Routehappy Finds the Best Flights Based on Much More Than Prices

The Launchpad is a series that introduces Mashable readers to compelling startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Routehappy

One-Liner Pitch: Routehappy helps you book the best flights based on the in-flight experience, rather than just by the price and schedule.

Why It's Taking Off: The startup has a team of dedicated data experts who have put together a comprehensive database to find out seat layouts, plane types, travel time and amenities for any flight in the world.

There's no shortage of websites to compare prices and schedules for flights, but what if you want to go beyond that and compare factors like the amount of legroom or whether there's Wi-Fi on the plane? You might have been able to find some of that information spread across different travel sites, but it hasn't all been available in one place until now.

Routehappy, an online service that launched out of beta last week, lets travelers see a "happiness score" for economy and business class flights from every major airline, which factors in everything from how spacious the seats are to the quality of in-flight entertainment. You can also sort flight results by price and arrival/departure times, as you might on traditional travel websites.

For more than a year, a team of data experts at Routehappy have been collecting information about seat layouts, plane types, amenities and more from press releases, company pages and frequent flier websites, among other sources. The result may be the most comprehensive guide to date for comparing the in-flight experience across airlines.

"Flight search has not evolved in years. It's all based on price and schedule," Robert Albert, founder and CEO of Routehappy, told Mashable. "There is this entire category of information that is hidden from users and it's about the actual experience of flights."

Albert worked at Site59, an online travel agency, and then at Travelocity after it acquired Site59. A frequent flyer himself, Albert became frustrated with the lack of comparison tools for this kind of information online and decided to build his own. The startup raised $1.5 million in a seed round last year and currently has eight people on staff, half of whom work on collecting data and half of whom work on the technology side.

Routehappy attracted "tens of thousands" of users in the first few days after launching last Friday, according to Albert, 10% of whom came from abroad, which is impressive considering the startup hasn't even begun to market itself outside the U.S. Routehappy is now working on a new feature that would let users simultaneously filter flights by price and the happiness score.

While the service is certainly useful for consumers interested in learning more about particular flights before booking, Albert notes that it's also helpful for airline carriers. Right now, he says, airlines feel like they've been "commoditized" by price and price alone, but Routehappy may give them a way to compete based on the planes and amenities that they have invested in.

"The airlines are spending billions of dollars enhancing their planes, but when you go to search for flights, there is nowhere for airlines to promote their differentiators," Albert says.

Routehappy plans to generate revenue from referrals to flight booking websites, as well as through advertising on site and eventually selling data about users searches and preferences for flights.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Fields of View