todsul · HackerTrans

todsul

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Submissions

How Startups Should Travel

flightfox.com

16 pointsby todsulvor 9 Jahren0 comments

Flux: a new political system for the information age

voteflux.org

2 pointsby todsulvor 10 Jahren1 comments

The Time Everyone Corrected the World’s Smartest Woman

priceonomics.com

10 pointsby todsulvor 11 Jahren0 comments

In Defense of Uber

bothsidesofthetable.com

11 pointsby todsulvor 12 Jahren1 comments

ScriptRock Raises $8.7M for DevOps

forbes.com

2 pointsby todsulvor 12 Jahren0 comments

Beauty and the Bleak

media.news.com.au

1 pointsby todsulvor 12 Jahren0 comments

What It Actually Feels Like Before Success

smitpatel.com

3 pointsby todsulvor 12 Jahren0 comments

Why We Abandoned Crowdsourcing

flightfox.com

111 pointsby todsulvor 12 Jahren54 comments

Around the World in 80 Hours

flightfox.com

1 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren0 comments

Europe's Ryanair vs. America's Southwest

flightfox.com

82 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren77 comments

Eurotrip Hack: 10 Cities for $232

flightfox.com

1 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren0 comments

Argentina's Currency Black Market

flightfox.com

104 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren111 comments

Just how much power does a Tesla Model S produce?

youtube.com

8 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren1 comments

Hacking Flights to the 7 Natural Wonders of the World

flightfox.com

2 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren0 comments

Automattic Employees Work From Home And Travel To Exotic Locations

businessinsider.com

2 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren0 comments

Bradley Manning Not Guilty of Aiding the Enemy

npr.org

5 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren-1 comments

How Flight Experts Fly First Class

flightfox.com

1 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren0 comments

Big Mac Index Goes North Korea

economist.com

2 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren0 comments

Google Apps Admin Console Down

admin.google.com

80 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren18 comments

Welcome Our Robot Overlords

scriptrock.com

9 pointsby todsulvor 13 Jahren1 comments

comments

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

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

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

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

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

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

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

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

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

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

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

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

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

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

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Disclaimer: I work at flightfox.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing this rather than sticking to a single site will yield much better results and make your search more efficient. The largest OTAs have real proprietary deals, the best of the aggregators search the best search engines, and the best search engines combine the most airlines (even LCCs) in creative ways.

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

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

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

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

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

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

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

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

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

We made a lot of these changes to make sure customers like you receive a more personalized service. We realized this is the key to creating consistent value. You can read about those changes here: https://flightfox.com/business/why-we-abandoned-crowdsourcin...

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

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

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

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

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

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

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

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

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

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

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

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