
Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack - tejasmanohar
Hey HN! We&#x27;re Tejas and Kashish, co-founders of Carry (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carry.travel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carry.travel</a>).<p>Carry is your executive assistant for travel. Just message us (i.e. &quot;I need to be in Boston for a meeting at 2pm on July 1st&quot;), and we&#x27;ll get everything done for you— flights, trains, cars, hotels, Airbnbs... you name it. Carry is not a chat bot— we function like a traditional agency with in-house travel agents, but unlike traditional travel agencies that use terminals (similar to Bloomberg in Finance) or manually search websites like Expedia, we&#x27;re building in-house tools to make our agents&#x27; jobs easier and help them work faster. Imagine automatically going from a customer message (&quot;I need to be in Boston Tuesday for a 10am meeting and return for a 9am meeting Friday&quot;) to parsed trip requirements (from: SFO, to: BOS, arrive by: 10am, return by: 9am) that are then merged with your calendar and user preferences to search all data sources. Our agents then interpret the results and propose options to the user. Over time, we want to add more automation and intelligence using each user interaction as training data (but first we need volume... lol).<p>We built Carry because we hate booking travel— it&#x27;s just way too time-consuming and inefficient. It&#x27;s tedious to check multiple sites (Skiplagged, Google Flights, Skyscanner, etc.) before finding the cheapest price, filling out all of the airline information, and then, searching for a place to stay. And, even when you have all the information, choice paralysis prevails.<p>9 months ago, we set out to build a chat bot because we asked ourselves &quot;Why can&#x27;t Siri book travel?&quot; Working backwards, we quickly realized why bots don&#x27;t work— they&#x27;re robotic, formulaic, and take lots of back and forth to convey what you want. We also realized that consumers don&#x27;t know what they want, which makes it really hard to choose travel options for them. With these learnings in mind, we looked to corporate travel agencies for inspiration.<p>It turns out 70% of corporate travel is booked without any tool or agency— employees book their own travel and expense it. The other 30% uses tools at two ends of the spectrum— 1 old school travel agencies (think phone calls) 2) new-age corporate travel portals (imagine a clunky, worse Google Flights). 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.<p>Thus, we decided we&#x27;d create an assistant for everyone. Carry is the first travel tool built for employees-first. Employees get all the points, all the options, and the ability to save time an assistant provides. So far, we&#x27;ve been working with corporations directly, but today, we&#x27;re doing a soft launch of Carry for individuals with a waitlist at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carry.travel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carry.travel</a>. That said, for the HN community, just email me (tejas [at] carry [dot] travel) if you want to start using us for work immediately.<p>If you travel frequently (or even if you don&#x27;t!), we&#x27;d love to hear about the inefficiencies and pain points you&#x27;ve experienced while traveling that you wish a product like Carry could solve. We want to hear your feedback on the product and work with you all to develop features to save even more time.
======
tejasmanohar
Hi HN! We've been impressed with the response here. Y'all must love travel.

If you use Slack and want to get started using Carry for your team, we've
created a temporary link while we're on the front page to go ahead and install
Carry. Here's the flow:

\- Go to [https://carry.travel/hnpromo](https://carry.travel/hnpromo)

\- Select your team's workspace in the top right

\- For "Post to", select "Slackbot" or anything (this step is annoying,
sorry-- we'll fix)

\- Click "Install" (You may have to ask an administrator depending on your
settings)

\- Send a _direct message_ to @Carry on Slack saying anything

If your team uses another platform or wants to get in touch, schedule a demo
(under the request access button,
[https://carry.travel/](https://carry.travel/)) or email tejas [at] carry
[dot] travel, and we'll be in touch.

~~~
joshi4
Hi ! Congrats on the launch ! If anyone finds it helpful, I've created a guide
with screenshots for how to signup for carry: [https://flowshare.io/flow/how-
to-signup-for-carry-for-hacker...](https://flowshare.io/flow/how-to-signup-
for-carry-for-hackernews)

------
duxup
"70% of corporate travel is booked without any tool or agency"

That always bothered me. We used this middle man agency ... there was no
savings, I still just booked it myself for the most part. I just had to use
their crappy site.

I did not understand the point of that, but man it was policy.

