This could be very useful for some as many people can't afford a $500+ flight in the event of a family emergency or sudden departure.
@nikkw0ng, do you limit this to people with good credit? How do you ensure you get paid in full?
@rrhoover Hey Ryan! Excited to see you reaching out!
The financing company that we're working with will handle the loans and all the associated details. We're a lot more interested in helping people find and book great deals than we are in the minutia of handling the financing ourselves. :-)
@rrhoover@nikkw0ng I'm not sure it's "minutia" considering a lot of your interested customers will likely have less than perfect credit. Your finance company is either going to have:
A - Very high interest rates (e.g. 30+%) or
B - Very low approval rates (e.g. < 10% of your customers will get approved).
In other words, if only a tenth of the people that want your product can get it, the financing aspect isn't minutia.
Might want to consider being upfront about that when you start letting people apply.
Report
@rrhoover@nikkw0ng@seekwell_io I agree with Mike here guys...having worked with a similar product focused on the UK market, the approval rates are very low. The conversion rate for selling a flight is low enough already, adding the complexity of a finance/loan application in between just drives down conversion rates even further.
As everyone has mentioned though...great launch, and great design!
@nikkw0ng great UI, congrats!
Would you be interested to partner with Flystein (https://flystein.com) ?
For example if your client was not able to obtain the credit and is short by few hundred $ to pay for the flights then maybe Flystein experts could fit that budget.
This is awesome. I am definitely going to check this out. Any chance you are going to partner up with Scott's Cheap Flights? Seems like a natural fit together. I already use them to find cheap international flights to book.
@jgoells That's actually in our immediate agenda! We love Scott's hand-picked deals and would love to incorporate them into our Getaway Alerts feature (adding a human touch). Keep posted for announcements!
This seems like a really cool idea, and I like your design a lot! I can definitely see how this would be useful for me when trying to travel internationally or even just to more expensive cities within the US.
Couple of questions for you:
1. What kinds of fees or interest are charged to the customers? From what I can tell this is basically a loan, so I'd assume your users can't be getting it for free :).
2. If this is basically a loan, how are you handling the regulatory aspect of lending? What about the capital aspect? It could get very expensive to finance loans to new users as you grow.
I'm definitely signing up for the beta to check it out!
@nneuman Heya Nick thanks for getting in touch—and for the kind words! :-)
Yeah, so we're directly working with an independent financing company to provide short-term loans/credit to our users. The risk is taken by the partner and we do not make any money from interest. They have really attractive rates so it ends up actually being a really good deal.
The airlines pay us a small commission every time a user books a ticket through Bliss. This commission does not add any additional cost to the customer.
Hope to see you on the platform!
Report
Stunning landing page...
In terms of the product this is very similar to https://flymble.com/ which launched on PH recently (https://www.producthunt.com/post... you guys see it?
They do the same thing but I think they're currently UK focused although looking to expand further into Europe and the US.
I think the winner in this space will be the product which offers the widest global offering which means partnering with more finance providers.
@cmen Cool to know that there are some like minded people over in the UK interested in this kind of thing as well. I'm sure everyone's working super-duper hard so we'll just have to see! :-)
Report
@cmen Nice. Also, @amamarfo's https://www.airfordable.com is in this space and launched on PH as well (https://www.producthunt.com/post...). I'm a fan. I'm excited for how these companies are opening up global travel to those who may not have been able to consider it before.
All of the available data I've seen points to continued passenger growth over the next 5, 10 years with the majority of it coming from emerging markets in Asia and Africa. A big win is probably going to be in getting a product into those markets.
👋 Hi everyone, I’m Nikk, founder at Bliss. Bliss is the most affordable way to fly anywhere.
I started Bliss out of personal frustration when I had to travel to Asia but couldn't drop ~$1400 at once for a ticket. I didn’t have a credit card and looked around for financing options but surprisingly couldn’t find one for flights. Then I realized this is a big problem, especially for other young people.
Bliss helps you (1) find & compare the cheapest flights, (2) pay for said flights over time, and (3) lets you know when cheaper options come up.
We’ve tested our platform with a small group of users with great feedback, and we’re now slowly rolling out access to a slightly bigger crowd via invite only. Any feedback would be appreciated!
The idea is brilliant. The expensive tickets make me go crazy while I get call on and off to raise the card limit or receive fraud notifications! I want you to make a difference. Just remember that airline websites are over-complicated to maintain that they are securely getting money using their website or one of the horrible aggregates. Security of money is what they care for. What do I miss?
Product Hunt
Fractals
SeekWell
Fractals
Flystein
The Book of Joe
Fractals
The Book of Joe
Fractals
Hustle X
Fractals
Casa
Fractals
Fractals
Fractals
ZEPETO
Fractals
Fractals