[HN Gopher] Show HN: Duffel (YC S18) - A faster way to sell flights
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Show HN: Duffel (YC S18) - A faster way to sell flights
Hi everyone! I'm Steve, founder and CEO of Duffel. We're so
excited to introduce Duffel Links today - a low code solution to
sell flights online fast. Through one single API request, offer
your customers a best-in-class shopping experience tailored to your
brand. Since day 1, we've made it our mission to break down
barriers in the travel industry and make it easy for anyone to
start selling travel. Now with Links, you can still use Duffel even
if you don't have technical skills. It truly has never been easier
to get started selling travel. The Problem: We've removed many
blockers to selling flights, but until today, offering even a
simple flight shopping experience could be a complicated task. Even
with our APIs and components, you would still face challenges such
as handling search inputs for passengers of all ages, getting the
details of one-way, return and multi-city trips and more. The
Solution: Enter Duffel Links! Links take care of all of this for
you so you can start offering flights to your customers
immediately; with a single API call, you can generate a link where
your customer can access our best-in-class flight shopping
experience, customised to match your brand. Leverage thousands of
hours of product design and travel expertise every time you
generate a link. Key features: -Search intuitively - Your
customers will be able to input search parameters to ensure they
see the most relevant flights and filter itineraries, so they can
find the perfectly timed flight. -Optimised for conversion - When
booking, they can pick the fare with the right level of flexibility
and amenities, complete our simple checkout, and instantly access
all the information needed to fly. -Access to 300+ airlines -
including low-cost carriers, NDC and GDS. -Add markups - Quickly
and dynamically add markups to fares when creating a link and
easily charge your customers. Up-sell to your customers by offering
premium seats and paid bags. -Make it your own - Customise the
entire search and book experience to match your brand. Include your
logo, custom URL and brand colours throughout. -Compatible with all
screen sizes - Links is fully responsive for all devices -
including mobiles, tablets and desktops. Feel free to try Links
today - we're looking forward to your feedback and comments.
Thanks, Steve
Author : stevedomin
Score : 78 points
Date : 2023-02-16 13:27 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (duffel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (duffel.com)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Quickly and dynamically add markups to fares when creating a
| link and easily charge your customers.
|
| What's the customer benefit to using a random site to book
| tickets they could already book on something like Google Flights
| without a markup?
|
| Who handles support for rebookings, cancelations, etc.? It's bad
| enough having to go through an OTA with airlines/hotels when
| there's a problem; they tell you to call Expedia.
| sokoloff wrote:
| When we shopped for a Galapagos trip, different operators had
| different offerings, but it was on us to line up "here's how to
| get everyone from where they live to the boat" which this has
| the (theoretic, but perhaps not practical) means to solve.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Travel agencies and the like would be using it. It's a lot
| better and cheaper than trying to get access to a GDS (which
| can be expensive, negotiating with a host agency, etc).
|
| I wanted to poke around at it myself but it seems like I'd need
| a $99/mo package package to use it? (I legitimately actually
| want pseudo-GDS access for my personal cohort so we can
| coordinate flights and conventions together as the logistics
| leader of the group. I know I'm not the enterprise customer
| you're looking for, buuuuuut...)
| SamBam wrote:
| But it seems like the customer is still the one searching for
| the flights, so then what's the point of using a travel
| agent's website? Just for the pleasure of spending an extra
| 5% in fees to the agent?
| [deleted]
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| I could see some bespoke tech savvy experience all inclusives
| wanting a product like this as well. Like let's say you are a
| tour operator that only does one thing like sell packages to
| go ride motorcycles around Southeast Asia for a week or two.
| These kind of packages are already offered by tour operators
| as all inclusive save for the flights. They can now easily
| add flights to that and it's a bonus for both them and the
| customer - the package is truly all inclusive now, plus the
| customer no longer needs to provide flight details for
| transportation to and from the airport. In this case you
| probably wouldn't even want to add a markup - the added value
| of having the flight info immediately on hand would be enough
| to make it worthwhile.
| stevedomin wrote:
| Yes, that's correct, only available on a paid plan today. API
| still available on a PAYG basis though!
| stevedomin wrote:
| This wouldn't be a random site: it could be your bank, an
| hotel, an events/experiences marketplaces, etc. And there would
| be a reason for them to offer flights alongside their core
| experience: it might be they want to enable you to redeem
| points for travel, have special deals with airlines that they
| want to pass along to their customers or there's a benefit from
| a UX standpoint to selling you flights alongside other
| products.