~~~
kenrose
At my previous company, I was once told the reason was integration with their
accounting systems and enforcement / guidance around travel policy. e.g.,
don’t spend more than $X / night at a hotel in a certain city.

Definitely seemed like these middleman agencies were a solution to a problem
faced by the finance team.

~~~
duxup
Yeah I suspect that was it.

Oddly, I don't think a lot of this stuff really accounts for the complexities
in air travel.

Like I literally couldn't rent certain types of cars ... and the no cars....
all in the name of saving money.

But I could take a taxi everywhere for 150% of the cost of car rental (at
least) because you still had to get from A to B.

The end result was "don't check that box!" but any other box was ok even if it
did the same thing or worse.

~~~
Rebelgecko
I recently had a fun experience with something called the "Fly America Act", a
law which says that when the US government is paying for your travel you have
to fly on a US flagged airline.

For my trip, the flight would've been about 6 hours (direct!) and cost $600 on
a foreign airline. On the cheapest US carrier, the flight was about $850 and
took 10 hours due to a layover. When you take hourly rates into account, it
easily cost the government an extra $1000 for me to travel on the US airline.

I wish I could've taken the direct foreign flight and just sent United a check
for $250. Would've been a win/win for everyone— the American airline gets its
corporate welfare without any of the costs they incur when someone actually
gets on their plane, and I wouldn't have had to waste 4 hours of my life each
way sitting in an airport to satisfy a dumb law.

~~~
nrf1
The Fly America Act is pork for the Airline industry; they aren't intended to
save the taxpayer money. Exactly the opposite.

I've even seen _identical_ itineraries -- one under a US flag carrier and the
other under a foreign flag -- with a mid-3-figure price difference. The
airlines know what they are doing.

Call your congresspeople.

------
mmckelvy
> 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!

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

~~~
austhrow743
I was in b2b software sales until recently. I've been on the other side of the
table when the buyer will be an end user, or when they have end users they're
placing trust in and actually listening to.

Imo the issue is more just that ease of use is a hard sell. Buyers, including
end users, want features. Lots of them. They want to be able to do everything
they could ever potentially think to do within your software, doesn't matter
if some of those tasks are once a month/year items for which perfectly good
solutions already exist and for which there's no real gain from having it
within this solution. It's what they ask about, what they want to talk about,
what they test for, what I get feedback on from them when I win/lose the sale.

They might want ease of use in 6 months when they're actually using the thing
and not give two hoots about most of the things they were certain were
necessary earlier, but that's irrelevant. They didn't want it when it
mattered. Now they're locked in. In terms of contract but also in terms of
what their processes are designed for, what their staff are trained to use,
what their other tools integrate with; and there's no guarantee or even reason
to believe that an alternative wont be just as bad.

So there's tons of pressure on b2b software providers to do a lot of things
but very little to do any of it well.

~~~
namdnay
This is exactly it. You don’t lose an RFP if your product sucks. You lose an
RFP if you say that it doesn’t match one of the 700 outrageous requirements

------
tekacs
This reminds me of Magic ([https://magic.gd](https://magic.gd)) or Fin (now
defunct, [https://fin.com](https://fin.com) \- a closer match, with a similar
if broader mission).

Hopefully the narrower scope will allow you to escape the issues that Fin ran
into, trying to bolster their team. :)

Magic has fixed pricing for some tasks, including travel booking I believe -
so hopefully Carry is (or becomes) either less expensive or higher quality.

