The two-hour flight deal that changed how we build FlashSeat

Why that message stuck with us

Sarah's question should have been straightforward: deals expire, that's the whole point of flash pricing. But it wasn't straightforward, because she wasn't wrong. She'd found a deal, acted on it, and then immediately wanted to share it with someone else. That's not unreasonable. That's the entire way modern travel works. You grab a bargain and text your mates.

When we looked at our data, Sarah wasn't alone. Around 35% of our bookings happened within two hours of a deal going live. That made sense, right? Urgency drives clicks. But what we hadn't measured was the churn after the sale. People who wanted to book again within that same window, only to find the deal gone, told us they felt a bit cheated. Not angry, just disappointed. And a lot of them didn't come back.

The problem, though, was architectural. Our system was pulling deals from vendors in real time. A flight for £34 might be available for twenty minutes, not two hours. We couldn't hold inventory. So we had three options: expand our vendor partnerships to lock in longer windows, build a waitlist, or accept that we were capturing one booking per deal and call that success.

What saved searches actually solved

We started with the waitlist idea. If a deal sold out, users could click a button to be notified if it came back. It was straightforward, user-friendly, and we built it in about three weeks. But nobody used it. Three weeks of work, and the uptake was so low we almost shelved it.

Then someone on the team (I think it was James, but I should probably check my Slack history) suggested we flip the problem. Instead of hoping the same deal came back, what if we let users save their search criteria? Barcelona for under £40, departing Thursday? We'd ping them the moment we found anything matching that.

That launched in November. By January, saved searches accounted for 22% of all bookings. By April, it was 32%. More importantly, it completely changed how people used FlashSeat. They weren't just hunting for deals on a Tuesday afternoon. They were setting up automatic notifications and checking the app when they had time. It moved us from a "boredom browser" to a "I've got criteria and I trust you to find it" tool.

The Premium members especially loved it. The deal alerts feature is technically available to everyone, but Premium users get early notification. So they see the Barcelona flight before the free tier does. That two-hour window suddenly becomes a three-hour window. In practice, it means they book more often and they book faster.

The deal alert economy

Once saved searches took off, we realised we'd accidentally created something else: a reason to come back regularly. If you've set up three searches for flights to Paris, Lisbon, and Amsterdam, you're checking FlashSeat once or twice a day. You're not trying to book a flight. You're just... checking. It's low-friction habit formation.

That's why we built deal alerts into the Premium tier at £7.99 a month. It's not just a notification feature. It's the unlock for people who actually use saved searches multiple times a week. They get early access to those deals too. They see them before the free tier, which means better availability. The value proposition is obvious: pay a little, catch deals a bit earlier, save more on each booking.

It also solved a problem we didn't expect. Free users were sometimes frustrated by seeing a deal, clicking on it, and finding it sold out before they reached checkout. That happens because we're showing deals that genuinely exist in real time, and sometimes they move fast. But Premium members see alerts earlier, which means more of them complete the three-step checkout before inventory expires. It's not magic, but it's the natural consequence of being first in line.

The Pro tier and the fee-free moment

Once we understood the saved searches behaviour, the next question was obvious: who books so often that they'd pay to remove the buyer fee altogether? Not everyone. But people who book flights monthly, or who go to eight concerts a year, or both? They hit the math breakeven point pretty quickly. The Pro tier at £14.99 a month gets you zero buyer fees, which on a £200 flight is actually meaningful.

We launched Pro in February as a hunch, honestly. We thought maybe 3% of our user base would want it. It's been closer to 8%. Those users tend to be London-based, aged 24-32, and they book both flights and event tickets. They're not trying to hack a system. They're just frequent enough that the fee stings. Remove it, and they use FlashSeat for almost every purchase they make.

What's interesting is that Pro users also generate the most feedback. Not complaints, feedback. They tell us when a saved search returned a terrible deal. They notice when event ticket inventory is thin. They're invested. They're the reason we expanded from flights into concerts, sports, and theatre tickets. They needed it.

Back to Sarah and the Barcelona flight

I don't know if Sarah ever came back. I hope she did. But her question in October showed us something important: the feature wasn't "deal alerts" or "saved searches." The feature was control. Sarah wanted to feel like she could find a good deal, trust that she'd be notified when a similar one appeared, and not miss it the second time around.

That's what saved searches actually do. They let you set your terms once and then step back. You're not refreshing the app every hour hoping something breaks. You've done the work upfront. Now the app does the work for you. Premium members get that work done a bit faster, and Pro members don't pay the fee when they finally book.

We've built other things since then. The QR tickets in the app. The three-step checkout. The event category pages. But none of it would have happened if we hadn't paid attention to a frustrated message from someone who just wanted to buy a second flight.