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

I installed it in a personal slack workplace and said "I need a flight to Cancun August 27th to September 1st" and got a boilerplate response saying a travel agent would get back to me within an hour. I followed up with "I need a flight to Cancun on August 27th, returning September 1st" and got no response at all. I waited a while and got asked for a time preference (it called me by my username not my display name, btw, which is a little weird). I said "Leaving morning, returning afternoon". Again, a lengthy pause. Then, without giving me a price quote, it said they'd have options for me shortly and asked me to finish creating an account (birthdate, full name, etc). After a while it asked me if I meant SFO -> CUN (I'm not really sure why that would be the presumption).

Is this currently an automated process or am I talking to a human support agent?

I'm curious if you've looked into the "guest travel" space, allowing non-employees to book corporate travel. Pana(pana.com) is the only competitor I've seen explicitly focused on this space, but TripActions and CWT cover this use case as well. I think interviews make up a large part of travel expenses for lots of companies, and currently the experience is pretty subpar at most companies as an interviewee.

1. I'm generally flexible about dates. The way I generally book a trip is to look at a date range and choose the cheapest option in several websites - Google Flights, Kayak, etc? Can I assume your process would be similar too?

2. It's a very time-consuming process. How would you do it for free?

3. Would I get any additional discount if I go through you/any authorized travel agent in general? Or do they also internally use the same websites we do?

So I need a new app for my already-bloated slack app just to book travel? It also takes longer, is hard to search and retain, and is limited by the chat UI which is pretty useless when combing through tons of options and messages.

First off, >Is this currently an automated process or am I talking to a human support agent?

You're talking to a human! The human has custom portal/tools/processes to book travel, but all questions and replies are by consumers.

As per the details / juicy parts, 1) We'll remove or modify the boilerplate response for first time users within business hours (8am-2am PT). We don't really need it as we respond within a minute or two max.

2) Generally, we see display names from Slack, but for some reason, we don't for your user (unusual). Will check on that.

3) RE: The lengthy pauses, sorry about this-- today was a pretty crazy day with the launch and our agents had a spiky load, but we'll improve here. I believe the initial response only had a 1 minute gap but after that, things may have slowed down. Ideally, we automate the initial responses so it's ~instant.

4) The account creation is a first-time user thing. Our agent thought the booking was high-intent / going to complete (we primarily serve business travelers) so we asked you to create an account so we have the necessary details to book while we pull up the options.

Feel free to email me at tejas [at] carry [dot] travel if you have more feedback or questions! And, we'd love for you to try Carry again next time you'd like to travel :)