In an effort to make airfare more affordable, a university student and her sister created a website to offer cheap flights while donating some profit to charity.
Senior Sunmee Huh, a cell biology and genetics major, teamed up with her sister, Dahlia Huh, 17, to create PlaneTickets.com this past winter break.
The website is a flight search database that works with Skypicker, a third party based in Europe to filter through travel itineraries and offer the user desired flights at the cheapest rates. Ten percent of the profit from the website would go to help fund and support medically oriented nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations, Sunmee Huh said.
“I was surprised that there was no big player in the [travel] industry that gives back to student organizations, such as Doctors Without Borders,” Sunmee Huh said.
Huh came up with the idea for the site while searching for flights to Honduras during summer 2014, hoping to go on a service trip to provide medical care to Hondurans who were in need. When planning her trip, she noticed the main cost of what she had to spend to attend a service trip was the price of her round-trip flight.
After hours of watching tutorials on website design and programming, the Huh sisters launched their website at the beginning of March. The sisters said the website has had more than 20,000 visits and 7,000 flight searches since then.
Sunmee Huh said they are pleased with the site’s traffic, and they plan to garner a customer base with mainly people who have a passion for global impact and connectivity.
Jay Smith, Honors College Entrepreneurship and Innovation program director, is a university professor who taught Sunmee Huh. He created a web development firm and is confident that his former student’s idea has potential for success, Smith wrote in an email.
“Sunmee is one of the most talented, creative, hardworking and dedicated students I have taught,” Smith wrote.
PlaneTickets.com is an advocate flight search database, Sunmee Huh said, which reroutes user’s searches to the specific airlines for tickets. She added the sisters are also planning to start looking for advertising to boost the site’s success.
“In the near future, my sister and I will be looking for investors to build up our business, as well as include hotel and car search,” Dahlia Huh said.
While Smith said the website has the potential for success, he added that he could see them facing challenges while aiming for the desired website productivity, such as making sure the site is visually engaging for the user and efficient in its job.
Jonathan Chen, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, was one of the first users to book a flight using the website. He booked a flight from Washington to Austin this past March at a lower price than expected.
“I liked the ability to customize my search criteria and how it helped me create a cheaper itinerary,” Chen said.
Dahlia Huh will attend Harvard University next year and works as a full-time student member of the Montgomery County Public School’s Board of Education, which oversees a $2.4 billion annual budget. While managing a part-time job, keeping up with schoolwork and running the business can be challenging, she said she enjoys it.
“Working on a project and mission you love makes all the time and effort worth it,” Dahlia Huh said.
