[USA][BIZ][10] Seeking a Tech Confounder for a travel rewards startup.

Overview:

I have been in the travel rewards with a few successful companies, some with over 100K profit per month. However, in the last year myself and my partner have dedicated our team to building a revolutionary solution in travel industry. I am the expert in the niche (necessary connections and a deep knowledge of the industry) Ops, financials, running a business etc. My partner owns a wildly successful marketing company and by far the smartest marketing mind I have ever spoken to. We have a team of experts in UI/UX and any and all advertising types down the line. We have been paying a dev team to build our product and we are almost ready for launch.

What is the product?

We have built a solution that can search for the price in points across 30 different programs and 100 airlines. Imagine a Google flights for points. However, this already exists (point me is the largest at around a 15M valuation).

The difference is for the first time in about 2 decades we will be able to provide flights cheaper than the airlines themselves. Because we can calculate how many points a ticket is (previously was never possible and not a cheap software to build) we can calculate how much it would cost us to get that ticket. (We buy miles from brokers, via automated system for unlimited scaling)

Let’s look at an example (the best value is in business class tickets and that’s mostly where we will sell).

United is charging $5000 RT for a ticket from ord-LHR in business. This same ticket is 120,000 united miles (standard saver availability). Through our proprietary software we know that exact flight is 120K united miles, no need to manually search for award availability. We know our costs are 1.5 CPP from brokers. So that ticket will cost us $1800, we know united is charging $5000. We can charge whatever we want between that range to stay cheaper than United while also maximizing our rev (obviously more goes into this, and the whole process in general but trying to keep it simple). Best of all we can allow the the client to book this ticket online with amazing UI just as they would book any ticket, select their seat etc. we then handle everything on the backend and can get this ticket ticketed in less than 12 hours.

What about tickets where we aren’t cheaper?

We won’t always be cheaper, the key is we will always match the airlines price or be cheaper. If we can’t be cheaper using our own system the flight will be via an affiliate OTA so we are getting a commission back.

Isn’t this against the airlines rules?

Sort of, so mileage brokering is a T&Cs violation (not what we do, but we do partner with them). But it is fully legal, it has gone to court and was ruled that people have the right to buy and sell their miles. The whole industry is a little over 1B right now.

Where to go from here?

Myself and my partner have basic tech experience but we are not devs by any means, we are looking for a senior engineer to grow into a CTO role ( someone who gets shit done and works hard, my experience with business in general has been most companies do “fake work” meets and BS. We try to spend as much time as possible building the product, we are looking for someone who shares that same passion.