Skift Take
Dohop is carefully picking its spots: Going all in on the B2B side of the business, targeting the Middle East, and working with low cost carriers on in-app flight bookings. All of that focus and contrarian thinking could work in its favor, although competing against much larger competitors could be as difficult as scaling an Icelandic glacier.
Dohop, a metasearch site specializing in flights and based in Iceland, has a set of challenges based on its location and diminutive business resources (population 323,000) that its peers don't have to deal with.
CEO Kristján Guðni Bjarnason, who serves as a freelance mountain guide in his minimal spare time, says Dohop's location and market position means it has to think differently.
Among the tweaks, past, present and in the game plan, Dohop decided to focus on the B2B side of the metasearch business about four years ago and now has some 8,000 affiliate relationships, according to Bjarnason, offers a self-connection option giving travelers flight-combination possibilities that are hard to find elsewhere, and Dohop is planning to revamp its site in 2015 with the aim to combine travel inspiration with metasearch.
"One thing to add is that our being a small company, much smaller than the big guys, we are capable or willing to take more risks in product development and to change our site," Bjarnason says. "We have to do that when we're competing against the big guys. We have to."
Skift spoke to Bjarnason about Dohop's challenges and the way forward.
An edited version of the interview follows:
Skift: What is it like building a flight search engine out of Iceland?
Kristján Guðni Bjarnason: Yes, that's challenging out of Iceland or any small market because the population is so small and even though we are a well-know
