👋 Hi everyone, I’m Nikk, founder at Bliss. Bliss is the most affordable way to fly anywhere.
I started Bliss out of personal frustration when I had to travel to Asia but couldn't drop ~$1400 at once for a ticket. I didn’t have a credit card and looked around for financing options but surprisingly couldn’t find one for flights. Then I realized this is a big problem, especially for other young people.
Bliss helps you (1) find & compare the cheapest flights, (2) pay for said flights over time, and (3) lets you know when cheaper options come up.
We’ve tested our platform with a small group of users with great feedback, and we’re now slowly rolling out access to a slightly bigger crowd via invite only. Any feedback would be appreciated!
This could be very useful for some as many people can't afford a $500+ flight in the event of a family emergency or sudden departure.
@nikkw0ng, do you limit this to people with good credit? How do you ensure you get paid in full?
@rrhoover Hey Ryan! Excited to see you reaching out!
The financing company that we're working with will handle the loans and all the associated details. We're a lot more interested in helping people find and book great deals than we are in the minutia of handling the financing ourselves. :-)
@rrhoover@nikkw0ng I'm not sure it's "minutia" considering a lot of your interested customers will likely have less than perfect credit. Your finance company is either going to have:
A - Very high interest rates (e.g. 30+%) or
B - Very low approval rates (e.g. < 10% of your customers will get approved).
In other words, if only a tenth of the people that want your product can get it, the financing aspect isn't minutia.
Might want to consider being upfront about that when you start letting people apply.
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@rrhoover@nikkw0ng@seekwell_io I agree with Mike here guys...having worked with a similar product focused on the UK market, the approval rates are very low. The conversion rate for selling a flight is low enough already, adding the complexity of a finance/loan application in between just drives down conversion rates even further.
As everyone has mentioned though...great launch, and great design!
@nikkw0ng great UI, congrats!
Would you be interested to partner with Flystein (https://flystein.com) ?
For example if your client was not able to obtain the credit and is short by few hundred $ to pay for the flights then maybe Flystein experts could fit that budget.
This seems like a really cool idea, and I like your design a lot! I can definitely see how this would be useful for me when trying to travel internationally or even just to more expensive cities within the US.
Couple of questions for you:
1. What kinds of fees or interest are charged to the customers? From what I can tell this is basically a loan, so I'd assume your users can't be getting it for free :).
2. If this is basically a loan, how are you handling the regulatory aspect of lending? What about the capital aspect? It could get very expensive to finance loans to new users as you grow.
I'm definitely signing up for the beta to check it out!
@nneuman Heya Nick thanks for getting in touch—and for the kind words! :-)
Yeah, so we're directly working with an independent financing company to provide short-term loans/credit to our users. The risk is taken by the partner and we do not make any money from interest. They have really attractive rates so it ends up actually being a really good deal.
The airlines pay us a small commission every time a user books a ticket through Bliss. This commission does not add any additional cost to the customer.
Hope to see you on the platform!
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Will be excited to see this flourish in the travel realm!
Pros:Great user interface on top of a great new spin on travel.
Cons:none so far, it looks great!