Yapta

» see yapta.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The name stood for Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant. Yapta was founded in Seattle in 2006 with Tom Romary as chief executive, and it was built on a rule that most American flyers did not know they could use. If you booked directly with an airline and the fare later fell below what you had paid, many carriers would give you the difference as a credit. Almost nobody claimed it, because nobody rechecks the price of a ticket already bought. TechCrunch summed up the pitch on launch day: "All airlines offer these on price drops but few consumers follow up. Yapta will help by reminding you."

The public beta went out on 21 May 2007 as a browser add-on. You tagged a fare while shopping on an airline's own site, which saved the flight and the price to your account. Yapta then kept checking, before and after you bought. Ten airline and travel sites were supported on the first day. The company had 5,000 users from its private beta and 750,000 dollars of angel money. It also had a fire: the office in Pioneer Square burned that morning, so the staff moved into their investor's offices and launched from there.

The consumer service, by then called My Yapta, was retired after 31 March 2020 on less than three weeks' notice. It priced everything in dollars and lived off the refund rules of American carriers. I was in Turkey, outside both the currency and the rules.

~ the record ~

~ the voucher trick ~

On 22 June 2008 TechCrunch reported that Yapta had turned into a full website, so that tracking no longer depended on installing anything. It had 350,000 registered users and followed fares on 23 airlines. Its own tally of savings identified for them stood at more than 60 million dollars, close to 50 million of it found before purchase and the remaining 10 million or so claimed as airline vouchers afterward. About 46 percent of the flights being tracked had shown a price drop at some point. "People want to know when it happens," Romary told the site.

~ from travelers to travel managers ~

Romary left in 2011 for a job in Silicon Valley. James Filsinger came in as chief executive around 2012, and GeekWire dates the turn toward business customers to the same moment. The new products were FareIQ for flights and RoomIQ for hotels. They watched a company's bookings and rebooked at the lower price without the traveler having to do anything, which is the consumer idea with the consumer taken out.

The corporate version found buyers. Yapta said its clients saved 2 to 4 percent of their travel spending and put the running total at more than 350 million dollars. It raised over 25 million dollars with Voyager Capital as a lead investor and employed about 90 people. Shell Oil and the NBA were among the customers. Coupa Software, a listed company that sells spending controls to businesses, announced on 7 January 2020 that it was buying the whole thing.

~ twelfth of March ~

The shutdown notice on yapta.com is dated 12 March 2020. "After many years of providing customers with savings all across the world, My Yapta will be retired," it said. After the 31st there would be no searching or tracking, and the trip data stored in accounts would no longer be available. The business products were unaffected and had already been renamed Travel Saver. The notice ended: "We hope you enjoyed the journey as much as we did." It did not mention that the World Health Organization had declared a pandemic the day before.

Travel Saver did not last either. On 2 December 2021 The Beat reported that Coupa had told the travel agencies reselling it that the product would no longer be supported on its own. Nothing answers at yapta.com now.

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