|
| > Who handles support for rebookings, cancelations, etc.? It's
| bad enough having to go through an OTA with airlines/hotels
| when there's a problem; they tell you to call Expedia.
|
| As much as possible we try to enable our merchants to offer
| self-service flows for cancellations, changes, etc. The airline
| systems don't always let you do everything programmatically so
| at that point whoever is selling the flight who be in charge of
| the customer. We're exploring ways we could provide support
| ourselves, to take that load off of our customers.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The airline systems don't always let you do everything
| programmatically so at that point whoever is selling the
| flight who be in charge of the customer.
|
| OK, so this is my sticking point.
|
| There are horror stories of Expedia somehow accidentally not
| booking the flights they've sold. You get to the airport,
| there's no ticket and no seat. Airline says "nothing we can
| do, call Expedia".
|
| They _can 't_ call Duffel. I can't fix it programmatically.
| Customer's sitting angry at an airport, honeymoon ruined.
| What happens?
| stevedomin wrote:
| > You get to the airport, there's no ticket and no seat
|
| We issue instantly issue tickets / pay for the booking so
| and for a lot of the major airlines we're plugged directly
| into their reservation system so this should be an
| extremely rare occurrence, if an occurrence at all. Nobody
| should ever miss a honeymoon because of that imo.
|
| Customers won't be able to call Duffel but can get in touch
| with the merchant that sold them the flight.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > this should be an extremely rare occurrence
|
| I think this dramatically overestimates the levels of
| perfection in airline IT.
|
| > Customers won't be able to call Duffel but can get in
| touch with the merchant that sold them the flight.
|
| Who can take what action to fix the problem?
| chinathrow wrote:
| Does Google flights sell flights directly?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No (which is very much preferable, IMO); they link you
| directly into the airline's purchase flow. The search results
| include a lot of folks who do, like Expedia, if you want the
| third party experience. It's not much fun when things go
| wrong.
| SamBam wrote:
| Kayak, for instance, now sells all flights through third
| parties, like ChatDeal. The internet abounds with tales of
| ChatDeal not actually purchasing the tickets, or canceling
| them at the last minute. Any issues go through these third-
| party sites, who do not care about customer service or
| getting you to your destination.
|
| The idea of buying any ticket not directly from the airline
| terrifies me now.
| AaronNewcomer wrote:
| They actually do on some airlines. For instance, check out
| the first booking option here: https://www.google.com/trave
| l/flights/booking?tfs=CBwQAhpHag...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That looks like it'll still result in a direct Spirit
| booking, though.
| AaronNewcomer wrote:
| Yeah. It feels like they're acting more like a travel
| agent. Kind of like what this original post would be
| doing.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's unclear to me from the Duffel page which scenario
| happens. https://duffel.com/flights/airlines seems to
| indicate _some_ airlines have a direct connection, but
| the vast majority go through something called Travelport.
|
| If I ask the airline to cancel my booking, what happens?
| Do they do so? Does the Duffel markup come back to me? Do
| I get status benefits from the airline?
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Who is this for other than travel agents? Very cool but I can't
| imagine too many use cases immediately.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Flights are a loss leader, with middlemen making very little or
| no money. The real money is in hotels and rental cars. Will
| purchasers via this API pay more than they would for flight
| tickets in other services? Or how are you making any money off of
| this?
| dkindler wrote:
| The real money is also in FF points.
| https://youtu.be/ggUduBmvQ_4
| berkle4455 wrote:
| I can't wait to install a random "purchase a flight" widget on my
| horticulture blog.
| eiso wrote:
| To me this seems like Stripe for Flights. No for a moment let's
| think beyond applications that would like you to book your flight
| through them (where Links seems super useful IMO) and start
| thinking about future voice assistants and copilot like products,
| Duffels API is the interface to book flights, how else do you
| offer this? No affiliation with the company, just genuinely
| positive about what they're doing.
| eiso wrote:
| To me this seems like Stripe for Flights. No for a moment let's
| think beyond applications that would like you to book your flight
| through them (where Links seems super useful IMO) and start
| thinking about future voice assistants and copilot like products,
| Duffels API is the interface to book flights, how else do you
| offer this? No affiliation with the company, just genuinely
| positive about what they're doing.
|
| p.s. It looks like my HN account from almost a decade ago with
| the same username got deleted (had to recreate). How is this
| possible?
| Oras wrote:
| Is that for agencies who had API access to other airlines and
| holiday packages? or for hotels to combine their own booking with
| extra 3rd party APIs to book a full holiday from one place?