~~~
chrisfrantz
Must have missed Fin shutting down. Any info on why they closed up?

~~~
tekacs
This obliquely-named blog post has the context:

[https://www.fin.com/posts/fins-plan-
for-2019/](https://www.fin.com/posts/fins-plan-for-2019/)

------
koolba
How much does this cost? I don't see any pricing information.

> We book travel on your personal card so you can get all the points.

Do you bill the charges directly to the customer's card or do they get billed
by you and then you separately purchase the flight/hotel/etc?

Curious how that works regarding card data storage as you'd need likely need
the full card number, expiration, and CVV to run each charge and it can't just
be hash or payment token if you're passing it on to a third party for the full
booking.

~~~
tejasmanohar
Great questions :-)

> How much does this cost? I don't see any pricing information.

Carry is free for individuals and small teams. We don't charge for just
booking travel, but we do have upgrades available for larger teams (admin
panels, constraints, etc.). What are you interested in using Carry for? Seems
like you work at a large company, feel free to email me at tejas [at] carry
[dot] travel.

> Do you bill the charges directly to the customer's card or do they get
> billed by you and then you separately purchase the flight/hotel/etc?

At the moment, most of our transactions are done the latter way (get billed by
airline/hotel/etc and then separately charge the customer), but we're looking
into some ways to avoid this, particularly \- Tokenization: Spreedly/TokenX \-
Using something like VGS,
[https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/)

Let us know if you have thoughts here! Payments are a very interesting topic

~~~
ricksebak
> At the moment, most of our transactions are done the latter way (get billed
> by airline/hotel/etc and then separately charge the customer)

One concern that comes to mind about this is if the credit card companies
would consider this purchase as "travel". Like where Chase Sapphire Reserve
gives triple points for travel purchases, and also has a $300 travel credit,
but either of those things would only work if Chase considers your service as
"travel", rather than "online service" or whatever.

You may have already worked this out and gotten it classified as travel, and
if so it would just be a nice thing to put on a FAQ or whatever.

~~~
ctphipps
Same for credit cards that offer travel insurance as long as the
flights/rental cars etc. are booked through them. They'd most likely need to
see the charge from the airline in order for the coverage to be effective.

~~~
tejasmanohar
Good point. Travel Point multipliers can be achieved via setting a merchant
code (MCC) of travel on charges (stripe, for example, supports this.

The trip insurance card benefit— I don’t think we can satisfy right now. We’re
exploring ways to use the user’s own CC with the end vendor (eg airline)
rather than us charging the user separately. “credit card tokenization” should
work here (Spreedly, TokenX) but it’s non trivial due to how many vendors are
in the space

Email me if either of these are stopping you from wanting to use the service,
and we’ll figure out a workaround or let you know when it’s solved!

~~~
namdnay
Normally insurance is still valid in case of intermediaries, your travel
insurance is perfectly valid if you booked through an OLTA. Maybe it’s just a
question of certification?

------
exabrial
Can you have a non-Slack version? Just a page where you put your log in
information and it asks the same thing the slack bot does? It would take like
15m to build this

~~~
tejasmanohar
We have customers using SMS and email as well. We’ll highlight those words on
the site

Maybe we’ll add a web app chat sometime, too. But would SMS satisfy the use
case you’re thinking about? Also, do you not use Slack or do you use it but
not want to use it for travel? If latter, why?

FWIW, maintaining support for more platforms is easy when it’s just text, but
Slack is very powerful / can have rich UIs (eg a book button or a form in a
response).

~~~
nrf1
SMS is great. Please convince my $MegaCorp to use this instead of the god-
awful 90s attempt at flights.google.com they're using right now... god speed!

------
matchbok
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.

~~~
tejasmanohar
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).

------
cptaj
Here's a killer feature everyone wants:

I want to put a date range and get the cheapest plane tickets.

Big range, I want to find the cheapest time of the year to fly and plan my
vacation.

Nobody lets you do this.

~~~
donjoe
Momondo.com does it, Cheaptickets.de as well.

