I understand the pitch, and the extra value add of having some existing relationship with the hotels / etc.
But the quality of the actual AI response is just worse than GPT 5.2. Which makes it feel like a tacked on thing and more of a gpt wrapper.
I asked about a retreat with our US team that could also include one engineer in Pakistan that needs a visa. And the response was something to the effect of: "Assuming your engineer has a US visa, you can go to Puerto Rico".
Whereas chatgpt gave a much more well researched answer.
show comments
jedberg
Interesting. My team just went through this to plan offsite. Took about 1/2 a day of one person's time. So I asked your tool to help me:
"I want to have a two day offsite for a team of 12 in Cambridge in April."
It then started pulling up results in Cambridge UK. I meant Massachusetts. I didn't say that in the prompt, but I figured since there are two equally famous Cambridges, it would ask me for clarification.
I redid it specifying Massachusetts and it worked pretty well (although all the options it found were about double the price of what we actually booked).
An interesting idea!
BTW I didn't continue, but I assume you manage the whole booking process? How do deal with questions from the venue and other human in the loop issues?
show comments
3rodents
I did not see this mentioned: a very hard part of organizing events for remote teams is dealing with visas, for example, choosing to host an event in Europe will often prevent someone from India attending. Do you handle that, finding a location that is suitable for the largest number of the team?
Another challenge is travel, e.g: scheduling an event in Europe for a distributed team of U.S. people during bad weather leads to people stranded at airports, missing the event.
I think this is a great idea, but I am surprised to learn that organizers are spending most of their time communicating with hundreds of venues. Once you have a location and budget, finding a venue is straightforward.
show comments
jpau
> For venue recommendations [...] we do not rely purely on the language model. We embed both user requirements and venues into vector representations and retrieve candidates using similarity search. Hard constraints such as capacity and dates are applied first, and results are ranked before being presented.
Huh this surprised me as a forgone opportunity.
I heard second-hand about the process for organizing our last offsite. Searching for venues was not the time-consuming part.
The time-consuming part was actually engaging with the venues to confirm specific details not available online. Our teammate who did this engaged with _hundreds_ of venues. It was a lot of work on their part ... and probably not the most fun part of their job.
That seems like an ideal agent scenario?
show comments
agenticfish
Maybe I misunderstood the use case this is for, but I asked it to search for a "venue for team outing for 8 people in the City of London" and it just came up with random hotels in London. I clarified that I'm looking for venues for a team activity and that it needs to be limited to the City, but it just returned hotels again.
show comments
jondwillis
I initially didn’t read this post, fixated on “company event”, and thought it could be used for a single-day, one-off “thing to do tonight given (location) and (preferred activities/venue type) after (work end time)” It presented hotels and then some potential activities, but didn’t look up the time. When I asked about what is open after the time, the agent seemed to realize my request was not in your typical use case flow and gave me a refusal.
It’d be cool to offer one-off event suggestions, but I understand that’s probably not as easily monetizable.
show comments
rokizero
I asked it for locations in the Randstad (area in The Netherlands around Amsterdam) and I got:
1. Hoofddorp, Noord-Holland, Netherlands (actually ok location)
2. Marysville, Ohio, United States
3. Lisboa, Portugal
4. Nashville, Tennessee, United States
5. Kenmore, Washington, United States
6. Golden, Colorado, United States
I would expect there to be some reviewer agent that ensures that all found locations are at least within the same country?
show comments
throwaw12
> Where would you expect this to fail?
Haven't organized large meetups, but for regular enterprise companies this could be a difficult to buy decision, because you have ChatGPT + bunch of connectors which can get company policies.
This could be good idea for event companies who regularly schedule things, but even for them, probably difficult to justify the value when you have access to ChatGPT and other connectors
show comments
amelius
> Where would you expect this to fail?
Booking.com and similar moving into this space with their own generic AI tool.
Or even Gemini improving their UI so it presents search results more neatly.
show comments
fandorin
Well, I checked your chat cause I'm planning a company retreat to Athens for two teams - one from Poland, the other from Sweden. And the chatbot told me (after saying what a wonderful destination Athens is) that there are direct fligths from both cities to Athens which is simply not true...
show comments
nedwin
This is great, congrats on the launch. I never would have discovered half these venues / options without this.
show comments
aitacobell
How big is this market? Feels pretty narrow if it stays focused on company outings but are there plans for additional categories?
show comments
anjel
Built upon the original ideas of Quicksilver (never forget)
Vincent - nice work on this, there's clearly a good kernel of insight here, and I can tell you've been at this a couple years.
I completed a (rather large) contract to reverse-engineer, and eventually rebuild, a hotel chain's property management system from scratch from 2015-2018. We did it all: keycard integration, booking channel sync, credit cards, group bookings, yield management, front-desk GUI, supply management, taking rooms into/out of service, reservation migration from old system to new...you name it, we probably touched it. Dozens of small lessons about the lodging (and broader hospitality i.e. restaurants, country clubs, bars) business domain.