| amasea wrote:
| I am a software engineer and travel agent on the side who _only_
| books flights and lives on flyertalk (because I find complex
| airfare to be a fascinating and fun optimization problem).
|
| I don't understand how companies like this get any funding. From
| every angle it just seems exploitative.
|
| For agents: Getting set up properly with a GDS is not necessarily
| expensive, but it is a huge pain, and most agents don't want to
| deal with airfare at all for that matter. If they don't want to
| do this properly, then they're arguably doing customers a
| disservice (and really they should just provide them a link to
| book the air part themselves, but that's a controversial take in
| the industry). But that said, this market for agents who don't
| want to deal with it and/or want to markup more to skim extra off
| the top is very crowded with consolidators, airline portals, etc.
|
| For customers: this is just a worse google flights that actively
| suppresses price transparency. It forces a new middleperson,
| Duffel, in the picture whenever you need to change flights
| (increasing latency). It enables agents to skim off the top, and
| with the exorbitant fees it practically guarantees worse pricing
| than other channels.
|
| I can (and do) routinely issue tickets with $0 fees, always same
| or lower price vs if the customer booked it themselves. I also
| still make significant commission (sometimes over 20% on quite
| expensive tickets). The customer gets tickets that are cheaper or
| far too complex to book on any self booking website. Everyone
| comes out ahead. _Maybe_ Duffel passes the (very occasional)
| private fare savings along, but I doubt it. Instead, they 're
| probably doing the opposite and pocketing at least some of the
| commission and not even sharing it with the agent. Most
| experienced agents charge some fees.. that's fine. But with
| Duffel, those CC fees are so incredibly high that it forces
| agents to charge higher fees (keep in mind that in the normal
| scenario there is $0 true cost here. The airline is the one that
| charges the card - you're just giving them the CC info).
|
| So the target is agents that don't really know how airfare works
| and haven't put in the effort to get set up properly (either
| themselves or through a partnership with an existing agency)? And
| it shows on the pricing page: *What if I want to use my own IATA
| or ARC accreditation?* *That's no problem! If you have your own
| accreditation and would like to use it please contact us to
| discuss pricing and next steps.* Translation: "If you actually
| know what you're doing, we can't price gouge you so contact us to
| work something out."
|
| And more insulting, from my perspective as a software engineer,
| they likely aren't solving any technical problems in the airline
| industry! Their travel consultant job postings are for people
| with GDS experience. So they are just using the same GDS and NDC
| APIs that everyone uses, skimming off the top, and charging more
| than real payment portals potentially just to hand the airline a
| credit card number.
|
| Everyone loses except greedy agents stepping outside of their
| skillset to upcharge and have a customized page that matches
| their brand.
| robk wrote:
| What's your flyertalk handle? Interested in your services!
| i_am_programmer wrote:
| I interviewed with these guys in London maybe just over a year
| and a half ago? Interviewer was lovely for the first call then
| just absolutely ghosted me when I had to reschedule the technical
| session by a few days. Then came back about 4 months later asking
| me if I was interested in going forwards. So weird.
|
| I remember they apparently wrote everything functionally with
| Elixr and kept mentioning it like it solved some real problem you
| couldn't possible do any other way. Weird seeing it pop up here.
| stevedomin wrote:
| It's been a while so not sure there's any point investigating
| what happened now but I'm very sorry you had such a poor
| experience during our interview process. We strive for
| candidates to have a good experience and clearly we missed the
| mark here.
|
| Re: Elixir: isn't it the only language that lets you write
| highly-concurrent, low latency, fault tolerant software? :)
| [deleted]
| crenwick wrote:
| YC: let's finance companies to solve climate change
|
| Also YC: let's make tools to encourage more flight travel
| jacooper wrote:
| Don't kid yourself, not body's going to stop flying because of
| climate change.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Some people definitely have. Or have decided to limit
| themselves to one flight a year as a compromise.
| "Staycations" where people take vacations in their home town
| are a thing, and the pandemic has shown that most business
| travel is unneeded.
| jacooper wrote:
| If these people even count for 1%, that would be an
| achievement in itself.
| nickparker wrote:
| Almost nobody in tech is interested in the degrowth solution to
| climate change, we're all in on increased affluence with tech
| mitigations for the environmental harms.
|
| Somebody's gotta book all the electric / / synfuel powered
| flights ;)
| jdjslskshdj wrote:
| Risk diversification I guess? But yeah, disappointing that YC
| would invest in something like this.
| chillbill wrote:
| What are you suggestions as an alternative to flying? How would
| people travel from one country to another quickly?
