Launch HN: Solve (YC S17) – We Save International Travelers Hours of Time
Our service sounds like it'd be expensive, but it is actually quite reasonable for someone who's already traveling internationally. For instance, our service for two people arriving in London costs $225 and in Hong Kong it costs $210. It's about $75/person from there. Many of our clients are business travelers and families, but we can help anyone who values their time and/or wants some extra assistance getting through the airport.
I stumbled upon this idea when a friend and I were flying from Seoul to Bangkok. I wondered if there was a way for us to get through customs more quickly, so I searched Google and found a (rather shady-looking!) website for a company that said it could help. I took the risk of giving this company our passport and credit card details, and amazingly, it all worked out. When we arrived, an agent met us at the gate, we were whisked through the airport process in minutes, and the agent helped us get a taxi to our hotel.
I wanted to book the service for other trips, but there was no easy way to do it. So, my co-founders (Shawn and Justin) and I built Solve. We’d love your feedback and are happy to answer any questions.
206 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadThat is a complicated, unsexy business though. It will be hard to pull off on a scale, in many airports.
No offense, and maybe I'm not the target customer, and my international travel outside the US/EU is limited, but this seems like the kind of behavior that's going to make other travelers angry.
Is "place in line holding" just more common in other parts of the world?
I've been through a priority queue in business class, but this sounds like a much cheaper option if you just want to fly economy. I will definitely try this out on my next trip.
Actually a bigger business opportunity might be to sell the "pass the queues" access on the fly (without pre-booking). In most cases I would be a bit hesitant to spend money on these in advance, but if things don't go as planned I might be interested in paying to speed things up.
I'm sure the 1% will love it, but due to the political calculus, your success will make the world a worse place.
As for places like SFO - in the US in general (Miami and JFK airport being the exceptions), no company has access to meet clients at the gate for international arrivals, so this service isn't as in demand.
We're also still working on crafting our wording and how to pitch the value props to our clients.
For airports where it says does not include fast track immigrations/customs (except for the US), we usually have an expedited immigrations/customs. Another agent will go stand in line a head of time and you can cut in with them, or they'll know the immigration officer and simply walk you to the front. It's true for all airports we service except for the US airports.
It is only officially supported on Nexus and Pixel phones, which are great devices. You can get around the limitation by doing some Googling as well if you insist on using a different device.
"By no means perfect" doesn't mean "isn't perfect", it means "it's actually quite a long way away from being perfect".
I check in on the state of Fi every so often, and from what a lot of users are saying about it, it seems to be at best beta quality, and that's using the handful of officially supported devices. Perhaps in the countries you've been to with the device you use it's fine, but it doesn't seem anywhere near as reliable as picking up a local SIM.
Throw in the fact that it's not officially supported for most devices and that it's only available in the USA makes it a complete non-starter for me.
Also:
> if you insist on using a different device.
Having a device that Fi doesn't support isn't me being unreasonably stubborn like you seem to think. If Fi doesn't support the device that I use, that's Fi's shortcoming, not my own.
Singapore has done this in a great way. As soon as you take your bags and go out there are display boards for SIM purchases - quite quick as well. Super friendly staff.
EDIT: changed Europe to Schengen.
[1] http://httparchive.org/interesting.php
For the casual traveler, it might not make the most sense, but for someone who does a lot of international travel, it's a great option.
The SIM is pay as you go, you can refill it at most newspaper stands.
"Roaming charges end on 15 June 2017. Europeans travelling within the EU countries will Roam Like at Home and pay domestic prices for roaming calls, SMS and data."
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/policies/roami...
Happily using my UK SIM and data plan while traveling through several EU countries.
> Happily using my UK SIM and data plan while traveling through several EU countries.
The Brexit should fix that for you.
The data is slow, but definitely good enough. It is good enough to use google hangouts to call phones back in the states.
They delivered it to my hotel and it was easy to set things up.
As another example even though > 40% of users don't have a landline more often than not you can not call a Japanese toll free number (0120) from a cellphone.
