[kinkrtyavimoodh]

This seems incredibly pricey, especially for the services you seem to be promising (which, for all the airports I spot-checked, amounted to Meet and Greet, Custom Assistance, and Transport Assistance). Fast tracking was not covered in the base price for any of the airports I checked. Connecting flight service is $745 per person!!!

Your example pricing was for 2 people, but I checked and it looks like the price for 1 is the same—SFO is $375 (for both 1 and 2 passengers), likewise for BOM ($340 for 1). Given how much you are pushing the business traveler angle, I think it'll be more honest to talk about price per passenger, as business travelers rarely travel in pairs.

Business travelers typically travel light, and might not need as much baggage assistance or custom assistance. Likewise, you only claim to provide assistance booking transportation (the passenger pays for the actual transport), which means that unless someone is traveling to a very very 'foreign' land (where no one speaks English, the signage is very confusing, you are very likely to be cheated, etc. etc.) I don't see too much value coming out of the service for most travelers.

I understand it's a discretionary spend, and that you can charge whatever you want, and that three or four hundred bucks is throwaway money for many business travelers (or their companies) but I was personally quite disappointed to see the pricing, because I was hoping to use it to get, say, an aging parent through all the airport hassle. For 50-100 bucks, worth considering. For 400, not so much.

[blainevess]

Pricing varies and our goal is to make it much consistent in the not so distant future. When we decided to build Solve, we thought we were building a simple booking engine. But really, behind the scenes, we are taking a ton of data and making it easy to understand. It just ended up being much more complicated than we thought.

Now that we've got a better understanding of price, it will help us figure out how to optimize. The paired pricing is actually just legacy in the space and we'd like to ditch it or at least come up with something better.

We've got some work to do before we're at the 50-100 buck range, but we definitely appreciate your perspective and feedback.

[skewart]

That was my reaction too.

I don't think there's enough of an improvement over the status quo experience of crossing a border into a new country and getting to your hotel. In "very foreign" places the value might sometimes be much greater. But, in those situations if you could afford to spend $300 on a service like Solve there's a good chance you're staying at a place that will offer similar functionality or you're meeting up with people who will send someone to help you.

That said, if I could book Solve pretty last minute then the prices might be more reasonable, or even be too low. If a flight is delayed and I'm going to be cutting it close for a meeting then $300, or even $600, to remove all uncertainty about the border crossing could easily be worth it. Or if I get to border control and see there's a huge line, I might be more likely to give in to the temptation and spend money to get out of waiting for an hour.

I'm also super curious about the vision for scaling this. Even if the prices came down it seems like it's targeting a relatively small market. Plus, it seems like there are inherent limits on the product's scalability - you could only have a relatively small percent of all fliers using Solve before it would get congested and offer a worse experience than not using it! So, you guys must have something bigger up your sleeves! I'm curious where you see it going. Maybe a wider range of personalized travel services (so, still a small number of users, but more dollars per transaction)?

I dunno, maybe you just need to convince a handful of big companies to offer this as a perk and you'll be all set. Maybe that market is actually a lot bigger than I'm imagining off the top of my head.

All of that said, I do really like the idea of magically making the process of getting from my airplane seat to my destination faster, more comfortable, and less uncertain. I would definitely be a customer at the right price point and/or value prop.