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

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121–128 of 128 posts

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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tr…

Normally insurance is still valid in case of intermediaries, your travel insurance is perfectly valid if you booked through an OLTA. Maybe it’s just a question of certification?

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

#122
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.

This is called A flex, this is very common. Sadly is one of the most compute expensive searches as you have a combinatorics order of day pairs.

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

#124
post #4

Congrats on launching! Good luck! I just briefly checked your website, but could not figure out if you only do business travel or vacations as well. Also, which countries is your service available in?

Hey! One of the founders here. Carry is available all over the world, but our responses can be slower outside of the hours of 8am - 2am Pacific Time. Where are you based? For the last almost ~6 months, we've been doing top-down sales at companies, serving their teams that travel most (eg sales, implementation, professional services, etc. teams), but given demand from folks in our networks, we're opening up Carry to i…

I am from India. My use case for traveling is personal family vacation. I find it frustrating to book flights and hotels for personal vacations.

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

#125
post #37
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.

A lot of credit card deals lock you into particular airlines. Either through a card branded with that actual airline, or companies like AmEx making you choose exactly one to reap benefits with.

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

#126

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 bu…

Yes, Slack is blocked in China and other parts of the world. And not everyone uses Slack.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok makes sense. So you’re acting as a TMC but without the TA part? I guess the difficulty here is incident support: Say I’ve missed a flight and I need to be rebooked, hotel and taxi notified etc... With a classic TMC I call them on the 24/7 hotline and some agent will do it live for me. In your case the support line would be you right? Because your travel agency might not have access to the airbnb reservations etc.…

We do the TA part, too. We book flights, hotels, Airbnbs, cars, etc. so we can reschedule everything in incidents, not just one part if customers use us full-service.

And yeah, we have our own database for everything. GDS is just one way to book and a "portal to the airlines" for us

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

#128

Tejas, your name rang a bell, and I'm pretty sure we worked on a class project together back in Uni (rhymes with "Matton"). You probably don't remember me, but I'm super happy for you and wish you all the best. Small world :)

Haha, I never went to uni so you're probably thinking of someone else :-)

so it wasn't technically university, but a academy for gifted high school students, located on a university. am I barking up the wrong tree?
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