Carry is your executive assistant for travel. Just message us (i.e. "I need to be in Boston for a meeting at 2pm on July 1st"), and we'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're building in-house tools to make our agents' jobs easier and help them work faster. 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) 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).
We built Carry because we hate booking travel— it's just way too time-consuming and inefficient. It'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.
9 months ago, we set out to build a chat bot because we asked ourselves "Why can't Siri book travel?" Working backwards, we quickly realized why bots don't work— they're robotic, formulaic, and take lots of back and forth to convey what you want. We also realized that consumers don'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.
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.
Thus, we decided we'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've been working with corporations directly, but today, we're doing a soft launch of Carry for individuals with a waitlist at https://carry.travel. That said, for the HN community, just email me (tejas [at] carry [dot] travel) if you want to start using us for work immediately.
If you travel frequently (or even if you don't!), we'd love to hear about the inefficiencies and pain points you'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.
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.
It's not perfect, the calendar view shows two months at a time, and at times it's easier to use as starting point, but it's definitely better than clicking through 100 itineraries on an airlines slow site.
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.
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.
To see it, choose your flight then in the date pop-up choose Whole Month -> Cheapest Month.
I believe they also have the inverse where you can choose a month and a departure city and they'll give you destinations by price. I couldn't find it quickly though but I think they have it.
Let’s you set travel ranges, multiple destination options, geographic areas and more. Shows you the cheapest options within the range of parameters you set. My absolute favorite vacation planner.
I'm not sure if it's a startup or an MVP or a student project at this point, but it's the closest that I've come across
I recently moved out of state and want to fly back from time to time. I don't have any particular dates I care to fly on. I just want the most affordable option and I'll plan everything else around that.
Allows at the month level.
Just click on "Date Grid" after you search for your query and it will give you a matrix. I can't believe I just found this!
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.
For example:
My firm requires we use a corp booking engine. That engine charges a fee to book a ticket online or over the phone. We get a slight discount on fares and they in turn give a kickback each year to my employer.
The real kicker is that they sell some fares as "refundable" when in reality the fares are just regular fares but allow rebooking via this corporate travel agent. They've essentially locked you into using them and any interaction with an agent incurs a fee. My firm doesn't care, they just see that kickback at the end of the year and are happy. They don't care how inconvenient it is to use the TA.
I get some of the desires to control costs but in my case, I have schedules to keep and a lot of last minute travel and the corporate TA is nothing but an inconvenience. I frequently have to put in reasons for "breaking" policy (for example, I don't take red-eyes) on price because the limit between the lowest fare and your ticket is $100. So if the schedule is right but the fare for that is $110, you have to put in a reason why you booked it.
Definitely seemed like these middleman agencies were a solution to a problem faced by the finance team.
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.
We look at most of the top corporate travel portals and think "worse Google Flights". We want to help the employees save time, while they want to fill a checklist for the finance team. Obviously, this is trickier than it sounds since our ideal "stakeholder" is different than much of the market, but we think it's possible by targeting teams that waste the most time coordinating travel.
I write some software that involves accounting. Surprising how they drive A LOT of things. Sometimes a bit too much...
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.
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).
(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.)
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!
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.
> 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.
> 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/
Let us know if you have thoughts here! Payments are a very interesting topic
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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?
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 :)
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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?
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
I appreciate your honest reply and wish you luck!
Small world :)
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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
- 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/) or email tejas [at] carry [dot] travel, and we'll be in touch.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
Do you wanna use Carry at work? Happy to talk to you / employer.
Just curious, what % of travel at your company is booked through flightfox?
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.
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?
