are you working directly with airlines? what are you going to do to avoid situations like this: https://awardwallet.com/blog/air-canada-sues-seats-aero/
It's imperative for an open internet that Air Canada lose this case.
Launch HN: Roame (YC S23) – Flight search engine for your credit card points
41–50 of 137 posts
Re: Launch HN: Roame (YC S23) – Flight search engine for your credit card points
#42I once had a VC tell me they would never fund travel startups, because the only good founder of a travel company is someone who travels regularly, and that would imply they are too distracted to be working on their own company.
Hope this doesn't match what you've experienced?
Re: Launch HN: Roame (YC S23) – Flight search engine for your credit card points
#43I’ve been looking for something like this.
I don’t see many options for Brex points. Are those harder to transfer and take advantage of? Is Brex too new?
Small feedback: Skyview is a very confusing subscription term. Why not Roame Lite/Pro/Enterprise/etc
Re: Launch HN: Roame (YC S23) – Flight search engine for your credit card points
#44Congrats on the launch! Curious how you fit into the landscape of award travel tolls like point.me and seats.aero. What are you doing differently & who’s your target user?
Thanks! In our view, the more tools, the better to help educate and bring more people into the points world. We're focused on the beginner points user and helping them through the learning curve of points. Want people to use our engine to book their first ever business class flight. In terms of product, we provide 365 days of free real-time search across all the loyalty programs we cover and any fare class.
How are you going to deal with the fact that airlines don't want more people in the points world? (Or at least, they don't want people finding inexpensive redemptions, which cost them money.)
The fundamental reason that it's hard to find cheap redemptions is that the economic incentives are aligned against cheap redemptions existing in the first place. Airlines want the revenue stream from points to be as high as possible, and the redemption rate to be as low as possible.
Re: Launch HN: Roame (YC S23) – Flight search engine for your credit card points
#45This seems like a cool idea! Some random feedback from using the website: * I'm not really sure I understood what SkyView is? It seems like you need to enable that to book round-trip flights, and you have to pay for it? But then there's also SkyView Lite?? And that's free but needs an account? Is there no way to book round-trip without paying? * Maybe ask people what cards they have on the homepage? I found it confus…
Thank you! Always open to feedback.
1) You're right. We have been working on how to best present SkyView to users. Skyview is our cached search product, which lets users search up to 60 days at a time, search from region-to-region, and set alerts.
SkyView Lite is free "intro" version of SkyView, where free users with an account can search the upcoming 60 days of departing flights and search 7 days at a time. Wanted to let free users try it out before upgrading.
We currently do not support roundtrip because often times the lowest-priced points deals are found on different airline programs. With points redemptions 2 one-way flights are the same price as 1 roundtrip. (There are some exceptions like booking on ANA directly, which requires you to search roundtrip). You can open up a second tab to search the different directions though.
2) Totally understand. It was one of the debates we had. We were trying to balance showing users all the live points results out there so they can make their own decisions on whether to get new cards. We find that a lot of users may have one set of points that are not as useful or easy to redeem. They realize that perhaps they should consider another credit card for better access to deals.
We are planning to roll out a saved card programs feature, so you can just turn on to automatically filter.
3) So when you redeem on the Chase or Amex portal, your points are only worth at a set value of 1-1.5 cents per point (cpp) depending on your credit car program and they're all pegged to directly to the cash fare.
Let's use this example:
New York to Paris on Air France business class would cost around $4,000 in cash.
If you were to redeem on the Amex portal, that flight would costs 400,000 Amex points ($4,000 * 100 cents per dollar / 1 cent per point).
However, if you were to use Air France Flying Blue miles and redeem on the Air France website, the flight could be as low as 50,000 points. At 50,000 points you points would be worth 8 cents per point ($4,000 * 100 cents per dollar / 50,000 points). *Amex points can transfer to Air France Flying Blue at a 1:1 ratio.
So you're getting 1 cpp on the Amex portal, but 8 cpp on the Air France website directly. That's a big value increase.
Roame shows all the live availability if you were to redeem your points on the airline directly using their miles. So we would show the flight in the example above with the 50,000 points price.
4) Yes! We have a Discover feature where you can select your city and dates. You will see the cached flight deals from your origin city. We're still rolling this out, so the origin cities are limited right now.
5) Mhmm. Let me take a look at that. Thanks for letting me know
Re: Launch HN: Roame (YC S23) – Flight search engine for your credit card points
#46Wow I love this!!!!
Thank you! If you have any questions or feedback, please let me know
Re: Launch HN: Roame (YC S23) – Flight search engine for your credit card points
#47I once had a VC tell me they would never fund travel startups, because the only good founder of a travel company is someone who travels regularly, and that would imply they are too distracted to be working on their own company. Hope this doesn't match what you've experienced?
I once saw a YC video stating that they hate discovery type startups, calling them tarpit ideas. Yet here we are...
VCs are shiftier turncoats than Benedict Arnold and Judas.
Re: Launch HN: Roame (YC S23) – Flight search engine for your credit card points
#48I once had a VC tell me they would never fund travel startups, because the only good founder of a travel company is someone who travels regularly, and that would imply they are too distracted to be working on their own company. Hope this doesn't match what you've experienced?
haha, sounds like the chicken and egg dilemma!
Re: Launch HN: Roame (YC S23) – Flight search engine for your credit card points
#49Congrats on the launch! Been using your free product for a little while. As a fellow traffic hacker, some random comments: - I've been in the points game for a long time so I may not be your target customer. Take feedback with a grain of salt, I guess. - Commissions & Trust: You should disclose (more clearly?) that you're getting commissions from the CC signups and, ideally, that those may not be the best offers avai…
I tried this product recently and "Last Refresh" was a big pain point. I'm sure there's technical reasons why it's hard to keep things fresh (many airlines don't even appear to update their own listings until you try and book) but it was frustrating to find what looked like good deals and then spend the effort to book only to be told it wasn't an existing offer.
We need to do a better job distinguishing the two.
May I ask, are using the live search or SkyView cached search?
If you are using the live search (SkyView toggled off), all results are in real-time as you search.
If you are using SkyView cached search (SkyView toggled on), results are saved up to 4 days, but you can search 60 days at a time from 1 airport to all of Europe's airports.
Re: Launch HN: Roame (YC S23) – Flight search engine for your credit card points
#50I once had a VC tell me they would never fund travel startups, because the only good founder of a travel company is someone who travels regularly, and that would imply they are too distracted to be working on their own company. Hope this doesn't match what you've experienced?
VCs will say a lot of things when they are not investing. 99% of what they say is nonsense when not investing, because the real factor is “will it make lots of money?” and/or “can it scale to hundreds of millions of people?”
Almost anything else doesn’t matter. Travel a lot? I guarantee you that if your company is running well and printing cash, VCs will not give a second thought to how much you travel.
But if you’re not making money or sales… that’s a different story.