Show HN: Duffel (YC S18) – A faster way to sell flights

Show HN: Duffel (YC S18) – A faster way to sell flights(duffel.com)

89 points by stevedomin 3 years ago | 66 comments

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

notafraudster 3 years ago |

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

stevedomin 3 years ago | |

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 3 years ago | | |

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.

SamBam 3 years ago | | |

> "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.

itake 3 years ago | |

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 3 years ago | |

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 3 years ago | | |

> 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

crazygringo 3 years ago | |

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 3 years ago | |

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.

ceejayoz 3 years ago |

> 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.

fideloper 3 years ago |

Who is the market for this? (This is way outside of industries I've worked in, genuinely curious!)

stevedomin 3 years ago | |

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 3 years ago | |

Travel and tourist guides.

ttrrooppeerr 3 years ago | | |

Two industries that newer generations use less and less. I still don't understand how this got funded but what do I know.

i_am_programmer 3 years ago |

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 3 years ago | |

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? :)

escaper 3 years ago |

So in your effort to "break down barriers in the travel industry" you've effectively created new, higher financial barriers for travel customers?

monero-xmr 3 years ago |

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 3 years ago | |

The real money is also in FF points. https://youtu.be/ggUduBmvQ_4

itissid 3 years ago |

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/

breck 3 years ago |

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?

eiso 3 years ago |

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?

crenwick 3 years ago |

YC: let’s finance companies to solve climate change

Also YC: let’s make tools to encourage more flight travel

nickparker 3 years ago | |

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 ;)

jacooper 3 years ago | |

Don't kid yourself, not body's going to stop flying because of climate change.

jhbadger 3 years ago | | |

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.

mgfist 3 years ago | |

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.

mhb 3 years ago | |

If that disturbs you, see Flock Safety (YC ??). Making the world safer one camera at a time:

https://www.flocksafety.com/

chillbill 3 years ago | |

What are you suggestions as an alternative to flying? How would people travel from one country to another quickly?

jdjslskshdj 3 years ago | |

Risk diversification I guess? But yeah, disappointing that YC would invest in something like this.

throwawaytimes 3 years ago | |

Rules are for peasants

ioman 3 years ago |

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.

eiso 3 years ago |

nithayakumar 3 years ago |

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 3 years ago | |

Spot on. Thank you!

xur17 3 years ago |

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 3 years ago | |

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.

pwillia7 3 years ago |

Who is this for other than travel agents? Very cool but I can't imagine too many use cases immediately.

berkle4455 3 years ago |

I can’t wait to install a random “purchase a flight” widget on my horticulture blog.

amasea 3 years ago |

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.

Oras 3 years ago |

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?