| throwawaytimes wrote:
| Rules are for peasants
| mhb wrote:
| If that disturbs you, see Flock Safety (YC ??). Making the
| world safer one camera at a time:
|
| https://www.flocksafety.com/
| mgfist wrote:
| Solving air travel emissions will come from decarbonizing air
| travel, not from prohibition. Even if all flights were to be
| cut in half tomorrow it would have a rounding error effect on
| global emissions.
| ioman wrote:
| This is a market I wish I understood better.
|
| If I understand this correctly, the target market is airlines
| that need to sell flights online and that don't have (or don't
| want) the staff to do it in house. According to Wikipedia, there
| are about 5,000 airlines currently. Large airlines seem unlikely
| to want to outsource this, but I'm guessing there aren't too many
| airlines that size (only about 300 use Sabre).
|
| I wouldn't have thought there would be a market big enough for a
| startup like this, but I appear to be wrong. I'm guessing their
| biggest challenge will be customer acquisition. But as I said,
| this is a market I wish I understood better.
| itissid wrote:
| I was under the impression that most people are price conscious
| and select the lowest cost option. This is not the target market
| for branding.
|
| Now there are some(how many? I don't know, but its a small
| minority 10-20% if you look at Coach/First Business class ratio)
| that are not price sensitive, sure, but isn't it they case for
| them that they know _well_ after some amount of flying what
| airline they like? I select between delta and southwest. I just
| open two tabs and look.
|
| Then there is a question of whether airlines even offer new stuff
| _frequently_ enough for people to change there preference? (I
| mean its not like they build the analog of a new iPhone every
| year for people to sit up and rethink their choices). The last
| innovation I heard was Delta 's division of classes into Basic,
| Premium and Delta Comfort+ thingy quite a few years ago.
|
| [1]https://thepointsguy.com/news/tpg-best-us-airlines-2022/
| xur17 wrote:
| I'm interested in using "Links" as a redemption flow for a points
| program. Is there a way to limit the maximum redemption price for
| a given link we generate, and is there a way to cancel
| outstanding links via api?
|
| edit: reading about it further, it looks like "Links" collects
| payment from the user, and hence won't work here.
| stevedomin wrote:
| Can you email me at steve [at] duffel.com? Would love to
| explore how we could support your use case as this is right in
| our alley.
| nithayakumar wrote:
| Awesome - lots of potential here.
|
| Lots of folks are asking "who is this for?". I think that's
| because the people that should use this don't know that they
| should yet. And it's probably missing the hotel/car angle too.
|
| This would let people like planners (e.g. destination wedding),
| events (e.g. festivals), and the like simplify and make money
| through the entire customer experience/journey.
|
| Good luck!
| stevedomin wrote:
| Spot on. Thank you!
| fideloper wrote:
| Who is the market for this? (This is way outside of industries
| I've worked in, genuinely curious!)
| stevedomin wrote:
| Banks, spend management platforms, hotels, concierge services,
| events & experiences marketplaces, employee reward providers,
| or any brand that has some kind of loyalty programs.
|
| There are a few reasons why such companies might want to offer
| flights (and other travel services) through their own product.
| A non-exhaustive list:
|
| - Retention: a credit card company or bank might offer points
| and wants customers to redeem these points for travel. An hotel
| might want to offer flights so that their customers can stay
| within their ecosystem rather than going to an OTA (which will
| offer million of other hotel products)
|
| - Monetisation: capture extra margin points from selling these
| products
|
| - UX: tighter integration between their own software and the
| travel booking piece, i.e a spend management platform layering
| approval flows, policies, on top of a booking engine
| jacooper wrote:
| Travel and tourist guides.
| ttrrooppeerr wrote:
| Two industries that newer generations use less and less. I
| still don't understand how this got funded but what do I
| know.
| noirbot wrote:
| I think it's more of a thing internationally? I could be
| wrong, but I definitely hear more of a talk of travel
| agents in europe.
| escaper wrote:
| So in your effort to "break down barriers in the travel industry"
| you've effectively created new, higher financial barriers for
| travel customers?
| breck wrote:
| When I buy flights I prefer to use a 6 page checkout flow that
| fails 10% of the time on an "*.aspx" page. /s :)
|
| This is interesting! Air travel has a lot of room for
| improvement.
|
| A lot of pain points stem from dumb laws and regulations though--
| are you ready for a bare knuckled fight to make things better for
| consumers?
