todsul

CEO of Flightfox here. We still absolutely use both technology and humans (that will always underpin our value prop), but we moved from the previous competitive crowdsourced model to a one-on-one model. The short story is that travel search benefits more from depth rather than breadth (at least at the expert level). With multiple travel hackers working at once, they can only invest $fee/n-hackers worth of time and there is a ton of overlap. With a single hacker, they receive all of the $fee and can dig deeper and deeper to uncover better results. The crowdsourced approach was definitely more interesting to consumers, but the results were inferior, especially on the customer service side. Now, we’re actually transitioning behind the scenes from a one-on-one to a collaborative model, which is bringing us new benefits, but requires more systemization.

Today, we target corporate travel, but we still work with individuals; you just need to click the Get Started button and we ask if you’re an individual after that. This pivot of sorts came from the fact we can deliver significantly more value to corporate customers (more customer value = more conversions, retention, referrals = better business & happier team). Consumer travelers typically only want the lowest price. If their “price to beat” is on a low-cost-carrier, we can rarely help. That becomes a dissatisfied customer despite us explaining “we’re here to help with your next trip”. Corporate travelers have greater requirements such as convenience, comfort, miles, hotels, perks, expertise, emergency response, off-site planning, large groups… the list goes on. With consumer travel, we were using a small subset of our tech and expertise; with corporate travel, we use everything and constantly need to expand our tech and expertise.

Hope that explains everything. Happy to answer any specifics about finding travel deals, since that’s what we do every day for 1000s of customers.

There are certainly downsides to living in Finland, but you picked a poor comparison in taxes. Taxes in the US are NOT low. Income tax is only one of many taxes in the US. In some states/cities, your property tax can exceed income tax. My state has extremely high taxes on cars too. It all adds up to a lot of money and a relatively high total tax rate. I wouldn't be surprised it a significant number of people in the US have a higher total tax rate than the Finnish average. Of course you can choose low-tax states, but the US as a whole certainly isn't some sort of tax haven.

I'm a paying customer of Trustle, for a few months now, and absolutely love the service. I don't know the founders, I just work with one coach and couldn't recommend her highly enough. I proselytize to friends and family, but they never seem to understand and just give me blank stares as I explain how much she helps. Maybe I do a poor job pitching, but I don't think that's it.

If I had to guess, I think most people prefer to be reactive, not just with children, but in every facet of life. Whereas other people (especially on HN) are instinctively proactive and are always looking for new ways to invest in the future. The reactive people don't seem to understand why I need the help of a professional when my infant child seems calm and grounded. Proactive people understand immediately; they get that it's an investment.

When I signed up, I didn't even know what Trustle was planning to offer. They said they do "parent coaching". Huh? I just knew for $x/month if I could bounce ideas off a professional it would be more than worth it. Fast forward a few weeks and I quickly learned to trust my coach's advice more than any pediatrician, day care worker or family member. The reasons are long and detailed, but suffice to say I'm a serious fan.

I've spoken to my coach a couple of times about tough situations, like sleep problems (she was impossibly helpful), but mostly I see value in our discussions about learning, discipline, philosophy, independence, etc. I've come to love her pragmatic, balanced and evidenced-based approach.

We liked Berlin because it is cheap, has good diversity (I know, Boulder is one of the least diverse places on the planet in contrast), has lots of recent history to explore, public transport is good, a culture that's interesting to us, a decent amount of English spoken, tech scene, startup scene, lots of great places to visit only a short flight away (keep in mind we're from Australia), and most of all it just felt right the two separate times we lived there.

What ended up driving us away was the red tape running a startup in Germany and dealing with taxes, etc. Normally we wouldn't let this deter us, but we had a shortlist of other places we liked just as much.

After a few years we started valuing friendships more and more. I don't have any solid tips other than making it a genuine priority and treat it like an ongoing project. Learn how to make contact, get better at approaching strangers, etc. That said, it is nice to eventually settle down and build longer lasting friendships, though those you build on travels don't have to disappear if you keep in touch and revisit each other. I think I've learned it's better to have a larger and wider variety of friends even if some are distant than a smaller homogenous group of friends.

This is a favorite topic of mine. My wife and I spent about 10 years living on five continents and traveling extensively though six (~50 countries) looking for the perfect place to live. We define "living somewhere" as renting a home, connecting the utilities and exhausting our visa. Long story short, we decided to settle in Boulder, CO (USA).

It's worth mentioning we're pretty independent, probably to a fault, and have no interest in living near family, despite having children (sorry fam).

We've lived in the following places: Bay Area, USA (twice); Berlin, Germany (twice); Montreal, Canada (twice); Chiang Mai, Thailand (twice); Sydney, Australia; Bangalore, India; Cusco, Peru; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and a handful of other places for shorter periods.

