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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

#91

Post by jbob2000 »

tejasmanohar wrote: post #41
jbob2000 wrote: post #30

How will you scale? The reason that travel booking is so bad is because once you get too big, you start to eat the (very thin) margins of everyone in the travel industry. Then they get all defensive and, if you don't get acquired, start cutting you off or giving you crappy restrictions. Are you competing with something like Carlson-Wagonlit Travel?

You're right-- the travel industry is built around leverage and highly political. I can't say that we've worked everything out, but we've already started navigating such situations and think they're inevitable. One theory (though a bit fluffy) is that if we can successfully automate more and more of these processes, our costs can be dramatically lower than "traditional travel agency" competitors / margin higher. Yes,…

I’ve had some exposure to the travel industry by working for a credit card loyalty program, but nothing formal.

I appreciate your honest reply and wish you luck!

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

#93

Post by icebraining »

matchbok wrote: post #87

Good luck! I still don't understand the need for these chat apps, tbh. Perhaps I'm just old fashioned, heh. 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.

According to their landing page, it works over email too.

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

#94

Post by tejasmanohar »

matchbok wrote: post #87

Good luck! I still don't understand the need for these chat apps, tbh. Perhaps I'm just old fashioned, heh. 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.

We think both chat and navigational UIs have a time and place. This should really be an essay, but I'll try to keep it short.

Chat isn't being used to say we use chat. Chat allows us to easily use humans on the backend to interpret things that computers are just much, much slower at doing right now and would require a lot of engineering work for a wide breadth of user states that are currently unknown due to lack of data / users. I personally do believe the _ideal_ (golden/dream state) UI would be a "navigational" one that makes a lot of assumptions but states them all, asks a lot of certain dynamic questions, and presents information in different styles depending on context. Humans are quite good at this (most people love Slack'ing their assistant to book travel), but we really haven't found a UI that does this well for travel and don't believe it's the best way to start attacking the underlying problems.

However, I agree that some parts of the travel journey should be a navigational app though and not chat-based. For example, checking an itinerary is better done through navigational UI-- I don't want to reference a chat transcript for that. (TripIt is ok here and works off of your email, we might make something of our own later).

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

#95

Post by t34543 »

notafraudster wrote: post #81

This is a really cool concept. 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…

You need responsive people especially when things go wrong - I use egencia at work and I’m fairly happy.

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

#96

Post by tejasmanohar »

avarun wrote: post #83

Hey Tejas, this looks awesome! Congrats on the launch, I'm looking forward to trying it out! 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, a…

Hi Varun! I think we have many mutual friends :)

We think Pana is smart. Interviews are definitely a large part of travel expenses in the Bay Area. My guess is by specializing in guest travel, Pana can be used in parallel to other tools at a company, which is a big advantage. We're exploring some similar "parallel" approaches but not completely honing in on interview travel right now.

Have you used Pana as a candidate? How'd you find it?

PS: We're also exploring some other group travel opportunities-- eg conferences, weddings, etc. We think this is a huge market that is nowhere near cracked.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

alphagrep12345 wrote: post #85

You mentioned that it's free for individuals. I have a few of questions. 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 thro…

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by adaorardor »

alphagrep12345 wrote: post #85

You mentioned that it's free for individuals. I have a few of questions. 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 thro…

Hey!

1. Yep, if you're flexible on dates we can look at flights within a certain range and help you find the cheapest option.

2. We make money off of commissions but always guarantee that we're giving you the lowest available online rate (which is much more transparency than most travel agencies offer). Re: 3., that's how we make our margin and offer Carry to individuals for free--there are additional discounts available to travel agents that aren't available through Google Flights/Kayak etc.

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

#100

Post by tejasmanohar »

kashishg wrote: post #71
mmckelvy wrote: post #65

> We found that no one actually wants to use these tools— they just have to, and that the only people who were satisfied with the state of things were folks who had assistants they could offload the work onto. I suspect this is the case with a lot of business / enterprise software. Congrats on the launch. I think this space (software assisted services that rely on Slack / SMS / email) is a promising one. Best of luck…

I wonder why enterprise tools end up this way, is it because the buyer (CFO/procurement) is different from the end user (employees)?

That and also distribution. One of the hardest part of breaking into enterprise is selling, and once big companies have a sales motion in place and locked-in customers (both in data on their platform and internal processes), penetrating crappier products into the market is increasingly easier so the quality bar goes down to some extent.
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