One thing is that hotel = brand (flag) + real estate + operations. You can remix those things in a lot of different ways, e.g. a single ownership group might have two properties on opposite sides of a street, one Hyatt the other Hilton, and they might look different but share staff, or procurement.
The industry's term for brand -- "flag" -- says a lot about how they view Hilton/Hyatt. They come and go, even if the staff running the property stays the same. The main reason hotels choose to flag vs. stay independent, is access to the chain's booking flow.
One of the more interesting consequences of this setup, is that small, independent hotels, are kind of a shit show in terms of technology. Chains generally require a lot of standardization of their member properties, including what software they run to manage the property. Many properties that don't affiliate with a chain don't have any property management system at all. It's basically 10-20 rooms run directly off the moral equivalent of an Excel sheet at the front desk. And why wouldn't it be--small boutique hotels often gross $1-2 million/year; there isn't budget for expensive enterprise software, or maybe more critically, the people who know how to deploy and operate it.
A significant value-add of Expedia and booking.com, especially with independent properties, is getting the supply (hotel) side of the market organized. Many of these hotels outsource their entire reservation tracking system to a single channel (e.g. booking.com) because trying to keep track of bookings across phone, direct web, Expedia, booking.com, and others, is just too hard without specialist software that requires more IT muscle to deploy than a single non-chain hotel can muster.
I mention this because I go to church every Sunday and was thinking about how much real estate churches have (event halls) that sit unused, and what a schlep it would be -- although good for everyone -- to expose the collective supply of the world's churches, HOAs, park districts, and other nonprofits, to the kind of events you're trying to do. It would indeed be a tremendous pain in the ass to get all the physical access (keys), contract terms, payment systems, availability, etc ironed out, but it's a massively underused class of real estate and many of these organizations could really use the cash.
show comments
righthand
Can it calculate how many people you need to layoff to make the company retreat affordable for next quarter?
show comments
esafak
Looks nice. I'd speed up queries and add a filtering UI to the results; don't make me type everything.
show comments
TZubiri
>"Agent"
> (2022)
Has there been a rebrand as of late? What was the product pitch before that? I guess "AI for planning company retreats" (and possibly SaaS for company retreats before that)
This capacity to pivot into these buzzwords shows that at least sometimes they are more phenomenons with marketing (or at least UX) definitions rather than technological ones.
show comments
vonneumannstan
[flagged]
show comments
philipp-gayret
I'm on the technical end but to me this looks like just another ChatGPT wrapper with a Booking.com & flight planner API key. Nothing more. Expedia was on the list of ChatGPT plugin developers in 2023. What's stopping you? What keeps you in business the moment any travel agency decides gets into Gemini, ChatGPT or the like? I'm sure you make a lot of money per commission, but I don't see what is unique about you as company. What stops anyone else from vibecoding what you'e built in an afternoon?
I understand the pitch, and the extra value add of having some existing relationship with the hotels / etc.
But the quality of the actual AI response is just worse than GPT 5.2. Which makes it feel like a tacked on thing and more of a gpt wrapper.
I asked about a retreat with our US team that could also include one engineer in Pakistan that needs a visa. And the response was something to the effect of: "Assuming your engineer has a US visa, you can go to Puerto Rico".
Whereas chatgpt gave a much more well researched answer.
Interesting. My team just went through this to plan offsite. Took about 1/2 a day of one person's time. So I asked your tool to help me:
"I want to have a two day offsite for a team of 12 in Cambridge in April."
It then started pulling up results in Cambridge UK. I meant Massachusetts. I didn't say that in the prompt, but I figured since there are two equally famous Cambridges, it would ask me for clarification.
I redid it specifying Massachusetts and it worked pretty well (although all the options it found were about double the price of what we actually booked).
An interesting idea!
BTW I didn't continue, but I assume you manage the whole booking process? How do deal with questions from the venue and other human in the loop issues?
I did not see this mentioned: a very hard part of organizing events for remote teams is dealing with visas, for example, choosing to host an event in Europe will often prevent someone from India attending. Do you handle that, finding a location that is suitable for the largest number of the team?
Another challenge is travel, e.g: scheduling an event in Europe for a distributed team of U.S. people during bad weather leads to people stranded at airports, missing the event.
I think this is a great idea, but I am surprised to learn that organizers are spending most of their time communicating with hundreds of venues. Once you have a location and budget, finding a venue is straightforward.
> For venue recommendations [...] we do not rely purely on the language model. We embed both user requirements and venues into vector representations and retrieve candidates using similarity search. Hard constraints such as capacity and dates are applied first, and results are ranked before being presented.
Huh this surprised me as a forgone opportunity.
I heard second-hand about the process for organizing our last offsite. Searching for venues was not the time-consuming part.
The time-consuming part was actually engaging with the venues to confirm specific details not available online. Our teammate who did this engaged with _hundreds_ of venues. It was a lot of work on their part ... and probably not the most fun part of their job.
That seems like an ideal agent scenario?
Maybe I misunderstood the use case this is for, but I asked it to search for a "venue for team outing for 8 people in the City of London" and it just came up with random hotels in London. I clarified that I'm looking for venues for a team activity and that it needs to be limited to the City, but it just returned hotels again.