There's also the issue that unlike the USA where you can't tell from the phone number if it's a cellphone or a landline, in Japan you can. Cellphone numbers start with 070, 080, or 090 where as landlines start with different prefixes. Because of this you're judged based on your number. A person or company without a landline is judged to be less trust worthy than one with. Oh, and landlines require $700 to start (though that may have been finally fixed)
Disclaimer: I am just a happy Fi customer
Could have used this coming back from Rome to the United States via Spain. Ended up going through customs 4 times just to make a transfer.
Curious how difficult it was to do this for 500+ airports so quickly, especially since you're a private company and operating beyond security gates in an era of permanently heightened security.
We provide you with a dedicated agent/problem solver (pun intended) that takes you from curb to gate and gate to curb. We're also really helpful on international trips where there are language barriers and insanely long immigrations/customs lines.
We also make sure you're safely off in your vehicle when you exit the airport and your'e not getting ripped off on a taxi or car. For example, in places like Mexico City or Beijing you're swarmed by drivers trying to get you in their car as soon as you exit the airport.
It wasn't easy to launch in 500 airports. Through a ton of research and work, we were able to partner with many companies and individuals who had the appropriate access at each airport. The key for us was that we wanted to create the one trusted, consistent place book this service.
VIP lounges, fast track and other premium services are all different from airport to airport, procedure for ordering them is unpredictable and sometimes cumbersome (like, faxing a request on the company blank and paying through the wire transfer ONLY, no credit cards accepted - that isn't an exception, but more like the accepted practice). If you will figure it out to the Uber level, when i can take an iPhone app, type in my booking reference for the flight, pay through the attached paypal account or CC, predictable and reasonable price, and someone will meet me at the entrance to the airport or off the plane and get through everything - that will be a killer!
My co-founder Sarah and I just moved from SF to travel the world while we bootstrap our startup, Canny. I'm also a huge fan of products like Shyp, Instacart, Prime Now, and Gobble that let you trade money for time. I think I could be your target customer.
However, $210 sounds pretty darn expensive for HK. I just went there last Nov. It didn't take much research at all to figure out how to get the 2 of us downtown on the bus for $40-50. The immigration process was smooth.
Maybe I haven't felt the pain point you describe, or maybe I'm not wealthy/spendy enough to be your target customer.
My feedback for you would be to work on crafting a story that sounds like "oh man, that's a life saver" rather than "save a few hours". Or maybe be more obvious that your product is just for the very wealthy and business travelers - like a high end credit card or something?
Just my 2 cents, hope it was useful. Best of luck!
With Gobble I'll happily pay a weekly subscription and make dinner all the time. With Solve, most people only travel a few times a year.
Maybe this reinforces that Solve is more for (frequent) biz travelers, where it would be stickier.
I have a few friends who are management consultants who fly literally every week, their companies might pay $200 for them to save a few hours. It's probably easier to charge a fortune 500 a few hundred bucks per employee than it is individuals. Worth noting that it's US-only travel though.
It's kinda like when people started expensing Ubers from the airport rather than taxis.
To your point, $210 in HK isn't for everyone, but a number of people find the cost quite reasonable for the time savings and safety factor.
We're new and still crafting our pitch, so I definitely appreciate your feedback there as well!
Would you think it's a life saver if the hotel you checked into at your destination gave you a smartphone that gives you access to the Internet, Google Maps, and other travel-related apps while you can also use it to Wifi hotspot your own personal phone?
My wife was just in Accra and received an Android device like you described at her hotel. My advice to her was not to use it for anything that involved logging in, because honestly, that just sounds shady.
I'd rather just have a SIM card. I buy these at the airport anyway.
Same questions for customers: Agents could acknowledge that they are there and waiting (with the customer's desired name/special request). It could also function as a customer support interface as well as providing the support phone number.
This seems like it would be very attractive for business-to-business with traveling employees as well.
Good luck!
Plus, our clients have the agent's information and the agents have our client's information, so they can communicate directly if necessary. In the near future, the client and the agent will have a Lyft-like experience on arrival or departure, where our agent sees the customer information on their agent app, and the customer sees the agent information on their customer app. This will be a massive improvement to the industry.
Thanks for your feedback/questions!
That's not going to happen without a data connection on the customer's phone though, which means either expensive roaming, buying a SIM card before they meet the agent, or fighting through crappy airport Wi-Fi sign-up pages. You could potentially partner with the airport Wi-Fi and have your application authenticate them to the Wi-Fi network automatically though. Do you have any other thoughts on how to solve the data problem?
