JALsnipe

Just got a push notification for a random DEN-ABQ flight that I never added to my or my friends flights before. Anyone else run into random flights being added to your My Flights page?



Also submitted feedback via in-app email.

flightyryan

I'm confidently guessing that "shake for random demo flight" got accidentally invoked, such as putting your phone in your pocket.

ankurdotb

This was a fascinating thread to read, really appreciate the openness and frank discussion on product roadmap. (At my previous job, one of the projects I’d worked with was in the airline industry/IATA and I know how complex this space can be).

I tried out Flighty recently on a long-haul flight from SFO-LHR on Sunday and had some thoughts/feature suggestions:

1. Love the Dynamic Island integration. It’s such a cool way to show the information at a glance without having to unlock the screen, especially when wearing masks (which I sometimes do at airports).
2. Some apps allow for reporting crowd-sourced data on gates, delays, checkin/security queues etc. App In The Air is a good example of this. On delays/gates, I definitely think the way Flighty does this is better since the wrongly reported crowdsourced data can be bad, e.g., for gates or delays. (More on this later.) But some of this can definitely be crowdsourced, eg, the baggage belt. On my flight, this data wasn’t shown but I also know this is extremely hard to fetch consistently across the hundreds of airlines from an API. If there was a way I could report the baggage belt in the app, getting this “wrong” - even with a disclaimer that it was crowdsourced - is extremely low stakes and would be more useful than “baggage belt not reported”. People usually have a lot of time to kill at baggage belt and more likely to open the app and report.
3. Same for checkin, security, and passport/immigration times that can be crowdsourced: knowing this was extremely useful during the summer of airport meltdowns in Europe. App In The Air allows this, but I don’t think enough people report this data these days any more so their stats for LHR, AMS, BER etc (airports with meltdowns) wasn’t great. However in normal times it’s very useful when flying unfamiliar airports. Unlike baggage belt, most people aren’t free so I don’t know how successful or how many reports this could get but perhaps it’s only calculated as a moving average and only if enough people report data so that the responses clear a threshold of statistical validity.
4. This particular flight had an issue where the airport site, display screens, the airline’s own app, FlightAware etc were ALL reporting an incorrect departure time and status. (E.g., the screens around the airport showed “last call” even though the gate departure was delayed.) The airline’s own app and FA kept showing this as “estimated” for the original time, whereas I found Flighty’s “plane is reportedly still at gate” more useful since I assume it was using actual ADS-B data to understand what was happening with the flight.
5. I found the ground radar / tracking feature extremely useful to understand delays due to taxiing. Most apps often just count ground arrival rather than gate-to-gate arrival. On this particular occasion, both SFO and LHR had congestion when taxiing and it was useful to understand this.
6. My final thought is on lifetime subscriptions: unlike other FT members here, I don’t think Flighty should offer this. A good example of this is how I’m a lifetime App In The Air user and got this circa 2015/2016. I haven’t paid them since. I understand the LTV point made earlier, but unlike most other SaaS/subscription software eg a note taking app where the cost to the service provider of just keeping the notes stored is minimal, in case of flight tracking the people likely to buy lifetime (such as FT power users) will likely be power users much longer than 3-5 years, more likely to add more flights (thus costing Flighty money on API lookups with data providers). I fundamentally think this is the mistake of “easy upfront money” that App In The Air made, and hence they have a tonne of users with lifetime subscriptions bringing in no incremental revenue - and hence why they’ve been forced to add flight/hotel booking to get revenues from affiliate marketing payments rather than focussing on improving the core product. I would hate for that to happen to Flighty since once the low-hanging fruit of FT users who buy lifetime has been acquired, the CAC for every incremental user shoots up. Remember that frequent fliers are a weird bunch who are always optimising for value, eg, they’ll happily drop 100s/1000s of dollars to buy points / credits at a discount during points sales. So even at current value of lifetime subscription at 4.5x of annual subscription, I personally think this is too low. (People who’ve already bought it can be grandfathered in.)
7. If Flighty did want to offer a lifetime subscription, it should be prohibitively expensive: perhaps 10/20/30/50x of an annual subscription. (I know App Store policies can be a bit funny about having subscriptions that are too expensive due to chargeback risk with those.) Instead, I would suggest thinking of lifetime subscriptions as a “perk” of a very expensive KickStarter / crowdfunding tier at $1k’s/10k’s. It’s still attainable for super frequent fliers (given the amount of money they are dropping on flights) and is realistic in terms of having sustainable costs. Having a bulk of users paying annually keeps the incentives aligned for Flighty to keep innovating on continuous recurring revenue streams, rather than have tonnes of lifetime zombie subscribers that cost money to service and support.

ankurdotb

To add to the above, the lack of a viable commercial, concurring revenue model is the reason I believe a lot of apps in this space have languished. Prime example are SeatGuru (no viable revenues besides triggering an affiliate marketing link to travel booking sites), ExpertFlyer (nominally a monthly subscription but hard to justify the subscription as a standalone tool) and they keep languishing with very old designs / no updates.

