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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

#71

Post by kashishg »

mmckelvy wrote: post #65

> We found that no one actually wants to use these tools— they just have to, and that the only people who were satisfied with the state of things were folks who had assistants they could offload the work onto. I suspect this is the case with a lot of business / enterprise software. Congrats on the launch. I think this space (software assisted services that rely on Slack / SMS / email) is a promising one. Best of luck…

I wonder why enterprise tools end up this way, is it because the buyer (CFO/procurement) is different from the end user (employees)?

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

#73

Post by kashishg »

namdnay wrote: post #72

Interesting... How are you performing the bookings? Are you registered as a travel agent with GDS access? Or are you going through an other agency?

We're partnered with a travel agency with GDS access. Additionally, we use various other OTAs that give us the full range of inventory for hotels and flights.

In general, travel agents that only use GDS don't have access to budget airlines such as Easyjet or alternative accommodations such as Airbnb or Sonder.

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

#74

Post by nrf1 »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #59
duxup wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I suspect that was it. Oddly, I don't think a lot of this stuff really accounts for the complexities in air travel. Like I literally couldn't rent certain types of cars ... and the no cars.... all in the name of saving money. But I could take a taxi everywhere for 150% of the cost of car rental (at least) because you still had to get from A to B. The end result was "don't check that box!" but any other box was o…

I recently had a fun experience with something called the "Fly America Act", a law which says that when the US government is paying for your travel you have to fly on a US flagged airline. For my trip, the flight would've been about 6 hours (direct!) and cost $600 on a foreign airline. On the cheapest US carrier, the flight was about $850 and took 10 hours due to a layover. When you take hourly rates into account, it…

The Fly America Act is pork for the Airline industry; they aren't intended to save the taxpayer money. Exactly the opposite.

I've even seen identical itineraries -- one under a US flag carrier and the other under a foreign flag -- with a mid-3-figure price difference. The airlines know what they are doing.

Call your congresspeople.

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

#75

Post by SkyPuncher »

cptaj wrote: post #15

Here's a killer feature everyone wants: I want to put a date range and get the cheapest plane tickets. Big range, I want to find the cheapest time of the year to fly and plan my vacation. Nobody lets you do this.

A couple companies have limited flexibility.

I recently moved out of state and want to fly back from time to time. I don't have any particular dates I care to fly on. I just want the most affordable option and I'll plan everything else around that.

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

#76

Post by pdx_flyer »

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.

Kickbacks, plain and simple.

For example:

My firm requires we use a corp booking engine. That engine charges a fee to book a ticket online or over the phone. We get a slight discount on fares and they in turn give a kickback each year to my employer.

The real kicker is that they sell some fares as "refundable" when in reality the fares are just regular fares but allow rebooking via this corporate travel agent. They've essentially locked you into using them and any interaction with an agent incurs a fee. My firm doesn't care, they just see that kickback at the end of the year and are happy. They don't care how inconvenient it is to use the TA.

I get some of the desires to control costs but in my case, I have schedules to keep and a lot of last minute travel and the corporate TA is nothing but an inconvenience. I frequently have to put in reasons for "breaking" policy (for example, I don't take red-eyes) on price because the limit between the lowest fare and your ticket is $100. So if the schedule is right but the fare for that is $110, you have to put in a reason why you booked it.

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

#77

Post by mr_isomies »

cptaj wrote: post #15

Here's a killer feature everyone wants: I want to put a date range and get the cheapest plane tickets. Big range, I want to find the cheapest time of the year to fly and plan my vacation. Nobody lets you do this.

You should really check out https://greatescape.co/

I'm not sure if it's a startup or an MVP or a student project at this point, but it's the closest that I've come across

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

#78

Post by Scoundreller »

zip1234 wrote: post #27
smcguinness wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at https://www.skyscanner.com . They have a "cheapest month" feature. All you have to do is choose your destination. To see it, choose your flight then in the date pop-up choose Whole Month -> Cheapest Month. I believe they also have the inverse where you can choose a month and a departure city and they'll give you destinations by price. I couldn't find it quickly though but I think they have it.

While it doesn't work amazing everywhere, I love skycanner's map feature: Pick a month and destinations and prices shown on a map. https://www.skyscanner.com/cheap-flights-map

I sometimes do the opposite for this: put my destination as my starting point, and use that to figure out which city is the best for me to fly out of.

I live near a border, and can arrange my life around a few other cities if the savings are worth it (e.g. visit family or see another city a few hours from me)

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

#79

Post by Scoundreller »

How will you handle itinerary changes by the airline?

I know lots of people regret booking with Expedia or the like when there’s a change and they can’t deal with the airline directly.

There might be some value in doing EU261 claims and their equivalents on behalf of businesses. My guess is that nobody pushes the claim when the employer is paying the bill.

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

#80

Post by tejasmanohar »

Scoundreller wrote: post #79

How will you handle itinerary changes by the airline? I know lots of people regret booking with Expedia or the like when there’s a change and they can’t deal with the airline directly. There might be some value in doing EU261 claims and their equivalents on behalf of businesses. My guess is that nobody pushes the claim when the employer is paying the bill.

Founder here. Currently, you have to go through us to make changes to the reservation or respond to airline itinerary changes, but we have an emergency line 24/7 (think PagerDuty), and we believe we can do a much better job of dealing with the airlines than individuals (and optionally over chat instead of phone calls!). There's actually a lot of things you can do to manage reservations for customers on the backend that are not utilized in sites like Expedia that travel agents do (eg on this DOS-like terminal for the "GDS", you can manage reservations in the same backend that the airlines use).

> There might be some value in doing EU261 claims and their equivalents on behalf of businesses. My guess is that nobody pushes the claim when the employer is paying the bill.

This is a great idea. I actually haven't thought about doing this. I actually had a super delayed flight back in the day

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