True, they care about local competition. But they also care about growing stockholders' equity, of which one method is improving profitability.
Since RyanAir has shown some prowess in this regard (admittedly through solicitation of subsidies, but also with an aggressive model), Southwest would certainly have some interest. We're talking almost 50% greater net profit on a third of the revenue. Sure that exact comparison is debatable, but the contrast is nonetheless interesting, even if done with a novel approach.
You're right, it doesn't make sense. We're adjusting our numbers to what the central bank has actually reported here: http://www.bcra.gov.ar
Reserves at 31 Dec were US$43.29b and at 18 Oct were US$34.25 = total loss of US$9.04b. Since there has been 291 actual days in the year up to 18 Oct, the daily loss is $31.08m.
Also anything that's not your normal trip. I.e. travelling with pets or surfboards, help using frequent flyer miles, help getting frequent flyer status, or just going to a new country that you've never been before.
Thanks for the feedback, we're looking into booking options now so that you don't have spend time trying to book yourself.
For others it has been an easy process to book as we have some verified travel agents on board. Other times when your trip is super complex, you may have to book on different websites. We're definitely aware that it's a friction point though so we're trying to fix it asap.
We're focusing on anything international and/or complex. Online travel sites like Kayak and Hipmunk have already done a good job for simple and domestic travel.
I spoke to the guys here and your contest was indeed a special case. It's true we're not flexible enough to put two people traveling from different locations on a single ticket/contest. But as you rightly pointed out, your comments should have sufficed.
The second mistake on our end was misreading the issue and the third was our new refund process, which unfortunately had issues during your refund. This isn't an excuse, but your case really was a series of unfortunate events that ended up affecting the same person, you.
In addition to the refund, I believe we also offered a free contest to win you back.
All of that aside, we're trying our best to deliver the highest quality results. It's not easy on a 2-sided platform, but our efforts are paying off. Every day we save people $1000s; that's not a soundbite, we really do. We hold these 'showcase' contests as a bit of fun for our experts and also to prove out business hypotheses. Every now and then, a couple of contests like yours slip through the cracks, but we do everything we can to re-gain your trust.
The last thing I want to clear up is your suggestion that we don't do complex flights. That's simply not true. Your case was unfortunate, but it wasn't really a complex flight. We do much much more complex itineraries involving frequent flyer miles, pets, unusual luggage, etc.
Again, apologies for the poor experience and we'd be more than happy to pay for future contests to regain your trust.
At the moment you can put in whatever you want - we have with this contest - you can write a custom destination like "Anywhere in Europe" or "Round the World". There's a text box where you can put any requirements you like, you can even ask for help to use your 100k United miles etc. We've left it completely open to see how people use it and then build on that.
You can create your own flight contest and note exactly which cities you want to visit and we'll find you the best/cheapest itinerary. We're discussing now about opening up the results of this RTW contest for a smaller fee, would anyone else be interested in that?
The $1730 itinerary is for 6 months (Oct - Apr), but the other options are different - one as short as a month (but at least 48 hours in each continent).
When you launch a flight contest, there are real people on the other end who are searching just for you, so we need to let you know when they've found a great flight. As for asking how you found out about us, we're just gathering information on what works best for customer acquisition.
A $2000 RTW ticket wouldn't include taxes and it wouldn't go to all 6 continents. All the prices in this contest include taxes and stop on every continent (except Antarctica).
People who need a flight can create a contest and then flight hackers compete against each other to find them the best deals/flights. This RTW contest was an experiment to see how far our hackers could go, and considering a RTW itinerary usually costs $4k+, their results are pretty impressive.
For the cheapest route ($1,730), here are the cities visited:
Depart New York
- Georgetown (South Am)
- New York (North Am)
- Berlin (Europe)
- Agadir (Africa)
- London (Europe)
- Turkey (Europe)
- Tehran (Asia)
- Kuala Lumpur (Asia)
- Perth (Oceania)
- Bangkok (Asia)
- End New York
Yeah this happened to me too. After a while the snacks stopped popping up and my opponent just kept looping. Which means you have to refresh and lose your running score :(
Fantastic game though, so addictive... the running score, and win ratio are great. It would be cool if you could see your opponent's win ratio or a rank of some sort too? Perhaps when you're counting down for the game to start?
Hercules Technology Growth Capital (http://www.htgc.com/) is listed and based in Palo Alto. But the entire listed VC and PE market is undervalued, they all trade at substantial discounts to the value of their underlying portfolio companies (but on the other hand how do you/they measure this?).
Since RyanAir has shown some prowess in this regard (admittedly through solicitation of subsidies, but also with an aggressive model), Southwest would certainly have some interest. We're talking almost 50% greater net profit on a third of the revenue. Sure that exact comparison is debatable, but the contrast is nonetheless interesting, even if done with a novel approach.