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Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

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Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#41

Post by tejasmanohar »

jbob2000 wrote: post #30

How will you scale? The reason that travel booking is so bad is because once you get too big, you start to eat the (very thin) margins of everyone in the travel industry. Then they get all defensive and, if you don't get acquired, start cutting you off or giving you crappy restrictions. Are you competing with something like Carlson-Wagonlit Travel?

You're right-- the travel industry is built around leverage and highly political. I can't say that we've worked everything out, but we've already started navigating such situations and think they're inevitable.

One theory (though a bit fluffy) is that if we can successfully automate more and more of these processes, our costs can be dramatically lower than "traditional travel agency" competitors / margin higher.

Yes, in theory, we're competing with Carlson-Wagonlit / Amex Concierge. That actually hasn't been hard at the smaller / medium size companies interested in using us (big ones are obviously harder since they have a travel desk, etc.). In actuality, we're currently competing with companies like Concur & TripActions and the most popular way, employees just spending tons of time planning/booking/expensing travel themselves.

Do you have a background in travel space? Would be cool to chat more

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#43

Post by tejasmanohar »

monksy wrote: post #42

A lot of this really feels like the people who need that would be better off with a personal assistant/secretary that remembers the person's needs and preferences.

That's the point :-)

Dedicated personal assistants are too expensive (or at least, that's the common belief). Our idea is to use a mix of computers + humans to provide a personalized experience.

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#46

Post by tejasmanohar »

adaorardor wrote: post #11
notananthem wrote: post #5

Love to give this a shot if anyone has a referral. Probably my major pain point is my team booking travel together. We'll put it on a clunky excel file or sharepoint page, people block out what they think is the travel date, factory times move and we all have to rebook or just go early/late, etc. Being able to block reschedule a group of individuals would be cool too, like grouping these individual accounts for certa…

Email me at gnomepomsky [at] gmail.com!

adaorardor is a friend that can share an invite!

But, group work travel is super interesting. Feel free to just email me-- tejas [at] carry [dot] travel directly, and we'd love to chat and see how we can help, especially if your team has a trip coming soon.

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#47

Post by duxup »

"70% of corporate travel is booked without any tool or agency"

That always bothered me. We used this middle man agency ... there was no savings, I still just booked it myself for the most part. I just had to use their crappy site.

I did not understand the point of that, but man it was policy.

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#48

Post by tejasmanohar »

duxup wrote: post #47

"70% of corporate travel is booked without any tool or agency" That always bothered me. We used this middle man agency ... there was no savings, I still just booked it myself for the most part. I just had to use their crappy site. I did not understand the point of that, but man it was policy.

Exactly. I'd say many companies are worse off w/ traditional middle man agencies. They don't save time and often cost the company more money (though there are some merits in the problems they prevent, like abuse, at scale).

We look at most of the top corporate travel portals and think "worse Google Flights". We want to help the employees save time, while they want to fill a checklist for the finance team. Obviously, this is trickier than it sounds since our ideal "stakeholder" is different than much of the market, but we think it's possible by targeting teams that waste the most time coordinating travel.

Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack

#49

Post by ricksebak »

tejasmanohar wrote: post #17
koolba wrote: post #6

How much does this cost? I don't see any pricing information. > We book travel on your personal card so you can get all the points. Do you bill the charges directly to the customer's card or do they get billed by you and then you separately purchase the flight/hotel/etc? Curious how that works regarding card data storage as you'd need likely need the full card number, expiration, and CVV to run each charge and it can…

Great questions :-) > How much does this cost? I don't see any pricing information. Carry is free for individuals and small teams. We don't charge for just booking travel, but we do have upgrades available for larger teams (admin panels, constraints, etc.). What are you interested in using Carry for? Seems like you work at a large company, feel free to email me at tejas [at] carry [dot] travel. > Do you bill the char…

> At the moment, most of our transactions are done the latter way (get billed by airline/hotel/etc and then separately charge the customer)

One concern that comes to mind about this is if the credit card companies would consider this purchase as "travel". Like where Chase Sapphire Reserve gives triple points for travel purchases, and also has a $300 travel credit, but either of those things would only work if Chase considers your service as "travel", rather than "online service" or whatever.

You may have already worked this out and gotten it classified as travel, and if so it would just be a nice thing to put on a FAQ or whatever.

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