bear drop.
This is an idea that I've been.
Wanting to bring to life for well over a year.
But before I just tell you all about it, I want to step back and help you appreciate what it's taken.
To get to that point.
And to do that, we need to.
Go all the way back to 2013.
We both became completely obsessed with traveling on our incredible honeymoon to Belize. As soon as we got home, we already couldn't wait to go on another trip. And we had plenty of flexibility in our schedules. The problem was we were broke newlyweds.
Back then. There were two things that allowed us to start traveling more even though we.
Had very little money.
The first thing was signing up for.
Travel credit cards to earn frequent flyer miles. And we signed up for a lot of travel credit cards. I talked about that a lot in the past.
The second thing I did was I started religiously searching for flight deals. And I did this by signing up for all these deal websites and searching obscure forums for flights that were either intentionally or unintentionally priced too low by the airlines.
All of Nate's obsessing really paid off when he found us a flight from the US to Asia for only $255. We got to fly to Thailand for the very first time. And it was a really life changing trip for us. We never knew that we would be traveling for a living a few years later and back to Thailand like a million times. But that is when we fell in love with Asia. And then Nate found us another flight deal that went from the US to Africa. It was only $325 and it was our very first time to South Africa. And the tickets were so cheap that we even got to invite some of our other broke college friends to come with us.
But probably my favorite deal that I've ever found was the $700 business class.
Flight from Brazil to Hong Kong.
Those flights should have cost over $7,000. We actually made an entire video about this trip.
And if you want to hear what my country accent sounded like before I lost the majority of it, you can go back and check that video out. Or maybe don't. It's like the first time I ever held a camera and talked to it and it's kind of painful for me to watch. It's about 9:30 in the morning here, so I'm gonna go find a lounge and grab a cappuccino.
I've always had my own way of.
Finding these deals, but I've never had a good way to share them with other people.
And I've been trying to figure out.
A good way to do that for a long time now. At one point I set up my own Slack channel that was like aggregating.
All these deal sites and sending it out to people. But then people started receiving 20 plus.
Notifications a day and they either left my side channel or just completely started ignoring the notifications, which was totally understandable.
Then I tried signing up for like.
Other deal websites, thinking maybe I could recommend one of those and the same thing kind of ended up happening to me.
I felt like I was just receiving too many irrelevant deals or they were.
Just sending deals for the sake of saying that they sent a deal that week.
So that's why at the end of last year, after thinking about what my perfect solution would look like for over a year, I started working with a.
Developer to build this from the ground up.
Fast forward to today and I am.
So excited about what we have built.
We have built a software that can search hundreds of thousands of different flight combinations every single day to make sure.
That we're finding the best flight deals possible.
And we built a website that lets anybody create a profile and customize the.
Deals that they want to receive. Let me show you how it works.
After you've signed up for your account.
You'Ll be taken to your account dashboard.
Where you can customize all of the.
Deals that you want to receive.
This will ensure that you only receive.
Deals that are relevant to you.
You can start by choosing the departure.
Airports that you'd like to receive deals from. I'd recommend choosing your home city as well as any major surrounding hubs. Next, you can choose the regions that you want to receive deals to. If you want to receive deals to all of the regions, just leave all of them checked.
But if you have your heart set on a few specific bucket list destinations.
Just choose the regions that fit your travel goals. Next, you can set your travel availability.
So if your schedule only allows you.
To travel during the summer months, you could uncheck all of the other months.
Finally, if you have a specific budget.
For your flight, you can give us that information using this slider.
Once you've set up your account and.
Started your free trial.
Anytime we find a deal that perfectly meets your criteria, we're gonna send you an email with all the information that.
You need in order to book the flight.
And if you choose, we'll send you a text message notification so that you never miss a time sensitive deal.
For the last six weeks, we've had over 100 people beta testing our and here are some of the deals they've received.
Come on, Mila, where you are.
Even though we haven't been sending out deals for that long, we've already saved a couple people a lot of money. You may remember our friends Heath and Alyssa from our Canada series. They booked a flight from Dallas to Venice round trip for only $450.
And the other day, I received an email from a family of four who used the deal to fly to France for only $1,500. Yay. So we've been taking advantage of these.
Deals for years now.
And the reason that we're so excited.
About Fair Drop is because it's finally.
Going to allow us to start sharing these incredible deal.
You people tell us all the time that we've inspired them to travel, and it makes us so happy, which is why we're so excited to take it to the next level and help people remove the biggest financial barrier that keeps them from traveling.
From traveling.
Gosh.
So we're gonna wrap this whole commercial up.
But the truth is, this is something that we are genuinely excited to share.
With you, and it's something that we've been working on for a long time. We're definitely biased because we're the ones who created it, but we think it's gonna help save people a lot of money on flights. So if this sounds interesting to you, if you're into travel, click the link in the description below and go check it out.
There is a small yearly membership fee, but you can try it for free for 30 days. And if you sign up this week, you'll get 25% off that yearly fee if you keep your account after your.
Free trial, which we hope you will. But if you don't like it, you can cancel.
We never take your money or tell.
Me what you didn't like and we'll.
Fix it and make it better.
So we're just finishing up editing this video, and I realized that we left out something really important, and that's that we are only searching departures from four.
Different countries right now. That's the U.S. the UK, Australia, and Canada. So if you're not in one of these four countries, these deals won't be super useful for you quite yet, but we do hope to expand to more countries soon. Okay, that's it.
Gosh. Can't see because of that. Yes. Being fragging.
It's gonna be okay.
This place looks awesome. Symbols everywhere, and I can't understand anything. And this is the first time that I have been outside an airport or an airplane in seven days.
