Listen on your favorite app
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Welcome to Travel Buddy
Did you know that packaging your travel needs into a single bundle—like booking your flights, hotel, rental car, and activities all through the airline—can offer you significant discounts often as high as 30-40% off your total travel costs? In the latest episode of the Travel Buddy podcast we explore the ins and outs of dynamic travel packaging. If you were to book a flight and bundle it with a hotel, car rental, or activities, you might think that manually piecing together the best options would save you money. However, the reality is quite different. When you manually build your itinerary—choosing the best air route and booking with the same carrier, such as American Airlines, along with the best hotel you can find—you often end up spending a lot more. So next time you're planning a trip, consider the benefits of bundling your travel needs via the airline, or using a packaged travel site. It could save you both time and money.
Transcript
Hello, Noel, and welcome back to the travel buddy podcast. You're becoming kind of a regular guest, which I really love. So, um, this is great. So you are the CEO of switch fly and today you have a travel hack, if I can call it that.
I do.
Okay. All right. So, uh, if you want to travel somewhere, there is one way that you can piece together a Journey, so you buy the flight then you look for good hotels and you look for rental cars that sort of thing Um sometimes individually because you're looking for the best rate the right location, whatever And then there's also these like kind of bundling Services.
If you call it like that, like Google flights or Expedia or whatever. And then there is a vacation bundling platforms, if I'm understanding you, right. And one of those options can save you thousands of dollars. If you're trying to put together a travel itinerary, tell me about this. Why is this the case?
Which option do I choose? And, and just, yeah, help me save money when I'm trying to go somewhere.
Yeah. So, um, I spent this weekend looking for hotels in Edinburgh, right? Like searching, searching, searching, searching, doing all these crazy things. Most consumers, most people don't know this, right? But most consumers for leisure travel. End up pinging all kinds of sites. They're looking for the best deal, right?
Where do I go? I can go to, you know, the, the big name, right? The Expedia and bookings. com and Priceline and hotel. Like all those are great sites. Right. And the interesting thing about behind the scenes, right under the curtains or behind the curtains of, of the industry is that between hotels and air carriers, right, there is a relationship.
And the air carriers, right, have access to special rates, if you will. And those special rates are, are when you bundle something together, right. Or package it together. And, and there's lots of sites. Like you can go to United Airlines does this, uh, American Airlines does this, JetBlue does this. You can go to Expedia and see this.
Most people don't know to click on this box, right. But this box actually triggers. A bunch of special codes, you know, down in the bowels of, of where all the codes live in, in all these systems that are basically like, Oh, this is going to be a bundle, right. Or this is going to be a package. So let's apply this rate code, right.
For our, for our segment, for our air. And, you know, if they've some, some of them have preferred hotels, some of them just have special rates. And some of the hotels are like, Oh, if it's a package, let's use this rate code, right? And it combines you, you go to your cart and you check out. But the truth is you cannot find those rate codes by yourself.
No matter what you do, you have to basically be in the bowels of the, you know, the code encyclopedia to know how to get those rate codes together. And um, And it's interesting because you can go and you can go to one of these sites and, you know, put in, you know, if I wanted to fly, um, you know, uh, from Denver to Miami and you add a package of flight plus hotel, maybe plus car or activities, and you bundle that all together.
When you come out the end, right, and you take your little notepad and you write down, well, how much is this going to cost? And then you go and you try to build that itinerary manually, right? I'm going to try to find the best air route and you have to use the same carrier, right? So I'm going to book American airlines, you know, Denver to Miami, and I'm going to book the best hotel I can find on bookings.
com or whatever. You're not going to beat it. Right. It's, it's really, I mean, it's. Um, it's probably 30 to 40 percent right of a discount when you do, when you look and you go to those packaged travel saving sites and you really understand the market and how it works. No,
Uh, why is it this way? What, what is it that is, is it, uh, you know, maybe just the culture of how the industry's developed? Is it the economics play in the favor of some of the airlines or it's a technological challenge to,
it's been, this has been, this has been this way for a very long time. Um, most people don't know about it, right? I've been here. Two and a half, three years almost. I didn't, I never knew about this. Right. And you start talking to people like, Oh, well, let me show you this. Let me show you how to save thousands of dollars.
And it's literally because, um, You know, the airlines want to service their members, right? And they offer this as a benefit and it, and in a lot of ways, it's kind of a side business for the airlines. It's not their main, you know, hauling people and flights and luggage and cargo and all that other stuff.
But. But they have these other kind of lines of business that do these kind of vacation packages. You know, American airlines is a perfect example. They have, um, you know, Caribbean destinations all over the place, right? So you can, if you're looking for a trip to Mexico or Puerto Rico or Dominican Republic or those places, they fly a lot of those routes regularly.
And so being able to build a package solution just made a whole bunch of sense for them. I mean, they, they They have been a SwitchFlight customer since 2006, right? And so, you know, this is not net new technology, it's just most people don't know it exists.
Yeah. Well, it's, uh, the travel world online and trying to figure out where I'm trying to go and how to get there and all the things to do. It's very confusing. There's so many options. I mean, so, so, so let me break it down from a, let's say we have some listeners that are very avid travelers and they've got a really great credit card, you know, either a loyalty card, Like American Express Platinum, or they've got like an airline branded card.
