CardMunch CEO uses Flightfox for 29-Country Startup Trip | Hacker News Reader

CardMunch CEO uses Flightfox for 29-Country Startup Trip

flightfox.com

85 pointstodsul31 comments

Flightfox is neat, but the thing that wasn't super clear and I found out later, after paying a finder's fee, is that you have to go through hoops to book your tickets.

This isn't just -- they put it together and you click a button and suddenly you have your tickets.

This is "now you have to spend hours on the phone, attempting to book these tickets, and you don't have enough information to really do it -- nor enough confidence to pull it off".

So I love Flightfox and I hope they succeed, but I'm hoping to save time -- and Flightfox definitely doesn't. It saves you money at the cost of adding a lot of extra time to your booking process, but that's not a tradeoff that is apparent from the start, IMO.

Thanks for the feedback, we're looking into booking options now so that you don't have spend time trying to book yourself.

For others it has been an easy process to book as we have some verified travel agents on board. Other times when your trip is super complex, you may have to book on different websites. We're definitely aware that it's a friction point though so we're trying to fix it asap.

I wasn't aware of/able to find the travel agents, so I paid the finder's fee but never actually booked tickets. It was too intimidating for me and I was too worried about ending up with half of the tickets and the other half becoming unavailable and ending up holding expensive partials.

Anyway, I'd be happy to pay for someone to handle it -- I'd even pay going rates -- but the whole process of me having to take the itinerary to someone else (that I have to find via Yelp or some other vehicle) or spend time on the phone with a couple of airlines is just too much for me. I'm super busy, and my expertise lies in tech -- not travel. :(

In general when you book flights you don't have to pay for a day or two. This is in part to solve the problem you mention.

we're looking into booking options now so that you don't have spend time trying to book yourself

This is the pain point which has prevented me from recommending flightfox to anyone else yet: When I tried it, I was pointed towards orbitz for flights which it turned out that they were advertising but (after I provided my credit card details) they didn't actually have. I'm still glad that I used flightfox, because the expert advice I got saved me $300 by pointing out that returning to Canada from Germany was much cheaper than returning from Austria -- but the booking instructions were completely useless.

If you can add a "book via flightfox" mechanism which guarantees that the flights actually exist, I'll tell everybody I know to use flightfox every time they travel.

Bowei here.

I just want to give a huge shoutout to FlightFox co-founder Lauren. She's been absolutely amazing to work with.

Early stage startups, please take note. This is how you get loyal first customers. You treat people like VIP and make sure they're taken care of.

Thanks Lauren!

hey thats awesome! I've started following your journey via your LinkedIn blog. You also had a really good slide deck on China ecosystem. 29 country trip - that's epic.

Its a great use case for Flightfox. My gut feeling at the moment is that its better for more complicated trips - multi-hop or where there is some kind of complexity like carrying a surfboard or if you have several kids, etc...

Nice work Lauren & Todd - from a fellow aussie!

Yep that is correct. For simple trips you can just use Kayak, but as soon as you start to deal with multi-hop, points purchase and all sort of crazy tricks, you need a service like FlightFox.

Also anything that's not your normal trip. I.e. travelling with pets or surfboards, help using frequent flyer miles, help getting frequent flyer status, or just going to a new country that you've never been before.

"Help me fly with my pet in cabin" would be a great service -- only some airlines do it, and they have weird rules. International even harder due to quarantine rules. (i.e. if I want to go to Hawaii with a cat in cabin, I'd have to charter, since I think the last airline doing cabin pets to Hawaii, Alaska, stopped on that route in 2009).

The thing that bothers me here is the same as with 99Designs. You pay an award fee but that only goes to the winner, right?

After using 99Designs a couple of times, I'm happy with the results, but probably won't use such a system again; it just feels a bit exploitative. I know, people elect to enroll in the system and compete so it's "fair" that way, but it just feels sorta icky to know I had X people spending so much time on my project and they get no compensation at all.

Maybe on FlightFox trips are usually shorter, easier, and less money, so it's not as bad - is that the case?

In my case on Flightfox, the person was clearly just using some software. The time investment was probably minutes.

The value for me is that this person knows all of the rules -- cheap legs, good days to fly, how to get X or Y, fare codes, etc. Plus they have the underlying software that powers ticket searching, they don't have to use ridiculously terrible web portals like us normal folk.

In my case, Flightfox took what was a simple round trip "I am flying to Sydney for a conference" for $2400 and turned it into:

* Fly to Sydney * Return via Manila, stop for a week * Return via Hong Kong, stop for a few days * Return to San Francisco

They teased out my layovers into full-fledged stops, and brought the total cost down to $2100. They found a way to get way more value out of this trip than I would have otherwise.