I initially didn’t read this post, fixated on “company event”, and thought it could be used for a single-day, one-off “thing to do tonight given (location) and (preferred activities/venue type) after (work end time)” It presented hotels and then some potential activities, but didn’t look up the time. When I asked about what is open after the time, the agent seemed to realize my request was not in your typical use case flow and gave me a refusal.
It’d be cool to offer one-off event suggestions, but I understand that’s probably not as easily monetizable.
I asked it for locations in the Randstad (area in The Netherlands around Amsterdam) and I got:
1. Hoofddorp, Noord-Holland, Netherlands (actually ok location) 2. Marysville, Ohio, United States 3. Lisboa, Portugal 4. Nashville, Tennessee, United States 5. Kenmore, Washington, United States 6. Golden, Colorado, United States
I would expect there to be some reviewer agent that ensures that all found locations are at least within the same country?
> Where would you expect this to fail?
Haven't organized large meetups, but for regular enterprise companies this could be a difficult to buy decision, because you have ChatGPT + bunch of connectors which can get company policies.
This could be good idea for event companies who regularly schedule things, but even for them, probably difficult to justify the value when you have access to ChatGPT and other connectors
> Where would you expect this to fail?
Booking.com and similar moving into this space with their own generic AI tool.
Or even Gemini improving their UI so it presents search results more neatly.
Well, I checked your chat cause I'm planning a company retreat to Athens for two teams - one from Poland, the other from Sweden. And the chatbot told me (after saying what a wonderful destination Athens is) that there are direct fligths from both cities to Athens which is simply not true...
This is great, congrats on the launch. I never would have discovered half these venues / options without this.
How big is this market? Feels pretty narrow if it stays focused on company outings but are there plans for additional categories?
Built upon the original ideas of Quicksilver (never forget)
#social https://youtu.be/v54CcKEN0Sk?t=27m00s
Vincent - nice work on this, there's clearly a good kernel of insight here, and I can tell you've been at this a couple years.
I completed a (rather large) contract to reverse-engineer, and eventually rebuild, a hotel chain's property management system from scratch from 2015-2018. We did it all: keycard integration, booking channel sync, credit cards, group bookings, yield management, front-desk GUI, supply management, taking rooms into/out of service, reservation migration from old system to new...you name it, we probably touched it. Dozens of small lessons about the lodging (and broader hospitality i.e. restaurants, country clubs, bars) business domain.
One thing is that hotel = brand (flag) + real estate + operations. You can remix those things in a lot of different ways, e.g. a single ownership group might have two properties on opposite sides of a street, one Hyatt the other Hilton, and they might look different but share staff, or procurement.
The industry's term for brand -- "flag" -- says a lot about how they view Hilton/Hyatt. They come and go, even if the staff running the property stays the same. The main reason hotels choose to flag vs. stay independent, is access to the chain's booking flow.
One of the more interesting consequences of this setup, is that small, independent hotels, are kind of a shit show in terms of technology. Chains generally require a lot of standardization of their member properties, including what software they run to manage the property. Many properties that don't affiliate with a chain don't have any property management system at all. It's basically 10-20 rooms run directly off the moral equivalent of an Excel sheet at the front desk. And why wouldn't it be--small boutique hotels often gross $1-2 million/year; there isn't budget for expensive enterprise software, or maybe more critically, the people who know how to deploy and operate it.
A significant value-add of Expedia and booking.com, especially with independent properties, is getting the supply (hotel) side of the market organized. Many of these hotels outsource their entire reservation tracking system to a single channel (e.g. booking.com) because trying to keep track of bookings across phone, direct web, Expedia, booking.com, and others, is just too hard without specialist software that requires more IT muscle to deploy than a single non-chain hotel can muster.
I mention this because I go to church every Sunday and was thinking about how much real estate churches have (event halls) that sit unused, and what a schlep it would be -- although good for everyone -- to expose the collective supply of the world's churches, HOAs, park districts, and other nonprofits, to the kind of events you're trying to do. It would indeed be a tremendous pain in the ass to get all the physical access (keys), contract terms, payment systems, availability, etc ironed out, but it's a massively underused class of real estate and many of these organizations could really use the cash.
Can it calculate how many people you need to layoff to make the company retreat affordable for next quarter?
Looks nice. I'd speed up queries and add a filtering UI to the results; don't make me type everything.
>"Agent"
> (2022)
Has there been a rebrand as of late? What was the product pitch before that? I guess "AI for planning company retreats" (and possibly SaaS for company retreats before that)
This capacity to pivot into these buzzwords shows that at least sometimes they are more phenomenons with marketing (or at least UX) definitions rather than technological ones.
[flagged]
I'm on the technical end but to me this looks like just another ChatGPT wrapper with a Booking.com & flight planner API key. Nothing more. Expedia was on the list of ChatGPT plugin developers in 2023. What's stopping you? What keeps you in business the moment any travel agency decides gets into Gemini, ChatGPT or the like? I'm sure you make a lot of money per commission, but I don't see what is unique about you as company. What stops anyone else from vibecoding what you'e built in an afternoon?