Hi everyone! The TRAVO team has been working on this challenging project for over a year and we're extremely excited to share it with all of you Product Hunters! We created this product because sometimes our purpose for travel isn't flexible in terms of timing. Personally, I had situations where I needed to get somewhere by some specific time for meetings, weddings, and other events by a specific time but the planning process seemed broken. Traditionally, almost every travel site optimizes for price while making timing flexible. Lots of day-long searches, or finding the cheapest weekend to go somewhere. In addition, they seemed to just give me a ton of flights that didn't work for my trip; leaving me sitting there trying to see if my flight gets in on time for my meeting. I also would always have my Google Maps open to see where my meeting is relative to the hundreds of hotel choices, and if there's in heavy traffic areas, getting from one place to another on time is pretty difficult. TRAVO optimizes for timing and requires the user to just input a single thing - a traveler's commitment location or date(s).
TRAVO uses billions of data points to formulate a complete itinerary and provide timing-centric tools around your objectives to modify flights, lodging, and ground transportation. We have every major flight carrier, over 800,000 lodging options, and ground options that include ridesharing, public transit and rentals. The entire trip is in front of you and any changes you make will instantly recalculate your trip. We also make it easy to share with friends and co-workers. I think there are lots of different uses for this product and I'm excited to make it open and completely free to the public and see what people do with it! Happy to answer any questions you have!
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@taelee Congrats Tae! Travel search is so broken and time consuming right now, this is a great idea.
This is seriously going to change the world of business travel, or just mission-oriented travel in general. Even if I have a dedicated assistant, it could take them hours to plan all the details to a conference in Shenzhen (or some city unfamiliar to you or the assistant). Now it's all done in less than 5 minutes, from departure ground transportation to the airport to the flight itself, all the way to arrival ground transportation to the hotel for the event, and back. Everything is meticulously planned algorithmically using the huge data warehouse at the disposal of Travo. This is a tremendous execution on technology integration and product.
@kuangwei_kdubbs_hwang thank you Kuangwei! We'll continue to improve and make it better for you!
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What an awesome product! Let's face it: planning a work trip sucks. It's time-consuming, clunky, and broken when it comes to being tailored to your schedule. I tried TRAVO and it is SO much better. In a few minutes, I was done. All I did was tell it where I needed to be & when and it did the rest. No need to flip back-&-forth between different airlines, hotels, and maps to piece together a trip and I wasn't left feeling like there was a better itinerary out there for me. TRAVO did all the legwork. How great is that! Booking a trip shouldn't be one size fits all -- TRAVO understands that and designed the trip around me. Do yourself a favor and try it out!
Just tested this out and really love it. Based on the amount of time it spent me to book a trip for someone recently, this may save me a ton of time next time I need to book a trip. EDIT: I will add the the flights are sending me in quite a weird way. Seeing what would happen booking a meeting in SF, departing from San Diego took me by way of Salt Lake City which is quite out of the way. I see that I can change the flights if I don't like what was automatically populated, but SD to SF should be straightforward.
@katie_weiler Thanks Katie! Keep checking back, this tool is about to get really good, very quick!
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@taelee@katie_weiler I had the same experience. I tried it for a conference in Toronto and it has me flying in and out of Pittsburgh and STAYING in Pittsburgh. Hmmmmm :( Also, traveling on my preferred airline / rental / hotel is table stakes for me for a travel tool.
@justinpirie@katie_weiler Hey guys this is great feedback. One of the biggest challenges we have is finding the balance between load times vs. recommendations. If we were to do a deep search, the load time for the initial search would increase by 2X but the recommendations would be much more accurate. Instead, what we tried to do is improve the selection tools after it gives the user a "starting point" - you should be able to find the flight you want using the filters, etc. At the same time, we're planning to develop a "deep search" vs. "light search" functionality that the user can get in preferences. @justinpirie, the behavior you describe sounds completely different from Katie's. It shouldn't recommend you to stay in pittsburgh under any circumstance when you have no commitments there. Can you do me a favor and send me your search URL to help@travo.com so I can take a look? Lastly, for preferred airlines, etc. have you checked out user preferences? After, you added those preferences, if you go to the hotel/flight/rental tabs, you can click on "show preferred" which will surface all of your preferences to the top! Let us know if you have any issues by using the chat function at the lower right hand corner of the site.
@justinpirie@katie_weiler@travo Ah- got it. BTW guys, the reason why this feedback is so amazing is that just by you sending me these messages, the engineers are figuring out how to improve our results without too much loading time difference and we might have a solution. :) To our guys, feedback from actual users are really motivating. Please check back tomorrow for it to take effect. Thank you everyone!!
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Very interesting... Shared it on FB.com/groups/inditraveller to get more people to try it
@mattrbruno Thanks Matt - I think there are great opportunities within the travel industry focusing on a particular usage scenario or a specific user. Appreciate the support! This is only the beginning... :)
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@taelee Awesome Idea. It addresses a real problem. I searched and found that Travo was mentioned in a Skift article almost seven months back. Now that Travo is live and kicking, may be you can pitch for an article on Skift featuring Travo. Kudos for your great work again.
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