We first settled on Montreal, but on our second visit, we decided to try somewhere else. The same happened with Berlin and it's still my wife's favorite city to visit. Boulder was just a major step above the rest for us personally: friendly people, very active lifestyle, some tech/startup scene, sunny weather, mountains, etc. We've been here three years now, which is our record for staying anywhere, and we've never once thought about anywhere else.

If anyone is at the beginning of a similar journey and search, get in touch.

If you get a chance, try the new(ish) A350.

The 787 is quieter than the A380 from the outside (fewer engines, less thrust), but a little louder on the inside (thinner fuselage, engines closer to fuselage).

The A350 is the best of both worlds and is on par (or slightly quieter) than the A380 on the inside.

For the best experience, try the A350 on Singapore or Qatar in business class.

Disclaimer: I work at flightfox.com.

What I think you’re asking for already exists. You didn’t mention price, which makes a big difference, but price aside, route data is available in both raw and GUI form. Check out flightconnections.com for a GUI tool.

Price is what consumers care about and without a perfectly efficient (or regulated or monopolized) market, there will never be a single source of all prices for all routes. This doesn’t exist for food, clothing or many genuine commodities.

Someone else replied with a link to ITAs white-paper that discusses the difficulty of the problem you’ve described. But, that only considers cash flights; what about fast trains, frequent flier miles, buying and using points, credit card bonuses, best rate guarantees, combining low cost-carriers, charter airlines, cargo flights, consolidator deals, local deals, company benefits, etc.

It’s a huge market that feels like it should be commoditized but is actually quite differentiated with significant barriers to entry.

My personal experience at Flightfox is overseeing the booking of travel for more than 60,000 people using travel websites rather than traditional GDSs (Global Distribution Systems - what travel agencies and online travel agents use). Our team has used most of the websites mentioned here and never relies on just one.

Most coders here could build a simple tool to make their searches much more effective and efficient:

  * Accept date/route/class input, like “10SEP DEN-FRA first”
  * Open tabs to 5-10 of the best and most varied travel websites
  * Skim the results and book

If I had to choose 5 flight websites for such a tool: Kayak, Google, Orbitz, Skyscanner and Momondo.

Given this, you may wonder what’s the point of Flightfox. We started with a pure focus on travel hacks (much more advanced than searching 5 OTAs), but we now do our best work managing travel for businesses. For consumers, we can only use one skill: saving money. For businesses, we can become their entire travel department and put everything we know into practice. Not just saving many $1000s/month, but helping with finance strategy, loyalty programs, upgrades, 24/7 emergency support, super-cheap business/first, etc.

@jkaljundi, Do you work out of Garage48? My co-founder and I just landed in Tallinn, literally 30 minutes ago. We flew from Canada to Helsinki and caught the ferry across to Estonia.

We came here for a brief change of scenery and because we've heard so many great things about doing business here. Many of our suppliers are in the area too. We'll drop by Garage48 tomorrow and see if there are any short-term spots.

Interested in a coffee sometime this week? We plan to be here for 1-2 weeks. My email is in profile.

This is Matrix: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/

Most of the flight hackers use Matrix because you can run more powerful searches. If you click "Advanced Routing Code" then type in one of those lines, then add origins and destinations served by that airline, you'll get a list of prices.

If people want, I can also post a full list of the origins and destinations per airline here.

If you use Matrix, here are the advance routing codes to find flights only in these airlines' best business class cabins:

    o:qr+ / aircraft t:787
    o:wy+ / aircraft t:330
    o:sq+ / aircraft t:77w
    o:vs+ / aircraft t:330
    o:cx+ / aircraft t:343 t:744
    o:sq+ / aircraft t:380 t:773 t:77e
    o:vs+ / aircraft t:340 t:744
    o:ek+ / aircraft t:380 t:77w t:77l
    o:qf+ / aircraft t:380
    o:qr+ / aircraft t:77L t:77W
    o:nz+ / aircraft t:787 t:77e t:773 t:744
    o:ey+ / aircraft t:77w t:340 t:330
    o:jl+ / aircraft t:77w t:76w
    o:br+ / aircraft t:77n
    o:cx+ / aircraft t:77g t:77h t:77w t:330
    o:tk+ / aircraft t:77w
    o:oz+ / aircraft t:772 t:777
    o:nh+ / aircraft t:787 t:77w
    o:9w+ / aircraft t:77w t:332
    o:ac+ / aircraft t:787 t:333 t:77l t:763
    o:tg+ / aircraft t:380 t:77w
    o:ke+ / aircraft t:380 t:388
    o:os+ / aircraft t:763 t:767
    o:hu+ / aircraft t:787 t:330
    o:ba+ / aircraft t:380 t:787 t:777 t:747
    o:lx+ / aircraft t:333 t:340 t:343
    o:lh+ / aircraft t:748 t:74h
    o:mh+ / aircraft t:380
    o:aa+ / aircraft t:77w t:763
    o:ca+ / aircraft t:77w
    o:ua+ / aircraft t:788

