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

158 点作者 tejasmanohar将近 6 年前
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.

36 条评论

tejasmanohar将近 6 年前
Hi HN! We&#x27;ve been impressed with the response here. Y&#x27;all must love travel.<p>If you use Slack and want to get started using Carry for your team, we&#x27;ve created a temporary link while we&#x27;re on the front page to go ahead and install Carry. Here&#x27;s the flow:<p>- Go to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carry.travel&#x2F;hnpromo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carry.travel&#x2F;hnpromo</a><p>- Select your team&#x27;s workspace in the top right<p>- For &quot;Post to&quot;, select &quot;Slackbot&quot; or anything (this step is annoying, sorry-- we&#x27;ll fix)<p>- Click &quot;Install&quot; (You may have to ask an administrator depending on your settings)<p>- Send a _direct message_ to @Carry on Slack saying anything<p>If your team uses another platform or wants to get in touch, schedule a demo (under the request access button, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carry.travel&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carry.travel&#x2F;</a>) or email tejas [at] carry [dot] travel, and we&#x27;ll be in touch.
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duxup将近 6 年前
&quot;70% of corporate travel is booked without any tool or agency&quot;<p>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.<p>I did not understand the point of that, but man it was policy.
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mmckelvy将近 6 年前
&gt; 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>I suspect this is the case with <i>a lot</i> of business &#x2F; enterprise software.<p>Congrats on the launch. I think this space (software assisted services that rely on Slack &#x2F; SMS &#x2F; email) is a promising one. Best of luck!
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tekacs将近 6 年前
This reminds me of Magic (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;magic.gd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;magic.gd</a>) or Fin (now defunct, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fin.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fin.com</a> - a closer match, with a similar if broader mission).<p>Hopefully the narrower scope will allow you to escape the issues that Fin ran into, trying to bolster their team. :)<p>Magic has fixed pricing for some tasks, including travel booking I believe - so hopefully Carry is (or becomes) either less expensive or higher quality.
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koolba将近 6 年前
How much does this cost? I don&#x27;t see any pricing information.<p>&gt; We book travel on your personal card so you can get all the points.<p>Do you bill the charges directly to the customer&#x27;s card or do they get billed by you and then you separately purchase the flight&#x2F;hotel&#x2F;etc?<p>Curious how that works regarding card data storage as you&#x27;d need likely need the full card number, expiration, and CVV to run each charge and it can&#x27;t just be hash or payment token if you&#x27;re passing it on to a third party for the full booking.
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exabrial将近 6 年前
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
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matchbok将近 6 年前
Good luck! I still don&#x27;t understand the need for these chat apps, tbh. Perhaps I&#x27;m just old fashioned, heh.<p>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.
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cptaj将近 6 年前
Here&#x27;s a killer feature everyone wants:<p>I want to put a date range and get the cheapest plane tickets.<p>Big range, I want to find the cheapest time of the year to fly and plan my vacation.<p>Nobody lets you do this.
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paulcole将近 6 年前
&gt; 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)<p>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将近 6 年前
Love to give this a shot if anyone has a referral. Probably my major pain point is my team booking travel together. We&#x27;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&#x2F;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.
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namdnay将近 6 年前
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?
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notafraudster将近 6 年前
This is a really cool concept.<p>I installed it in a personal slack workplace and said &quot;I need a flight to Cancun August 27th to September 1st&quot; and got a boilerplate response saying a travel agent would get back to me within an hour. I followed up with &quot;I need a flight to Cancun on August 27th, returning September 1st&quot; 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 &quot;Leaving morning, returning afternoon&quot;. Again, a lengthy pause. Then, without giving me a price quote, it said they&#x27;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 -&gt; CUN (I&#x27;m not really sure why that would be the presumption).<p>Is this currently an automated process or am I talking to a human support agent?
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Scoundreller将近 6 年前
How will you handle itinerary changes by the airline?<p>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.<p>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.
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bzbz将近 6 年前
Adding automation to this workflow seems like an exciting problem to solve!<p>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.
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sealthedeal将近 6 年前
This reminds me of that robo company that you could text anything you wanted to and they would book&#x2F;figure it out for you. Love that you are honing your focus in to Slack and Travel. Goodluck!
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avarun将近 6 年前
Hey Tejas, this looks awesome! Congrats on the launch, I&#x27;m looking forward to trying it out!<p>I&#x27;m curious if you&#x27;ve looked into the &quot;guest travel&quot; space, allowing non-employees to book corporate travel. Pana(pana.com) is the only competitor I&#x27;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.
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alphagrep12345将近 6 年前
You mentioned that it&#x27;s free for individuals. I have a few of questions.<p>1. I&#x27;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?<p>2. It&#x27;s a very time-consuming process. How would you do it for free?<p>3. Would I get any <i>additional discount</i> if I go through you&#x2F;any authorized travel agent in general? Or do they also internally use the same websites we do?
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monksy将近 6 年前
A lot of this really feels like the people who need that would be better off with a personal assistant&#x2F;secretary that remembers the person&#x27;s needs and preferences.
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atian将近 6 年前
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.
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toomuchtodo将近 6 年前
Is your plan to continue to perform the travel booking directly? Or turn into a SaaS product (Slack, Teams&lt;-you are here-&gt;Travel booking teams or companies) that any travel booking company can use? I&#x27;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.
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jbob2000将近 6 年前
How will you scale?<p>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&#x27;t get acquired, start cutting you off or giving you crappy restrictions.<p>Are you competing with something like Carlson-Wagonlit Travel?
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11235813213455将近 6 年前
Can it take into account climate changes as well? And reduce&#x2F;optimize travels, favor train, ..
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theunixbeard将近 6 年前
Do you use affiliate programs to get a cut of any bookings you make on your customers behalf?
dajohnson89将近 6 年前
Tejas, your name rang a bell, and I&#x27;m pretty sure we worked on a class project together back in Uni (rhymes with &quot;Matton&quot;). You probably don&#x27;t remember me, but I&#x27;m super happy for you and wish you all the best.<p>Small world :)
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dbuxton将近 6 年前
We use a similar YC company for corporate travel, flightfox.com. I can&#x27;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.
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sidcool将近 6 年前
Congrats on launching! Good luck!<p>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?
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longcommonname将近 6 年前
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.
MooshuBeef将近 6 年前
Booking travel is fun but extremely time consuming. Excited to see if my company (~200 people) would want to integrate this
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langitbiru将近 6 年前
Congratulation!<p>Now we know why Slack is highly valuated. You can even build a startup on top of it. :)<p>Anyway, what technology do you use for NLP? Spicy? Do you use Deep Learning? What about non-English languages?
rorykoehler将近 6 年前
Don&#x27;t Concur already offer this?
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sashavingardt2将近 6 年前
Congrats!
adtac将近 6 年前
Congrats on the launch guys, let&#x27;s get bubble tea again sometime in the future :)<p>I think I mentioned this before in person, but I&#x27;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&#x27;t take a bus to the airport after the flight). Finding the best combination that doesn&#x27;t require me to wake up at ungodly times is a hassle that I&#x27;d like to see solved.
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ivolo将近 6 年前
Love this product Tejas, we&#x27;ll be using it!
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NipunSingh将近 6 年前
Congrats on the launch Kashish &amp; Tejas!
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ejcx将近 6 年前
Congrats Tejas!
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georgespencer将近 6 年前
Congrats on launching!
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