Whenever I talk to my friends from the States I get the feeling no one
compares flight prices. Most of them book with 'their' fav airline of choice
without comparing different options.

~~~
sethhochberg
It depends a lot on how often you fly - I prefer Skyteam partners (ie, Delta
in the US) whenever I can because I fly often enough to have award status with
them, meaning lounge access, priority support, upgrades in-flight, etc... I'm
sure I pay them more raw dollars than I would if I booked my trips on the
absolute cheapest airline in all cases, but the perks make all the difference
between the flight being a chore or a moderately pleasant experience.

I have plenty of friends, though, who don't fly as often as I do and can
therefore chase the cheapest fare. It doesn't matter to them if they get a
flight with an airline they don't have status with, or an airline with no
special perks at all, because they're not on the road often enough to qualify
for those things in the first place. Raw price wins.

Travel is one of the few industries where brand loyalty still has some
tangible perks (albeit decreasing every time airlines revamp their rewards
programs), so especially within the US where pretty much all of the airlines
fly to pretty much all of the major airports, its an approach worth
considering.

------
paulcole
> Imagine automatically going from a customer message ("I need to be in Boston
> Tuesday for a 10am meeting and return for a 9am meeting Friday") to parsed
> trip requirements (from: SFO, to: BOS, arrive by: 10am, return by: 9am)

No offense if this was an off the cuff example, but this is awful parsing. I
don’t need to arrive in Boston by 10am, I need to be at the location of the
meeting by 10am. I don’t need to return by 9am, I need to be at the location
of the meeting at 9am. If your agents are seeing the parsed version, they’re
going to make poor arrangements nearly every time.

------
notananthem
Love to give this a shot if anyone has a referral. Probably my major pain
point is my team booking travel together. We'll put it on a clunky excel file
or sharepoint page, people block out what they think is the travel date,
factory times move and we all have to rebook or just go early/late, etc. Being
able to block reschedule a group of individuals would be cool too, like
grouping these individual accounts for certain types of travel.

~~~
adaorardor
Email me at gnomepomsky [at] gmail.com!

~~~
tejasmanohar
adaorardor is a friend that can share an invite!

But, group work travel is super interesting. Feel free to just email me--
tejas [at] carry [dot] travel directly, and we'd love to chat and see how we
can help, especially if your team has a trip coming soon.

------
namdnay
Interesting... How are you performing the bookings? Are you registered as a
travel agent with GDS access? Or are you going through an other agency?

~~~
kashishg
We're partnered with a travel agency with GDS access. Additionally, we use
various other OTAs that give us the full range of inventory for hotels and
flights.

In general, travel agents that only use GDS don't have access to budget
airlines such as Easyjet or alternative accommodations such as Airbnb or
Sonder.

~~~
namdnay
Ok makes sense. So you’re acting as a TMC but without the TA part? I guess the
difficulty here is incident support: Say I’ve missed a flight and I need to be
rebooked, hotel and taxi notified etc... With a classic TMC I call them on the
24/7 hotline and some agent will do it live for me. In your case the support
line would be you right? Because your travel agency might not have access to
the airbnb reservations etc. But then isn’t it tricky to intermediate the
rebooking discussions between the customer and the agency?

Extra question: how do you manage the non-gds content? Do you ask your travel
agency to add remarks to the PNR, or have you built your own database to track
these “PNR+extra” bookings?

Sorry, lots of questions but it’s a really interesting idea!

~~~
tejasmanohar
We do the TA part, too. We book flights, hotels, Airbnbs, cars, etc. so we can
reschedule everything in incidents, not just one part if customers use us
full-service.

And yeah, we have our own database for everything. GDS is just one way to book
and a "portal to the airlines" for us

------
notafraudster
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 username not my display name, btw, which is a little weird). I said
"Leaving morning, returning afternoon". Again, a lengthy pause. Then, without
giving me a price quote, it said they'd have options for me shortly and asked
me to finish creating an account (birthdate, full name, etc). After a while it
asked me if I meant SFO -> CUN (I'm not really sure why that would be the
presumption).

