Going on holiday is supposed to be relaxing (for the most part). Planning and preparing to go away can be a real headache. Do you want a beach, mountains, skiing or adventure holiday? Once you’ve settled on where to go, for most people, the price will be another issue. Flight tickets will fluctuate and its very difficult to determine when to buy your tickets.

Hopper is an app which will help you save money on flights. Its algorithm tracks your selected dates and will let you know based on historical prices whether it expects prices to drop further or go up. It will also notify you if either of these situations occurs, or tell you based on previous data if you should buy right now.

In addition to this, say you’ve looked at a flight from London to Milan, it will let you know if you could make a significant saving by flying to an alternative airport, within the vicinity, such as Bergamo or Turin. Furthermore, if you put in flexible travel dates, e.g a full-month ahead, it will provide further savings alerts by varying dates you fly. As an example, it can be relatively cheap flying to certain destinations on a Friday afternoon.

Hopper for iOS

The new Hopper ‘Flex Watch’ feature is supposed to act as a virtual travel agent for you by suggesting various places to go. As long as you suggest a trip over 7 days, you can then set it to go anywhere, specific continents, countries and so on.  The Flex Watch feature will then show you a selection of places, explain why they’re affordable spots, or when they will be more affordable, then by swiping up you can see what deals are available right now and overview of when the cheapest time to go.

Using this data, Hopper will then continue to search for you and notify you of further flights within the price and travel parameters you’ve previously set.

The ‘Flex Watch’ feature is currently only available for Hopper on iOS, but should be released for Android in the near future.