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Comment by namdnay | Hacker News Reader

Interesting... How are you performing the bookings? Are you registered as a travel agent with GDS access? Or are you going through an other agency?

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We're partnered with a travel agency with GDS access. Additionally, we use various other OTAs that give us the full range of inventory for hotels and flights.

In general, travel agents that only use GDS don't have access to budget airlines such as Easyjet or alternative accommodations such as Airbnb or Sonder.

Ok makes sense. So you’re acting as a TMC but without the TA part? I guess the difficulty here is incident support: Say I’ve missed a flight and I need to be rebooked, hotel and taxi notified etc... With a classic TMC I call them on the 24/7 hotline and some agent will do it live for me. In your case the support line would be you right? Because your travel agency might not have access to the airbnb reservations etc. But then isn’t it tricky to intermediate the rebooking discussions between the customer and the agency?

Extra question: how do you manage the non-gds content? Do you ask your travel agency to add remarks to the PNR, or have you built your own database to track these “PNR+extra” bookings?

Sorry, lots of questions but it’s a really interesting idea!

We do the TA part, too. We book flights, hotels, Airbnbs, cars, etc. so we can reschedule everything in incidents, not just one part if customers use us full-service.

And yeah, we have our own database for everything. GDS is just one way to book and a "portal to the airlines" for us

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