Is this currently an automated process or am I talking to a human support
agent?

~~~
tejasmanohar
Hey! Thanks for trying Carry and sharing feedback. It's often hard to grok the
perspective of a new customer from one interaction so this is helpful.

First off, >Is this currently an automated process or am I talking to a human
support agent?

You're talking to a human! The human has custom portal/tools/processes to book
travel, but all questions and replies are by consumers.

As per the details / juicy parts, 1) We'll remove or modify the boilerplate
response for first time users within business hours (8am-2am PT). We don't
really need it as we respond within a minute or two max.

2) Generally, we see display names from Slack, but for some reason, we don't
for your user (unusual). Will check on that.

3) RE: The lengthy pauses, sorry about this-- today was a pretty crazy day
with the launch and our agents had a spiky load, but we'll improve here. I
believe the initial response only had a 1 minute gap but after that, things
may have slowed down. Ideally, we automate the initial responses so it's
~instant.

4) The account creation is a first-time user thing. Our agent thought the
booking was high-intent / going to complete (we primarily serve business
travelers) so we asked you to create an account so we have the necessary
details to book while we pull up the options.

Feel free to email me at tejas [at] carry [dot] travel if you have more
feedback or questions! And, we'd love for you to try Carry again next time
you'd like to travel :)

------
Scoundreller
How will you handle itinerary changes by the airline?

I know lots of people regret booking with Expedia or the like when there’s a
change and they can’t deal with the airline directly.

There might be some value in doing EU261 claims and their equivalents on
behalf of businesses. My guess is that nobody pushes the claim when the
employer is paying the bill.

~~~
tejasmanohar
Founder here. Currently, you have to go through us to make changes to the
reservation or respond to airline itinerary changes, but we have an emergency
line 24/7 (think PagerDuty), and we believe we can do a much better job of
dealing with the airlines than individuals (and optionally over chat instead
of phone calls!). There's actually a lot of things you can do to manage
reservations for customers on the backend that are not utilized in sites like
Expedia that travel agents do (eg on this DOS-like terminal for the "GDS", you
can manage reservations in the same backend that the airlines use).

> There might be some value in doing EU261 claims and their equivalents on
> behalf of businesses. My guess is that nobody pushes the claim when the
> employer is paying the bill.

This is a great idea. I actually haven't thought about doing this. I actually
had a super delayed flight back in the day

~~~
Scoundreller
Just to clarify: There are already services for consumers that will take care
of EU261 claims on your behalf so you don't have to force the airline in court
(and possibly you would just contract for them), but, like I said, for a
corporate-paid ticket, I don't think anybody bothers.

------
bzbz
Adding automation to this workflow seems like an exciting problem to solve!

I’m interested in seeing how you end up dealing with inaccuracies that arise
in a almost-safety-critical operation. E.g, in your example, returning at 9
(even ignoring delays) would make the traveler miss their meeting.

~~~
kashishg
You're right, flights/travel is so mission critical that we don't see "AI"
taking over this workflow anytime soon. There will be a real person verifying
every decision for the near and medium-term future. The automation component
helps these real-people make decisions faster (ideal case is 30 seconds or
less once it gets really good)

~~~
sealthedeal
Linking to their Calendar would be interesting so you can know their business
schedule.

~~~
kashishg
Yes! We're working on the calendar integration :) We find that several
business users will omit calendar because of privacy or because they don't
keep them up to date, but power users of GCal would love this I think

------
sealthedeal
This reminds me of that robo company that you could text anything you wanted
to and they would book/figure it out for you. Love that you are honing your
focus in to Slack and Travel. Goodluck!

~~~
erichurkman
Are you talking about Magic [0]? I've used it a few times for rather esoteric
items and had great experiences.

(Both were booking appointments at government agencies with awful reservation
systems that often were overbooked or limited availability — TSA global entry
appointments and DMV appointments. It cost about $30 each time.)

[0] [http://getmagic.com](http://getmagic.com)

~~~
alphagrep12345
Do they continually look for opened DMV slots?

------
avarun
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, and currently the experience is pretty subpar at most
companies as an interviewee.

~~~
tejasmanohar
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.

------
alphagrep12345
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 through you/any authorized
travel agent in general? Or do they also internally use the same websites we
do?