Hi mtrimpe, we measure NPS for exactly this reason, to find out how well we're delivering exceptional value and a memorable experience. The NPS absolutely does take dissatisfied customers into account. Dissatisfied customers are some of the quickest to rate :)

In your specific case, it's likely you chose the option for the experts to do everything they can to help you save. The challenge of our business is that some people want more trickery, then some like you want less trickery. It's our job to segment customers early, understand what each wants, then provide the right result. We've made a lot of improvement with this.

For example, you mentioned a few things that don't exist anymore:

   - We do not have contests
   - We do not have winners
   - Experts also do support

That does sound like a nice balance, but there's also value in having a single number. We noticed this going to our current two question system.

For example, with only one question, you can get anyone to rate at any time with a single click of a link (e.g. in an email). As soon as you have more than one question, customers have to visit a form with multiple fields and click a submit button.

This may not sound like a big deal, but it is. Also, having a single, easy to understand number helps us engrain the NPS in everything we do. Everyone on our team knows our NPS. Our experts even have their own NPS. They can recite each others' most recent scores. It's not easy to get an obscure metric like NPS engrained into everything like that.

That said, I do particularly like the question about repeat custom. We can measure it from our data, but intent to repeat sounds interesting.

It's interesting you mention this because a lot of typical SaaS metrics don't apply to us. Or at least they're not primary concerns. In many cases we try to minimize user engagement. Engagement is time and time is money.

Similarly, when we talk about NPS to SaaS founders, they seem less interested (for good reasons I imagine). But NPS still does seem quite universal.

Hi Graeme, we're in Le Plateau too, moved here from SF (previously Berlin and Sydney).

We have a nice office on Blvd Saint Laurent looking directly out onto Mont Royal: high ceilings, 11 inch MBAs, 27in screens, Ikea trestle tables, etc. It's not a home office per se, but home for us nonetheless.

You should drop by if you ever walk past. We're just above Code Black Coffee.

Hi prawn, rightly or wrongly, we live by the "launch fast" maxim. Sure we had some test data, but a change this big was always going to be a huge leap of faith. So we needed to get it out to confirm previous findings before worrying too much about conversions.

On that note, the risk wasn't just a different format but everything that goes with real-time communications. Not just web sockets or whatever tech, but a real-time human marketplace. The previous format afforded us a lot of luxuries with regard to resource planning and "load balancing". Now with real-time, it's quite tricky. I suspect this is a challenge for Uber too.

hi fibbery, we made this change exactly for this reason: so customers would get great results more of the time. With the new format, not only do you get one of the best experts, but that expert can spend more time just on you. That last part is key.

This idea that "one person digging deeper" is better than "more people competing" first came to us at an in-office hackathon (flight hacking, not software hacking). We noticed with more "iterations", experts could hack even the most mundane trips. In this particular example, they got NYC<->Berlin (round-trip) for about $400 with rigid dates. The rigid dates part is key because it simulates the real world (we've seen < $300 with flex).

Once we worked closer with some of our experts, we realized the top ones are miles more analytical. They either write their own software or compile huge spreadsheets of their findings.

So this change of format was to put you in touch with one of them, not with someone who does this on the side. We wish we could have created a new income stream for the average person, but to ensure customer value, we had to go this way.

Hi nigerian, apologies for the confusing pricing, we're working on that now. Anything more than one destination is multi-city. So your first example is just international, but the second eg is multi. Your second itinerary should be perfect for our guys.

Hey CHX, apologies for the blunder with the emails. It was an honest mistake of not BCC'ing and certainly not deliberate. As you saw, a handful of people replied to the whole group and talked about cloning our product, which wasn't really in our interests. We don't get worried about that stuff, we were just a little sad we messed up for you guys.

Hi Ryan, segmenting is our greatest challenge and (planned improvements aside) your experience was intended. It's the old startup adage: better to have 1,000 customers who love you than 1,000,000 who don't care.

What you're suggesting is what we call "gambling against Kayak". That's not our target market because it's not the market we can help most. We often say internally, it's not whether we can possibly help a customer, but whether we can likely help them.

Our idea to create "products" was to help segment customers into those we can help most. For example, complex trips, flying premium, using frequent flyer miles, traveling with pets, euro-city hops, etc. These are the people we can "likely" make happy and will help us grow to then target a wider audience.

