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
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.
> "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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> Customers won't be able to call Duffel but can get in touch with the merchant that sold them the flight.
As a merchant using your software, would we have priority access to the airlines' support lines? I ask as Duffel looks like a very attractive idea but if we're forced to wait on hold for 3 hours to speak to United's standard customer service for any customer issues that can't be fixed through the API, that would be really tough.