~~~
adaorardor
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.

------
monksy
A lot of this really feels like the people who need that would be better off
with a personal assistant/secretary that remembers the person's needs and
preferences.

~~~
tejasmanohar
That's the point :-)

Dedicated personal assistants are too expensive (or at least, that's the
common belief). Our idea is to use a mix of computers + humans to provide a
personalized experience.

------
atian
I would use this if you had a Bloomberg integration, and maybe if I could
share my itinerary through it. I sit on it all day except for activities to
upkeep my wellbeing.

~~~
tejasmanohar
Founder here.

This is interesting! One of our friends in finance recently suggested this,
too. We don't have access to a Bloomberg terminal, but we wanna look into
this. Do you (or anyone else) know what it takes to ship an integration on the
Bloomberg terminal? Will email you (from your profile) after the HN buzz, too
:)

Also, @HN we're currently on Slack/SMS/email but if you have other platforms
you'd suggest, let us know here. WhatsApp has definitely come up for some of
our friends in India.

~~~
atian
My email isn't working in my profile due to recruiters. I added you on
LinkedIn.

------
toomuchtodo
Is your plan to continue to perform the travel booking directly? Or turn into
a SaaS product (Slack, Teams<-you are here->Travel booking teams or companies)
that any travel booking company can use? I'd love for our corporate travel
provider to have this functionality, but we would never be able to support the
use of a startup for our travel booking functionality.

~~~
kashishg
We've been playing around with the SaaS idea that you described, because there
are 80k+ travel agents in the US and they are underutilized! We eventually
decided that performing the travel booking directly is important because that
way we control the user experience, and our level of service is really the
main value prop right now

We'd actually love to talk to your corporate travel provider and see if a
partnership makes sense! ping me at kashish [at] carry [dot] travel? Otherwise
we can get you started as an individual if your company allows it :)

------
jbob2000
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?

~~~
tejasmanohar
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, in theory, we're competing with Carlson-Wagonlit / Amex Concierge. That
actually hasn't been hard at the smaller / medium size companies interested in
using us (big ones are obviously harder since they have a travel desk, etc.).
In actuality, we're currently competing with companies like Concur &
TripActions and the most popular way, employees just spending tons of time
planning/booking/expensing travel themselves.

Do you have a background in travel space? Would be cool to chat more

~~~
jbob2000
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!

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11235813213455
Can it take into account climate changes as well? And reduce/optimize travels,
favor train, ..

~~~
tejasmanohar
Yes. We have "customer personas" that we bucket companies into and allow
custom rules on top of that... though we don't believe they're usually
actually necessary.

Do you wanna use Carry at work? Happy to talk to you / employer.

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theunixbeard
Do you use affiliate programs to get a cut of any bookings you make on your
customers behalf?

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dajohnson89
Tejas, your name rang a bell, and I'm pretty sure we worked on a class project
together back in Uni (rhymes with "Matton"). You probably don't remember me,
but I'm super happy for you and wish you all the best.

Small world :)

~~~
tejasmanohar
Haha, I never went to uni so you're probably thinking of someone else :-)

~~~
dajohnson89
so it wasn't technically university, but a academy for gifted high school
students, located on a university. am I barking up the wrong tree?

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dbuxton
We use a similar YC company for corporate travel, flightfox.com. I can't tell
you how much money we save by enforcing corporate policies and letting them
use lots of tricks to get the best possible rates.

~~~
kashishg
We've heard a lot about flightfox! We're focused employee-first so that we can
build a tool that employees their managers for, but that being said, several
of our corporate customers have been seeing a similar cost savings because of
the ability to set travel policies with Carry.

Just curious, what % of travel at your company is booked through flightfox?

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sidcool
Congrats on launching! Good luck!