| notafraudster wrote:
| It probably bodes a little poorly (either for the product, or for
| the product's applicability to this website) that almost every
| comment seems to be confused about what the product is or why
| anyone would ever use it. I've read the original post several
| times and I still don't understand myself. I read the main page
| and I can't tell if I'm meant to be in the target market or not.
| I clicked on Pricing and I don't understand what the free plan is
| (it doesn't give us access to "Links", which I thought was the
| product?)
|
| The "Why do you charge for excess searches?" link in the pricing
| page opens the Forex question, not the excess searches question.
|
| Pricing page provides pricing in GBP, EUR, USD, and AUD but does
| not use any kind of location data to localize the currency.
|
| I used the "Resources" menu and I don't understand what "Spend
| management: Unlock incremental revenue" means
| itake wrote:
| Just taking a stab at "who the customer is":
|
| My friend runs a theatre in SF and would offer crazy packages
| for their VIP seating, think Uber Black taking you to the
| event, with a private entrance and red carpet.
|
| I could see high end event sellers offering to include a flight
| to the event with the purchase of the ticket.
| xyzelement wrote:
| This was my vibe as well. Maybe it's one of these "if you have
| to ask, it's not for you" cases, but I agree with your words:
| it doesn't bode well that on the post (as deep as I went) it
| doesn't mention who the customer is.
| stevedomin wrote:
| > Maybe it's one of these "if you have to ask, it's not for
| you" cases
|
| Kinda agree but also think we should do a better job making
| it explicit who the target is. Thanks for the feedback
| jaequery wrote:
| Why not try clarify it for us here ?
| stevedomin wrote:
| Offered a few answers in comments below. Hope that helps
| clarify a bit.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=34819960
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34819449
| brudgers wrote:
| Who is the target?
|
| I am intellectually, curious.
|
| Thanks.
| stevedomin wrote:
| Thank you for the feedback. The point on not knowing whether
| you're in the target market or not is absolutely valid and
| something we should make a lot clearer on that page.
|
| Re: pricing: our main product is our Flights API
| (https://duffel.com/flights). Links is a new product we're
| launching today that lets you sell flights without having to
| write an integration with our API. You can access our API on
| our free plan but Links is only available on a paid plan.
|
| > The "Why do you charge for excess searches?" link in the
| pricing page opens the Forex question, not the excess searches
| question. We'll fix this, thanks for letting us know.
|
| > Pricing page provides pricing in GBP, EUR, USD, and AUD but
| does not use any kind of location data to localize the
| currency. It used to, might be a bug introduced with the new
| page.
|
| > I used the "Resources" menu and I don't understand what
| "Spend management: Unlock incremental revenue" means It's a
| page dedicated to spend management platforms that are looking
| to unlock extra revenue with travel
| ethanbond wrote:
| I think the confusion here is much more basic: what does it
| mean to "sell flights" and why would I do it? How do I know
| if I'm someone who can sell flights? I in fact don't own an
| airline, so what does that mean!
|
| I suspect there's a bit of "curse of knowledge" at play here.
| You've spent a bunch of time in this space and we haven't. If
| your target audience is all people who know this stuff then
| this might not be a problem, but just thought I'd try to
| clarify.
| stevedomin wrote:
| Thanks for clarify, it might very well be the case ("curse
| of knowledge")
|
| We're definitely trying to appeal to someone that know they
| want/need to sell flights but doesn't necessarily know how.
| SamBam wrote:
| > "Spend management: Unlock incremental revenue" means It's a
| page dedicated to spend management platforms that are looking
| to unlock extra revenue with travel
|
| I'm going to assume this is another case of being so immersed
| in the jargon that you don't realize that this is meaningless
| to most people.
|
| My initial understanding is "how do I spend management? It it
| like a currency?"
|
| The I realized that "spend management" is jargon for
| "managing your company's spending," I'm guessing. So...
| companies that sell spend-management platforms to other
| companies also want to sell them flights? Forget it, I'm
| still confused. Clearly I'm not the target audience, though,
| so it's ok.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yeah it gives zero indication who this is for.
|
| Reading from comments here it seems like travel agents and tour
| operators? But then I don't really understand that, they
| already buy flights on behalf of customers so how is this an
| improvement?
|
| I still have no idea who this is actually for or what the value
| proposition is. What, precisely, is this trying to replace, and
| for who?
|
| Give me the top three business case examples and then maybe
| I'll understand it.
| usehackernews wrote:
| What immediately came to my mind for me are ticket/event
| websites and travel blogs. Allow your customers to book travel
| to the event or to the location you mentioned directly through
| your site.
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