> 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.
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
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
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? :)
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.
(Disclosure: I'm the CEO of Duffel) Totally agree with your point above re: IATA. They made it possible but for a different reason, they opened the door to competition.
Standardisation of communication protocol can only do so much, especially when the standard is built to accommodate the needs of 100s of airlines using 100s of different host systems.
Also, there is ton of red tape around airlines' APIs as well, I'd say probably as much as in banking.
Duffel | Software Engineers | London, UK / São Paulo, BR | Full-time, on-site | https://duffel.com
Duffel is building the next generation of software for the travel industry. You will join a small and experienced team, work alongside people who love their craft (coding!), and tackle some of the most interesting challenges in travel today. Product & Engineering is at the core of our company. We are looking for people who know the patience it takes and the tradeoffs you have to accept to ship great product.
We went through Y Combinator (S18) and raised our seed round from top VCs (Index Ventures, Blossom Capital and Kima Ventures).
Duffel | Software Engineers | London, UK / São Paulo, BR | Full-time, on-site | https://duffel.com
Duffel is building the next generation of software for the travel industry. You will join a small (but growing) team, work alongside talented and incredibly ambitious people (but who really know how to enjoy their time off), and have the unique opportunity to shape our core platform and tackle some of the most interesting challenges in travel today. If there is one thing we can promise is that you will learn a lot.
We just went through Y Combinator (S18) and recently announced our seed round from top VCs (Index Ventures, Blossom Capital and Kima Ventures).