valisa

Hi! My name is Siarhei Lipchyk, and I’m one of two co-founders of valisa.io - low-cost travel & inspiration service. The initial idea was born when I shared my thoughts to Oleksandr Bystrikov - a close friend of mine and a colleague back in 2018. Apparently, both of us went through a similar flow of finding budget flight deals: we would open up a browser with a bazillion of tabs and query different dates and compare, which takes a lot of time and effort.

Most importantly, we haven’t found an easy-to-use website where you set your origin/destination and budget. Existing services didn’t fit our needs entirely. So we gathered together and wrote a set of python/nodejs scripts that used browser automation, which would fetch and aggregate flights for flexible dates ranges in the upcoming 3 to 6 months. It worked out surprisingly well despite the fact we had memory leaks in headless browser setup, possibly because we were too naive to think it would run smoothly without any issues in docker containers. Anyway, that was a good starting point for further improvements. Fast forward several months, I used this software to find and plan my family trip, and Oleksandr did the same for his low-cost weekend getaway to Italy.

Later on, we shared the idea with a limited circle of our friends, and most of them liked it. However, there was no frontend for it, nor scripts could run on a bigger scale. With some feedback and personal ideas for improvements, we set the goal for spring 2019 to make an MVP and launch it publicly. That, unfortunately, didn’t happen for several reasons: having a full-time job, emotional ups and downs, lack of organized process, and underestimated MVP features. During spring 2019, we changed the milestones several times and eventually agreed on delivering the very minimal functionality that would find the cheapest deals from major low-cost carriers in Europe.

It’s 2020, and here we go, valisa.io has finally launched publicly and ready to surprise you with crazy cheap deals. We have many ideas in the pocket and willing to add more features. Would be great to hear back from you here in comments or reach out to us via twitter.