Group Flight Search for remote teams planning a retreat - is this possible?
I work at Zapier and we are completely distributed. No single HQ office. We have 250+ [home] offices around the world. Twice a year we plan a retreat and we all come together. It's great. But it costs a ton of money. A ton.
A big part of the planning goes into which location is the perfect balance of awesome and cost-effective. So, what would be really helpful is to have a flight search that takes into account the location of every employee and determines which locations would be the cheapest for the entire team to fly into on any given date.
I don't know how flight searches work and I realized flight prices change frequently, but perhaps this search would give an approximate list of cost-effective choices.
Anyone know if it would be possible to create this?
Hi Bryce!
It's funny how I found this post. I had this same problem, but when travelling with friends, so I learnt to code and created Halfway Flights. When I came here to post it earlier, I made a random 'travel' search and found this post!
Anyway, I created Halfway Flights cause even having people fly from 3-4 origins was a pain (multiple tabs open, non compatible schedules, uneven prices...) and I wanted to be able to make it easier for my friends and I.
I just posted about it here, would appreciate your feedback! It's still a work in progress tho :)
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/so-much-time-spent-building-this-time-to-validate-feccdce7cf
My solution is a B2C free for users that aims to monetize via commisions and not suitable for a big company.
In the case of Zapier, I'd recommend www.trooptravel.com, which is a B2B which uses big data and lots of algorithms to optimize the trip organization (total price, visas, CO2 emissions....). I believe you have to pay an annual license but savings costs seem to be much greater.
Hope it helps!
Nice!! Whew given Covid we are delaying any retreats indefinitely. Strange times.
Glad to see some solutions pop up for this
Hi Bryce, I've been working on ideas around group travel and I think this is definitely doable. I'd love to jump into a call with you to learn more about your use case! My email is ivy@studioxolo.com :)
Yeah let's do it! I'll shoot you an email.
Hey Bryce, this is a pretty nice idea. Quite a lot of companies these days have remote teams and more importantly spend the time and money to organise an annual meet.
Might be worth talking to @briankidwell who runs Scott's Cheap Flights. They have been featured here in IH a few times.
Yeah, it certainly would help us over at Zapier. We'll see if I can get in touch with Brian! It would be great to learn more from them.
That's a really interesting idea. I work with Toptal (also remote) and having been to a European gathering earlier this year, I know that it cost a lot of money (and hard work) to make it happen.
Yeah there's definitely some room for efficiency, here. After scouring the internet I found a super small tool that does what I need but is limited to 5 people. So at least I know the idea is somewhat possible: https://www.tripmatch.org/
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Yea I've been doing some research about this, happy to share my notes if you're interested :)
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Right on! Ivy (@studioxolo) is working on this - perhaps you two can connect to see if there's any joint efforts that can sprout up (or healthy competition!). Feel free to send me an email and I can shoot over the notes I have from the research I did internally here at Zapier. Would love to see this become a reality.
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