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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

#101

Post by tejasmanohar »

rorykoehler wrote: post #99

Don't Concur already offer this?

Not exactly-- it's complicated. Concur is an expensing product that also has a corporate travel booking UI platform that sits on top of travel management companies (TMCs), some of which have their own portals with phone lines and chat services.

Just curious (not trying to sound snarky)-- Do you use Concur? If so, I'm curious if you prefer it to booking travel yourself. In research, we only met one traveler who was satisfied with Concur, and it turned out that they had an assistant using it for them. Our goal is to make a travel tool that's an employee perk and a joy to use, and one that saves the company even more money through saving employee time.

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

#102

Post by rorykoehler »

tejasmanohar wrote: post #101
rorykoehler wrote: post #99

Don't Concur already offer this?

Not exactly-- it's complicated. Concur is an expensing product that also has a corporate travel booking UI platform that sits on top of travel management companies (TMCs), some of which have their own portals with phone lines and chat services. Just curious (not trying to sound snarky)-- Do you use Concur? If so, I'm curious if you prefer it to booking travel yourself. In research, we only met one traveler who was sa…

I guess it's similar but not exactly the same. https://www.concur.com/newsroom/article/sap-concur-travel-bo...

I'm CTO at 8Common who own Expense8. We're a local player in Australia who compete directly with Concur. We hear all about peoples frustrations with Concur. We are also looking at interface and workflow enhancements too and I am interested to see how you get on with Carry. I do think there is a trend towards simplification of travel booking but I'm still not sure what the end (winning) result will be.

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

#103

Post by sethhochberg »

donjoe wrote: post #37
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.

Momondo.com does it, Cheaptickets.de as well. Whenever I talk to my friends from the States I get the feeling no one compares flight prices. Most of them book with 'their' fav airline of choice without comparing different options.

It depends a lot on how often you fly - I prefer Skyteam partners (ie, Delta in the US) whenever I can because I fly often enough to have award status with them, meaning lounge access, priority support, upgrades in-flight, etc... I'm sure I pay them more raw dollars than I would if I booked my trips on the absolute cheapest airline in all cases, but the perks make all the difference between the flight being a chore or a moderately pleasant experience.

I have plenty of friends, though, who don't fly as often as I do and can therefore chase the cheapest fare. It doesn't matter to them if they get a flight with an airline they don't have status with, or an airline with no special perks at all, because they're not on the road often enough to qualify for those things in the first place. Raw price wins.

Travel is one of the few industries where brand loyalty still has some tangible perks (albeit decreasing every time airlines revamp their rewards programs), so especially within the US where pretty much all of the airlines fly to pretty much all of the major airports, its an approach worth considering.

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

#105

Post by atian »

tejasmanohar wrote: post #32
atian wrote: post #18

I would use this if you had a Bloomberg integration, and maybe if I could share my itinerary through it. I sit on it all day except for activities to upkeep my wellbeing.

Founder here. This is interesting! One of our friends in finance recently suggested this, too. We don't have access to a Bloomberg terminal, but we wanna look into this. Do you (or anyone else) know what it takes to ship an integration on the Bloomberg terminal? Will email you (from your profile) after the HN buzz, too :) Also, @HN we're currently on Slack/SMS/email but if you have other platforms you'd suggest, let…

My email isn't working in my profile due to recruiters. I added you on LinkedIn.

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

#106

Post by Scoundreller »

tejasmanohar wrote: post #80
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 th…

Just to clarify: There are already services for consumers that will take care of EU261 claims on your behalf so you don't have to force the airline in court (and possibly you would just contract for them), but, like I said, for a corporate-paid ticket, I don't think anybody bothers.

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

#107

Post by pbk1 »

exabrial wrote: post #104

Can you have a non-Slack version? Just a page where you put your log in information and it asks the same thing the slack bot does? It would take like 15m to build this

Text/SMS would also be great here. I had a very positive experience booking onsite interview related travel via Pana, which seems to have a similar offering.

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

#108

Post by paulcole »

> Imagine automatically going from a customer message ("I need to be in Boston Tuesday for a 10am meeting and return for a 9am meeting Friday") to parsed trip requirements (from: SFO, to: BOS, arrive by: 10am, return by: 9am)

No offense if this was an off the cuff example, but this is awful parsing. I don’t need to arrive in Boston by 10am, I need to be at the location of the meeting by 10am. I don’t need to return by 9am, I need to be at the location of the meeting at 9am. If your agents are seeing the parsed version, they’re going to make poor arrangements nearly every time.

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

#109

Post by tejasmanohar »

exabrial wrote: post #104

Can you have a non-Slack version? Just a page where you put your log in information and it asks the same thing the slack bot does? It would take like 15m to build this

We have customers using SMS and email as well. We’ll highlight those words on the site

Maybe we’ll add a web app chat sometime, too. But would SMS satisfy the use case you’re thinking about? Also, do you not use Slack or do you use it but not want to use it for travel? If latter, why?

FWIW, maintaining support for more platforms is easy when it’s just text, but Slack is very powerful / can have rich UIs (eg a book button or a form in a response).

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

#110

Post by tejasmanohar »

ctphipps wrote: post #82
ricksebak wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

Same for credit cards that offer travel insurance as long as the flights/rental cars etc. are booked through them. They'd most likely need to see the charge from the airline in order for the coverage to be effective.

Good point. Travel Point multipliers can be achieved via setting a merchant code (MCC) of travel on charges (stripe, for example, supports this.

The trip insurance card benefit— I don’t think we can satisfy right now. We’re exploring ways to use the user’s own CC with the end vendor (eg airline) rather than us charging the user separately. “credit card tokenization” should work here (Spreedly, TokenX) but it’s non trivial due to how many vendors are in the space

Email me if either of these are stopping you from wanting to use the service, and we’ll figure out a workaround or let you know when it’s solved!

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