Either way, we already over-communicate to the client to make sure they know what to do. Eventually, the agent's app will be helpful too, so the agent can recognize the client if the client uploads their photo to our system.
Your idea about Wi-Fi is certainly something to explore as well.
The website though seems so vague. It is really hard to understand exactly what I would be paying for. There is a little bit of everything and nothing is very concrete.
I think the entire airport experience is a mess and one of the few things I can think of that's actually worse than 20 yrs ago. If you guys gain deep knowledge about their process and can then make it more efficient via technology, it would be huge.
Good luck.
Nice service, lots of luck.
For consumer facing product, they find you one of two ways.
1. Social (Paid ads) 2. Google search (Paid ads)
I am not talking about viral products or brands, I am talking about the average service (like this one).
I saw many companies do this mistake, some paid 10K some paid 2m<, all made a mistake IMHO.
Like it or not, Google is the entry point and how consumers will find your service.
Eg. five-letter .com search: https://namebio.com/?s==ITO4gTM5ITM
Also the weekly domain sales report by Ron Jackson is another good place to get a sense of current sales: http://dnjournal.com/domainsales.htm (I believe these are included in namebio's DB, but regardless Ron adds some color commentary to the numbers)
As for fast track immigrations/customs in the US, we're only able to help in some cases at JFK and MIA. Basically no company has access to meet travelers at their gate in the US. We're working to make this happen though, and there are pilot programs at a few airports coming later this year!
But...
After checking I am a bit disappointed:
- Istanbul: $235.00 Not including "Fast Track Immigration/Customs" for 2 passengers you can get local fast track card (I think it is around $500 for a year) which grants fast track on immigration/customs and also for all security checkpoints for 2 pax
- Amsterdam: $345.00 Includes fast track vs Privium Basic €121 yearly incl. VAT
- London: $220.00 Includes fast track vs AFAIK it is around 50 GBP for fast track for one time
Also I think if target is business travelers, a lot of airlines provide complimentary fast track for business class travelers. I don't recall not using fast track when flying business.
TBH I dont think Meet and Assist has big value, unless you provide some added value there.
Also at least I was expecting some lounge access on departures.
And frankly, the 5% discount they're throwing out is more insulting than offering no discounts at all.
Edit: I think to further clarify, the problem is that this seems most useful to casual/recreational travelers, but at business traveler pricing. E.g. if I fly to Amsterdam frequently for business, I'm not likely to need help navigating Schiphol AND you're competing with Privium (cheaper, more benefits). If I fly to Amsterdam as a tourist, I need the help but am unlikely to find the price appealing. IMO Solve is better off targeting casual travelers at a much cheaper cost and leave the business travelers to the clubs & memberships they already belong to.
For airports where it says does not include, we usually have an expedited immigrations/customs. Another agent will go stand in line a head of time and you can cut in with them, or they'll know the immigration officer and simply walk you to the front. It's true for all airports we service except for the US airports.
We've found that a good amount of families and the elderly benefit from the meet and assist. We also have a fair amount of high profile clients that want to avoid the paparazzi.
We consider our agents problem solvers. For example, we had a client leave his phone and passport on the plane in Singapore. The agent ran back, talked to the airline staff, got onto the plane to grab the passport and phone and was back in 5 minutes.
Lastly, our agent syncs up with the driver or helps you buy a train ticket which has been a huge value for our clients. Basically not having to think about how to leave the airport - our agents are taking care of everything for you.
If I would be in said line and observe such a behaviour, I'd be really pissed.
Dubai airport has a service called 'marhaba' which basically does this but only in Dubai.
It's great for helping someone who is older or disabled figure out their connecting flights through an airport.
Smart to bring this to more places.
Your pricing is pretty spot on too, it's a bit less expensive than marhaba btw.
Otherwise, yeah, we want to bring it to more places as we get a better understanding of the demand in places where the service isn't currently offered.
