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Comment by a_imho | Hacker News Reader

An app for planning holidays with 1 click

What's the closest to this? Is there an app where you can specify a destination/price/date and have a 1 click checkout with your bookings and tickets?

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By definition that app would have to hold on to your payment information, passport numbers and so on; I also think that all the evidence points out to people being willing to click a lot more to save money on holidays by exploring the option space.

I vaguely remember a service posted here where you’d sign up and they’d find a random trip for you and you wouldn’t know where you were going until the day of.

Google flights is probably the closest to one click though. Super fast to view destinations and prices without much effort.

Maybe you are talking about Srprs.me[0]? They are only available in a few countries within Europe, and they only let you travel to to other countries in Europe but it is exactly what you are talking about.

[0] https://srprs.me

Edit: changed link to the correct one.

There’s always going to be limitations because you can’t get visa or vaccinations.

A relationship with a travel agent where it has been established that you want to be very hands off.

That's ofcourse the issue; travel agents have been doing this since forever, but most people now want easy and cheap and travel agents are expensive. So expensive that many people don't use them and go through the pain of arranging all themselves. Very much not 1-click, but much cheaper generally.

Are they? I was under the impression that they mostly work on referral fees/commission. They get paid by the hotels, airlines, cruise companies, etc instead of booking.com or wherever you would look things up yourself

With that, I thought people stopped using them because most find some value in planning their vacations themselves, and the barrier to doing so got easy enough for them to do it. There's a huge subjective component to a lot of choices involved in a holiday. A travel agent seems ideal for someone willing to give up control of those specifics, that just wants to be able to send an email that reads something like "15-28th August. Portugal. I'm thinking something involving forests" and be done with planning.

> Are they? I was under the impression that they mostly work on referral fees/commission.

I like the idea of a travel agent and have tried many times, also for company travel, tried them; I have never had quotes less than 2x higher than finding myself. And others have similar results. Experiences may differ but this is what we generally find in NL / UK.

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