And then they know about some of these sites out there that you can find cheap flight deals, you know, uh, there's tons of them. So I'm not going to list them all, but there's cheap flight deals out there. There's Google flights. There's, and then there's these vacation package platforms that you're talking about.
Where do you even begin? Is it like, Hey, if you've got a, if you've got a branded card with an airline, start with them. You know, or where do you yeah, is that the that's
Well, because you can exchange your points, right? So, the reason they have you give those cards, right, is so that you use the points, right, for, for care, you know, for carriage with them, um, and come back and use those points as discounts and things like that. And that's, you know, that is a good way to, um, apply points against travel.
Right. And it's, um, you see a lot of those, I mean, I think every, Airline probably has a card, right? And the other option is that, you know, through the big financial services companies, there's a lot of, um, incentives to use points and they have, you know, the, the Voyager card or the whatever. Uh, some of those programs may or may not do some of these packaging programs per se.
They probably all have access to it, but the airlines and specifically, um, run this as a business, right? And so even an airline, the airlines control their own rates, right? And so they can say, you know what, for the, for the segment from, uh, New York to Orlando. Right? We want to run this as a package with a hotel and a Disney hotel.
Right? And so they've negotiated a special rate with, let's say, Disney. Right? And because they're the airline, they can actually control what the rate is for the seat that you're sitting in. And they might lower it in order to sell the package deal. And that's where you get the best savings, I think, is, is, Really going through the, you know, the airline and, and using those kind of promotional things.
Some of them, you know, some of our customers run promotional offers and it's 400, 500, 600 off if you book a package. Right? So if you look at the. That just the upfront savings and then you apply a coupon code of five hundred dollars off If you do the math and you really sit down and pencil it out You could look at it as you're getting the airfare and the hotel is almost free
man
if you do the math, right?
Yeah, it's really good.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, great Okay, that's super helpful. Do you do you have any advice on whether? If you're if you know, you want to travel let's say in the fall. I know I want to go somewhere I want to plan a trip with my family Is it better to pick a destination or pick a deal? And just sort of be open to where you want to go.
You ever thought through that
Um, you know, that's a hard one, right? Because you know, whenever it's so funny, right? When, whenever we travel, You're like, I think everyone does this, like trying to figure out the price, trying to, you know, whittle this down into the, you know, dollar per step that you're actually going to take right over this, you know, week long or two week long vacation.
But then whenever you go and then you come back, you don't ever think about that again. Right? Like, like you're, you know, it's more about the experience. So I think for me, it's learning about. New places and figure out where you want to go, right? What's interesting to you and then try to construct the best financial deal that you can But you know, you could go to Death Valley in the summer because it's cheap I don't know if you want to really do that right for the benefit of your family and so You know, there's there's deals But then there's also the experience that you bring back with it.
So I would focus on, um, you know, where do you want to go? Like, do you want to go llama hiking in Peru with somebody? Because that's really cool. And everybody comes back and they get pictures, right? Like I have of their experience in Africa, their experience in Europe or experience. You know, there's great places just in the country that you're in, right?
Be where your feet are. And, you know, you can go local and you can go have a great time as well. So
Wise words. Thank you. Okay. So I know this topic, this whole, you know, uh, category of things we're talking about, it's called dynamic packaging. What else is important for, uh, consumers to know if they're thinking about traveling somewhere and just how this works so that they can, they can get the best deals, best experiences
- I think a lot of, um, A lot of the way it works, at least in the upfront things is, you know, if you want to put a car in, if you want to do activities, do it all at your upfront purchase, because it doesn't necessarily a lot of, a lot of companies don't let you come back and add stuff and get more discounts.
Right? So if you know, you need a car, if you know, you need the hotel for a week, if you know, you need the flight, like try to put it all in the cart up front. Don't try to Piecemeal it together as you go along, it's more about, okay, I'm going to book this flight, this hotel, this car, and maybe these three activities and put it all together.
Amazing. Amazing. Now, switch Fly has some products, uh, that you guys are, are releasing, have released soon, um, that is geared toward putting some of these things together. There's ai, there's ml. We talked about that. That kind of basically looks for the best rate across the world's largest inventory, pulls it all together and then kind of create some of these bundles like this.
Um, is there any insight you guys are, are releasing on these new products or anything coming soon
We just continue to improve them. And so, um, you know, the machine learning team is, has identified, you know, special deals and opportunities because the hotels do change the rates, um, pretty regularly. Right. And so, um, you know, We are effectively at what we call a dynamic packaging platform. So it is being able to take air plus this and plus this and put it all together.
And that affords the consumer, um, some really good discounts and opportunities. The trick though, is that we aren't really direct to consumer. We run through people who have loyalty programs. And so, you know, my joke with people is we're the silent, silent partner. A lot of people don't know that we're behind the scenes, the travel option that people are using.
Um, and you know, when you get to that checkout cart and it says, you know, you've saved 254 or 550, usually that's because you're using packaging.
Okay. No, this has been super helpful. Travel hacks, saving thousands of dollars by finding these particular platforms and bundling everything together all up front and you get those discounts applied. Amazing.
You got it.
Thank you very much. Okay. This is great. I can't wait to tell my wife because she's going to love going somewhere else for cheaper.
There you go. All right. Thanks,
All right. Thanks. Now we'll see you next time.
All right. Cheers. Bye. Bye
