Staff at HTS, the B2B arm behind most of Hopper's revenue, report losing their jobs days after co-founder Dakota Smith left. Here is what we know.
Hopper, the Montreal travel company known for its price-prediction app, appears to have cut jobs in its business-to-business unit, Hopper Technology Solutions. More than half a dozen HTS employees posted on LinkedIn in early October that their roles had been eliminated.
The cuts followed the exit of co-founder Dakota Smith, who announced on Sept. 28 that he had left after three years as HTS CEO. Smith says he knew nothing of any restructuring. HTS powers travel tools for partners such as RBC, Expedia, Uber and Frontier Airlines, and Smith said in 2025 it brought in 90% of Hopper's revenue.
Days after one of its co-founders walked out the door, Hopper appears to have started cutting jobs in the part of the company that makes most of its money. More than half a dozen people from Hopper Technology Solutions, its business-to-business arm, posted on LinkedIn that their roles had been eliminated in early October.
Hopper is best known for its app that predicts when flight and hotel prices will drop, and plenty of travelers in the US and Canada use its tools without knowing it, through bank rewards portals and airline websites. That hidden side of the company is where the Hopper layoffs landed. If you book through a card rewards program or buy a cancellation add-on from an airline, there’s a decent chance HTS software sits behind the screen.
The Hopper layoffs became visible through employees, not the company. In early October, more than half a dozen HTS staff posted on LinkedIn that their positions had been cut. Hopper, which is headquartered in Montreal, has not confirmed the total number of jobs lost, which teams were hit or whether more cuts are coming.
It’s also unclear how the cuts were spread across the business. One longtime employee, a technical recruitment manager who had been with the company for almost seven years, wrote on Oct. 2 that he had helped grow the organization from fewer than 200 people to more than 1,200 spread across at least 37 countries. He called leaving bittersweet but didn’t say whether his exit was part of the cuts.
That headcount figure shows how big HTS had become. Without a number from Hopper, though, there is no way to know what share of the workforce was affected.
Dakota Smith, one of Hopper’s co-founders, announced on LinkedIn on Sept. 28 that he had left the company after three years as CEO of Hopper Technology Solutions, often shortened to HTS. He didn’t give a reason.
Smith has said he has nothing more to share about his departure. He also said he had no insight into any restructuring, because his last day was in mid-September, before the job losses surfaced. So while the timing is striking, there’s no evidence that his exit and the cuts are linked.
What makes his departure significant is the size of the unit he ran. Smith said in 2025 that HTS generated 90% of Hopper’s revenue. Losing the person who built that business, followed quickly by cuts inside it, naturally raises questions about where Hopper goes next.
HTS sells Hopper’s technology to other companies so they can offer it under their own names. Its partners include banks, airlines and travel firms such as Uber, Expedia and Royal Bank of Canada. The products cover travel booking, data tools and financial add-ons like flexible cancellation.
The division was busy right up to the cuts:
So these aren’t cuts at a company that has stopped signing deals. That makes the reasons behind them more interesting.
This isn’t Hopper’s first round of layoffs. The company has trimmed staff several times in recent years as its big partnerships shifted, and one shift this year was especially large.
Capital One, one of the biggest US card issuers, used to run its Capital One Travel portal on technology built with Hopper. In April 2026, Capital One took that platform in-house, buying the technology and hiring the Hopper employees who worked on it. Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank told investors the bank now fully owns the system it built in partnership with Hopper. For HTS, that meant losing control of one of its most visible partnerships.
Competition may be adding pressure too. Travel industry reporting has suggested Hopper could face a tougher fight in Asia as Booking Holdings moves to bring its brands Agoda, Priceline and Booking.com closer together. Hopper hasn’t tied the job cuts to any of these factors.
If you use the Hopper app or a bank travel portal built on HTS, nothing changes today. Bookings and cancellation add-ons you’ve already bought should work as before, and none of the partners has announced changes.
A few practical points:
For job seekers and people in the Montreal tech scene, the bigger takeaway is that even a busy, revenue-generating unit isn’t safe from cuts when leadership changes.
Hopper hasn’t said. More than half a dozen HTS employees publicly posted that their roles were eliminated in early October, but the full number is unknown.
He didn’t give a reason. Smith announced on Sept. 28 that he had left after three years leading HTS and said his last day was in mid-September.
No. There is no sign the consumer app or partner booking tools are closing. The cuts appear focused on staff in the HTS enterprise unit.
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