Of course -- then they gave me a pile of fare codes and letters and said "call the airline, good luck!" I haven't actually booked the tickets. :(

Curious: given that you saved about $300 despite all the extra time abroad, aren't you just making up for it by spending more on accommodations and food?

I mean, I'd do it in a heartbeat, but you aren't saving that much more, I gather. If at all.

Absolutely, yes. In my case I was annoyed that my round trip from Orbitz took me through Hong Kong for 3 hours, so I went to Flightfox to see if I could make it 3 days. They said yes -- AND made the flight cheaper!

The other option was to try to book multiple round trips or a multi-city with Orbitz/Expedia/etc and in my case it was driving the cost way up. I wasn't happy with the result, and couldn't get the price sub-$3500 to do what I want -- and then I would have had to pay food and accomodations on top of the higher price.

Hi Michael,

We have a lot planned to reduce the amount of unpaid work. Think of getting quotes from say a plumber. A handful may offer free quotes and then you choose one to complete the work. The initial quote does take some effort, but only a fraction of the total effort.

We're working towards this "free quote" model. There will always be a significant amount of work required upfront, but if we can increase value more and more on the backend, the upfront work will reduce in comparison and get closer to, for example, a plumber's "free quote".

Also, as someone else suggested, the experts tend to find flights much quicker than the rest of us. Sometimes it's software, and sometimes it's just from doing it so often.

How is this similar to getting a quote? The flightfox agent has done all the work either he/she wins or not. This is nothing like plumber quotes.

Pretty interesting service! I'm always surprised that human experts can challenge algorithms in setting up travel itineraries. I wonder how much time an average expert spends putting these proposals together?

From my quick survey, it took them between 20-30 hours of work to build my itineraries for me.

So by a rough estimate, I saved hundreds of hours by running this contest rather than doing everything myself.

Pretty amazing stuff, I think I will make Tim Ferris proud.

Interesting, may I ask how much did you pay out as the finders fee?

I see lots of promise in these types of crowd sourced activities and I'd like to compare the cost to self described "experts" who do this type of trip planning as a side business.

Also I'm curious did you consider a RTW ticket?

Here's a link to the post Bowei wrote when we started the contest which lists the prizes: http://flightfox.com/blog/world-startup-report

Finders fee was $500, but I added a few bonus prizes for fun you can read about it here: http://flightfox.com/contest/36810

Yes, I considered doing a RTW ticket. It was way more expensive ($20k min vs. $7500 cheapest itinerary from the experts). The price differences were astonishing.

Seems reasonable.

Flight hacks and getting the most out of my frequent flyer miles is somewhat of a hobby of mine, I'd bet there is a high correlation between flightfox experts and people on flyertalk.com

Interesting post and a very interesting concept of FlightFox! I think it would do well, especially if you're flying to several places. However, I wonder if I would save much if I was just doing a simple round trip flight.....

I agree with flights that involve multiple places. But there are also lots of RTW trip options. I've done a RTW trip myself with 5 destinations, and even then the options were a bit mind-boggling.

It was my first RTW trip so I spent a few hours looking up different RTW tickets, as well as figuring out what destinations to go to, how many stops were available, etc.. I ended up researching online, and then going to see a travel agent twice. I even brought an atlas with me the second time to see the agent! I also spoke to a couple of friends that have done RTW trips to get their perspective. Then you have to consider frequent flyer miles and what destinations, seasonality etc...

We're focusing on anything international and/or complex. Online travel sites like Kayak and Hipmunk have already done a good job for simple and domestic travel.

Is there a more complete service, like a travel agent, to help book an entire trip? e.x. I want to go to a beach in country A, B, or C, on X dates, I prefer Y type of hotel/resort, my budget is $Z, what are my options?

So far I've been using a combination of TripAdvisor, Hipmunk, etc, but it's still really painful.

I looked into using an old school travel agent, but it seems like they work on commission from the hotel, which doesn't really align incentives. I like Flightfox's model where the fee is simply based on complexity.

It's definitely in the pipeline for us, but our most redeeming feature (not being restricted by traditional search APIs) is also the thing that makes automated bookings the most difficult. But we have a solution; stay tuned.

I wish they'd partner with a travel agent (or become a travel agency themselves) to issue the actual tickets. If they could do that, I'd be a lot more interested in using the service.

I just similarly booked a round the world honeymoon ticket. I'd consider myself pretty good at scheduling domestic and international travel, and I'm an American-Airlines life-time platinum member. That said, the experts really impressed me and were able to find me business class flights for the entire trip for 7k a head. Not bad.

I think the cheapest was $7,500 for economy, and business class for $16,000.

That is still amazing consider when I book business class flights on my own, it's usually $3-4k per round trip.

Love this.

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