While searching the internet for cheap airline tickets in 2013, travel-lover Scott Keyes found round-trip, nonstop tickets from New York to Milan for only $130. After his first deal, he became obsessed with finding the best prices for international flights and began sharing the airline companies’ cheapest bargains and pricing mistakes with his friends via email. Now, at age 30, Scott never imagined his life as a successful CEO and is amazed by how his small email list became a nearly million-dollar start-up with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Scott’s Cheap Flights is a website in which travelers enter their email address and receive a free daily email with the best deals on flights all around the world. If customers pay only $39 a year, they become premium members and are able to customize their search. Some of Scott’s most impressive finds were tickets from New York to Paris over Christmas for $280, San Francisco to Melbourne for $421, and Chicago to Tokyo for $424, as each would have regularly cost well over a thousand dollars.
In only a couple of years, Scott’s Cheap Flights grew from 300 subscribers to over 230,000 customers. To grow his company, Scott has hired four employees to search the internet for special airline deals and “mistake fares” instead of relying on robots, who often do not catch the diamonds in the rough. Scott hopes to continue to grow his company and help people make dream honeymoons, visiting family across the sea, and exploring the world a reality.