I just briefly checked your website, but could not figure out if you only do
business travel or vacations as well. Also, which countries is your service
available in?

~~~
tejasmanohar
Hey! One of the founders here. Carry is available all over the world, but our
responses can be slower outside of the hours of 8am - 2am Pacific Time. Where
are you based?

For the last almost ~6 months, we've been doing top-down sales at companies,
serving their teams that travel most (eg sales, implementation, professional
services, etc. teams), but given demand from folks in our networks, we're
opening up Carry to individuals (both for use at their jobs and not). From
user behavior, we believe Carry is best for "high-intent travel", which we
classify as travel that you know you have to take-- whether that's a bunch of
people going to a wedding, a conference, or a business meeting-- as otherwise,
users often don't know what they want.

What would you like to use Carry for?

~~~
sidcool
I am from India. My use case for traveling is personal family vacation. I find
it frustrating to book flights and hotels for personal vacations.

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longcommonname
Very cool project. I work at a GDS and I build slack apps for nonprofit
organizations. Love to see two of interests used in New ways. Good luck with
your success.

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MooshuBeef
Booking travel is fun but extremely time consuming. Excited to see if my
company (~200 people) would want to integrate this

~~~
tejasmanohar
Founder here. Found you on Twitter :). Will reach out

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langitbiru
Congratulation!

Now we know why Slack is highly valuated. You can even build a startup on top
of it. :)

Anyway, what technology do you use for NLP? Spicy? Do you use Deep Learning?
What about non-English languages?

------
rorykoehler
Don't Concur already offer this?

~~~
tejasmanohar
Not exactly-- it's complicated. Concur is an expensing product that also has a
corporate travel booking UI platform that sits on top of travel management
companies (TMCs), some of which have their own portals with phone lines and
chat services.

Just curious (not trying to sound snarky)-- Do you use Concur? If so, I'm
curious if you prefer it to booking travel yourself. In research, we only met
one traveler who was satisfied with Concur, and it turned out that they had an
assistant using it for them. Our goal is to make a travel tool that's an
employee perk and a joy to use, and one that saves the company even more money
through saving employee time.

~~~
rorykoehler
I guess it's similar but not exactly the same.
[https://www.concur.com/newsroom/article/sap-concur-travel-
bo...](https://www.concur.com/newsroom/article/sap-concur-travel-bot-on-slack)

I'm CTO at 8Common who own Expense8. We're a local player in Australia who
compete directly with Concur. We hear all about peoples frustrations with
Concur. We are also looking at interface and workflow enhancements too and I
am interested to see how you get on with Carry. I do think there is a trend
towards simplification of travel booking but I'm still not sure what the end
(winning) result will be.

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sashavingardt2
Congrats!

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adtac
Congrats on the launch guys, let's get bubble tea again sometime in the future
:)

I think I mentioned this before in person, but I'd like to repeat myself just
so that others can chime in with whether they feel this pain point too: a lot
of travel revolves around other travel arrangements (not necessarily flights)
on the same day. These other arrangements are often slightly time-customisable
too, but the number of combinations is obviously limited (I can't take a bus
to the airport after the flight). Finding the best combination that doesn't
require me to wake up at ungodly times is a hassle that I'd like to see
solved.

~~~
kashishg
Thanks Adhityaa! So cool that you found us on here!

You're so right, there are no solutions that focus on point A -> B door-to-
door, and we've found that the reason for that is that most solutions don't
know their end customer. They don't include information like home address and
office addresses. The only solution that we can see handling end-to-end is
Google Flights since they can easily integrate with Google Maps, for us, a
very important goal is to help people manage their day of travel, not just
their bookings :)

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ivolo
Love this product Tejas, we'll be using it!

~~~
tejasmanohar
Thanks, Ilya! We're helping some folks on Segment's Sales teams :)

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NipunSingh
Congrats on the launch Kashish & Tejas!

~~~
tejasmanohar
Thanks, Nick!

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ejcx
Congrats Tejas!

~~~
tejasmanohar
Thanks, Evan!! Get us some users at CloudFlare :)

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georgespencer
Congrats on launching!

~~~
tejasmanohar
Thanks, George!

