Carry - Executive assistant for travel on Slack

@gustaf looks like this offered as a benefit to employees as well a self-service tool that employees seek and use/install on their own. Was this previously offered only for teams? If so, what motivated Carry to launch a self-service tool for only Slack (i.e. why not in other personal messaging channels)?

@chrismessina You're exactly right! The majority of our customers in the past have been companies that use us to manage their travel for all employees. We wanted to open it up to individuals who might find it useful for work travel, and it's now available on Slack, SMS, and email! We focus on Slack because we've found that our users on Slack get the most value out of Carry, but some users prefer to talk to Carry on SMS instead! What platform would you like to see us on? :)

@lucida_ng Hi Lucida! I'm one of the founders of Carry. Few reasons 1) Traditional travel agencies (for individuals) are often not very transparent, as they primarily serve a market that is not used to searching for rates online (i.e. elderly population, less computer-savvy folks). Whenever you book with Carry, we show you both the online rate and what we'll charge you, which is always lower or equal to the lowest online rate. It's also not easy to be transparent-- no data source for travel agents (or consumers even) provide all the rates so we had to build our own and still manually check public sites when needed. 2) Traditional travel agencies (at least in USA) primarily communicate with their clients over phone calls. We use chat, which is asynchronous and allows you to leave the boring work to us like you would with an assistant without waiting on the line. 3) Traditional travel agencies are not tech-forward or personal. Unless it's a friend who knows you booking your flights, they don't remember you and don't know what you like. We believe a mix of humans and computers are necessary for personalization and that neither alone will suffice, and Carry is totally built around this. We remember your past bookings, preferences, and learn over time so you never have to repeat yourself.

@will_yoo Thanks, Will! We do group travel, though there's a long way to go. No product has really cracked this yet, but it's on our minds. Email me at [my first name] [at] carry [dot] travel to try our group experience for your next trip.

@carry @tejasmanohar fyi the link is dead

@greenleaf Great question and glad you liked the product. Fin and other assistants-as-a-service weren't very focused and handled a wide variety of tasks. This made them hard to scale both from a cost perspective (which ultimately led to Fin's pivot) and also quality-- it's hard to make the service personal at scale when people can ask anything and all the requests are different. Carry, however, is completely focused on travel, and while we do more than booking (cancellations, support, changes, group travel, etc.) and may expand further down the road, we plan to stay within the travel domain, as that alone is a massive opportunity (there's trillions of dollars of business travel per year).