I registered a domain name a while back 'DeliveryOnArrival.com' with the idea to also accelerate business travel. The plan was that you could travel with less stuff (and therefore could bring only hand luggage) and get what normally use and need delivered on arrival: at the airport gate, in your Uber, in your Hertz rental, or at your hotel. Never executed on it though, maybe a nice add-on service (I would use it).
As for your baggage idea, check out a company called Dufl http://www.dufl.com/ We've spoken to them and they have an awesome service for not having to deal with your luggage.
$225 is rather pricey for me. Its a bit beyond my budget, but id happily pay $60ish to get through security/customs faster on my out to Malaysia from Heathrow if it was possible in anyway. If anyone from Solve is reading this please let me know if you can do something for me?
Back to normal travelers - I wish there were a free wiki that covered all this, since it seems like it's just a matter of having the right information. Like knowing which office to go in, what forms to have ready, etc. I guess it'd be more targeted towards casual travelers who won't pay $200 for this kind of service.
I went on an extended backpacking trip recently across 5 continents, and Wikitravel was unbelievably invaluable. Because it's a wiki, it has all the tiny up-to-date details that you're not going to find on more professionally-produced websites, right down to sidestepping tourist rip-offs like "if you go around the corner to XYZ plaza when you land, you can get a taxi for $20 cheaper than taking it from the airport".
Wikitravel is very similar - I believe wikivoyage forked from wikitravel some years back, and my understanding is that many of the primary contributors moved to wikivoyage.
For our service, however, it's not necessarily just about finding the "right" counter or "right" service it's having your own personal problem Solver to help you through the airport. If you're a company and you're sending an employee on an international trip for the first time, you want that reassurance that your employee (often your most valuable asset) is safe and comfortable. After all comfortable employees are productive employees.
p.s. solve isnt a great domain I hope you change it, something like traveller.com
ps. Whatever SEO marketer you went to, abandon them ASAP. The spammed geo pages (in this case: airport pages) with duplicate content is going to impact your rankings negatively. It is considered a "black hat" SEO technique. That or differentiate the content in a meaningful way. I only checked 4~ of the pages and they were all the same, so I'm assuming they all are. I could be wrong, but even then you'd want to change any that are too similar.
E: A small grammar fix.
Thanks for the SEO feedback, we'll definitely relook our strategy!
When I return to the US (San Francisco) on first class or business tickets there is no segregation of lines/service - you queue up in the big line and wait your turn (45-60 minutes later) like everyone else.
Other than diplomats, I see no mechanism for expediting immigration/customs inbound to the US and my (short, reckless) research suggested that expedited immigration/customs is not a perk for any level of ticket price or "elite" status.
Perhaps I misunderstand ?
Global Entry [0], if you are a US citizen or permanent resident.
It is life changing. Immigration takes under a minute at a kiosk and there is a priority lane at Customs.
[0] https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-...
Ok. But how are they (Solve) going to do it ?
Or is the US entry side of things not part of their product offering ?
A lot of our clients flying domestic, however, still find value in the service especially families and the elderly.
Edit: I see from other comments in the thread that you do this at JDK/MIA by having one of your agents stand in the queue ahead of your customers and then letting them cut in when they arrive. The British in me finds this abhorrent, and there's no way I'd do it.
Even with Global Entry I've had immigration take 25 minutes at O'Hare.
The last time I did this I had Global Entry and 5 of the 10ish kiosks were broken so that took a fair bit of time as well (you skip immigration but not customs in that case).
[edit] the time I had a truly miserable experience the line for immigration stretched long down the hallway to the immigration hall. It took more than an hour to see where the citizens vs non-citizens lanes began.
If one very consistently flies exactly Delta 6 and is a US citizen, one will very rarely wait more than 15 minutes in Detroit.
It is, unfortunately, very, very easy to spend hours in line. (4th quartile for me is probably 2 hours; max was close to 5.) If one is selected for secondary screening, throw all estimates out window; you've transitioned from routine travel into an adversarial proceeding with the USFG.
[+] Since most airlines operate on schedules which do not change much on a week-to-week basis it is fairly predictable that e.g. 10 AM on a Tuesday, and hence $BAR Flight $BAZ's scheduled arrival window, will be busy, given that N flights from abroad arrive near that window.
I commute internationally for work, but I've bookmarked you then to try out the next time I hit an unfamiliar airport.