I think this is spot on. We used to underplay the experience issue, but then we realized a poor user experience often hinders access to the best savings.

What made this worse was the animosity between customers and experts. It was expected between competing experts, but the concept of the "award" (and by necessity "switching award") caused tension in all directions. We still had many great results, but not to the level needed to build a great business. The difference with the current system is night and day. Everyone is on the same side; it's even a little erie since we're so used to the previous animosity.

hi emhart, interesting question. The contest format was certainly novel and helped garner a lot of early attention from press. So there's that. But I think you may be right that the contests helped us a) find experts, but also b) learn what was possible.

That somewhat fits with the idea that crowdsourcing is best when you have less info. Once you have more info, then (at least we think) it's best to work with fewer specialists. Although this is mostly referring to the customer, maybe we can apply the thinking to our product lifecycle too.

Hi encoderer, we were saying the same thing before testing this format.

However, unlike travel agents, our guys are genuine flight experts. If you travel wide, fly a lot, or use miles, you'll understand why this matters.

Behind the scenes, it's all about commissions. Agents work on commissions and most flights don't pay commissions. So it makes little sense for agents to spend hours on your flights.

This manifests in the wide skill gap between (most) agents and our experts. Most agents won't save you a cent, they'll just be there for good service. But our guys get insane deals you won't find anywhere else. Often they involve shorter flights with fewer stops too.

Hi brett, we're working madly on this now. We built the new version from scratch (very little in common), so we're a few-week-old startup all over again.

We can imagine these products being their own page with details, testimonials, examples, etc. Something like http://elto.com, whereas our current page is more like the 99-designs one.

Just wanted to mention, "clarifying" our products/pricing is priority #1.

Hi kingnight, our experts will refund you if they can't help or you're not happy.

In the old system, there was always a lot of tension when we'd refund customers, because the experts would have already spent a lot of time. But in the new system, we made it so we (admin) can't actually refund you, only the experts can. This has worked wonders because they now use refunding as a form of segmentation. Often they'll refund after 30 seconds if it's clear they can't help, which is a far cry from the amount of effort they'd previous expend before a refund.

Hi Aloha, thanks for the feedback. We'll try to make this more obvious asap.

To explain, our pricing is "from" $29. That's for the simplest trip. It goes up with complexity because the experts must work harder. This doesn't include the fare, this is the fee for consulting.

As you can imagine, this doesn't make sense for short flights for say $100. But our experts really start to work wonders on trips over $300-500. For multi-continent or business class, the savings often get into the $1000s.

If you click on each product, you'll see tweets from real customers talking about different results.

hi coco,

It's definitely better for longer trips, but NYC-Paris is a good one for us because I know our experts have a few tricks up their sleeves with this route.

I often fly Montreal-SF so can also comment on NYC-SF. If you just want the cheapest economy flight AND you have checked bags, no, don't use Flightfox. However, if you have carry-on, then our experts can help.

It gets much more interesting if you want to fly this route in business. I've done it a few times in business for about economy prices (usually a little less). It involves a few little tricks and a slightly complex booking, but for those who do it often, it can reduce the pain of 12 hours in econ. I usually only go to SF for a day or two, so being more relaxed has a noticeable affect on my time there and proceeding. It's not always available, but I'm usually pretty flexible.

Hey aridiculous, we really wanted the economics of the competitive format to be fair. We got to the point where our experienced experts were winning 30-50%, so for them it wasn't so bad. Customers sometimes complained about "only" getting 2 or 3 experts, but we quickly realized it was better for everyone, including the customer.

It's a bit like being a software consultant. Most clients don't pay enough for you to do your absolute best work. That's what happened in the contest format. The best experts didn't make enough to do their best work. With the current format, we see them really sinking their teeth into big trips and having fun.

Thanks nlh. First, thanks for the feedback on the pricing. We're talking about the miles product right now and will update it very soon. The high price was to account for most miles trips being fairly complex, but we'll segment a little more and offer you much better pricing.

UPDATE: just spoke to the experts and made it $69 for now. We'll change the pricing to be +$19 to use miles, but that'll take a little time. Reason it's more is that the experts have a few tricks that take considerable time.

Great to hear you received value with the competitive format. We still have the top 0.3% of experts from the previous system, they just get paid more and can spend a lot more time on your trip now. But we'll keep analyzing and make sure it's working well.

I thought so too. Certainly not the technical breadth of YC, but on par in terms of uniqueness of ideas, founder quality and traction. I thought our YC batch was a force to be reckoned with, but wow, this year's FonderFuel batch was killer.