Launch HN: TeamOut (YC W22) – AI agent for planning company retreats

You are right, venue recommendation is only the first step or the process.

What is time consuming is the communication with the venue to agree on "terms" , this is exactly why if you click on "Request Quote" you will have a real quote process with the venue that will share all the details and cost estimate with the client , we also offer to talk directly with the venue manager to talk about the final details and close the deal, that is where the value is at --> end to end booking process (not just aggregating results)

I did not see this mentioned: a very hard part of organizing events for remote teams is dealing with visas, for example, choosing to host an event in Europe will often prevent someone from India attending. Do you handle that, finding a location that is suitable for the largest number of the team?

Another challenge is travel, e.g: scheduling an event in Europe for a distributed team of U.S. people during bad weather leads to people stranded at airports, missing the event.

I think this is a great idea, but I am surprised to learn that organizers are spending most of their time communicating with hundreds of venues. Once you have a location and budget, finding a venue is straightforward.

>"Agent"

> (2022)

Has there been a rebrand as of late? What was the product pitch before that? I guess "AI for planning company retreats" (and possibly SaaS for company retreats before that)

This capacity to pivot into these buzzwords shows that at least sometimes they are more phenomenons with marketing (or at least UX) definitions rather than technological ones.

Hello, the visa question is quite recurring especially for larger team that have distributed teams.

The algorithm is quite smart about that because it has legacy data from ~1500 events. IT has been shown a lot of example of" When a team is located there, they have VISA issues --> they should actually go there because it worked in the past for XYZ client"

For example the algorithm will know that Dominican Republic is usually VISA frienly and can send larger groups there etc.

For the second part: Finding a venue with the requirements is hard, our clients really have a pain point, but what it is even harder tis to agree on terms, prices, food, meeting space, transportation coordination etc, it is a logistical nigthhmare

Interesting. My team just went through this to plan offsite. Took about 1/2 a day of one person's time. So I asked your tool to help me:

"I want to have a two day offsite for a team of 12 in Cambridge in April."

It then started pulling up results in Cambridge UK. I meant Massachusetts. I didn't say that in the prompt, but I figured since there are two equally famous Cambridges, it would ask me for clarification.

I redid it specifying Massachusetts and it worked pretty well (although all the options it found were about double the price of what we actually booked).

An interesting idea!

BTW I didn't continue, but I assume you manage the whole booking process? How do deal with questions from the venue and other human in the loop issues?