I actually appreciate that you guys want to keep the app independent and bootstrapped, and innovating like Weather Line / Weather Line 2 (which I was also a huge fan of).

On the other hand, a solid example of what people will happily pay subscriptions for are SeatSpy and Reward Flight Saver, because they give a complete reward seat search experience that’s sub-par with the actual airline tools. The annual price point those are at is similar to Flighty.

Realistically, if Flighty combines App In The Air (for tracking) + FA (inbound flight tracking), that’s already a compelling combined subscription. If due to that it was able to cover ExpertFlyer type seat availability alerts eventually, that would be very compelling trifecta.

lsquare

Any Black Friday deal?

hoipolloi

Any way to add notes to a flight that I added on the app? I would like to add stuff like ticket number, booking website, fare info so I have it all in one place. Thanks

mgo72

Hello,

another try: it still says the flight was on time in the app now.



Problem flight

poisson

I paid for PRO and am enjoying the app so far. Is there a way to backup the data so that if you get a new phone, everything transfers over?

Traveller 935

The data from Flighty is synced with your Apple ID so as long as you sign-in with the same ID on a new iPhone it should all just be there.

In a weird way I'm having the reverse problem - I used Flighty a few years ago as a test and it has some bad data in my account/history. I started using it again last November (with PRO this time) and as I still have the same Apple ID I inherited all data from my original test with no way to reset my account and get a clean start

poisson

Another thing I noticed is that some obscure airlines don't appear in Flighty. They do appear on Google flights for purchase and on FlightAware. Is there a way to get these added?

prodi12

Just recently switched to Flighty from App in the Air, loving it so far. Does anyone know if Flighty will be introducing an Apple Watch complication/app any time soon? Feel like it will be super convenient to have this, and Flighty can definitely do a better job than App in the Air, given how smooth and fast the lock screen notifications and app UI are.

Quick random data point when I was testing out Flighty while still using App in the Air. Recently relocated to Boston and began flying out of Logan on JetBlue more often (previously always with AA with Plat status). I had a flight that was code-shared between B6 and AA (bought from AA but operated by B6). I knew for a fact that it was departing out of Terminal C and Flighty showed the correct terminal and gate info. However, App in the Air was somehow showing me Terminal B, which was wrong and coincidentally with Gate as B6. I wonder if App in the Air was incorrectly interpreting JetBlue's code as the gate, and thus terminal, instead given that the info I had on the app was an AA flight number but operated by JetBlue. Anyway, super happy with Flighty so far and hoping for a watch complication very soon!

I think you should be able to go into your flight passport logs and manually delete (slide left) all the flights from the past if you want to start fresh. Similarly, Flighty had some issues auto-importing some past flights from my calendar so I manually added them with their flight number and dates from the main app page.

prodi12

Hi Ryan, love the app so far.

wanted to piggy back on this comment about the map route line thickness/visuals. I understand the thickness being uneven issue is caused by Apple Maps, but is there a way to reduce the route like thickness in general so that it takes up less space and, when more and more routes are added, this thickness begins to block out the entire map/region. I came from App in the Air and personally prefer their visual on the maps more (probably the only thing I can say they do “better” than Flighty haha). Because their lines look much thinner it makes the whole map look cleaner and imo their take on the map is more in-line with the aesthetics of the Flighty app. Is this something that Flighty would consider doing or perhaps adding an option for different route lines/visuals on the maps?

Adding a picture below to show what I’m referring to:

Traveller 935

Unfortunately this isn't a workaround. Yes I could go in the flights passport logs and delete everything there manually (1k+ entries) but the majority of entries came in via TripIt sync and when you delete these in Flighty they're not hard deleted but just marked as such aka soft deleted in Flighty. Which means I can't just start afresh with a sync from TripIt (with all good data in it) as Flighy will detect the data as already having sync'd at some point in the past regardless if they've been deleted in Flighty since then :-(

I've asked support for a big 'Account reset' button in the past but it's not seen as a priority.

Marschel

It seems like this app is useless when it comes to delays. eg last friday TP583 was nealy 3 hours late due to the inbound TP578 was delayed. They passed the info along when TP578 took off. So much for


Guess I still need to rely on Flightradar...

Next thing alternative flights. Because I had a connection in LIS and there was no way I'm gonna make the connecting flight with this amount of delay. So I checked the app and was presented only with the flights I already booked. Flighty team must fly only P2P... wrote them an email about this. Haven't heard from them in four days. Unfortunately I signed up for a year instead of one month which was a mistake #dissapointing

flightyryan

Shoot us an email Flighty Settings > Help & Feedback > Request Help asking for a total reset.