Meet Hyper, a travel agent in your pocket
Travel agents remain a valuable resource for travelers. They plan and book your whole trip for you, often at exclusive rates, saving you time and money. They can easily adjust your trip if something goes wrong and offer expert advice. Not to mention, it just feels good to know you are in the right hands and taken care of.
Still, communicating with a human travel agent is simply not as scalable as a website or app, nor is the typical consultation over a phone call as ideal an experience. Although travel agents tend to charge a service fee, the exclusive rates and perks they offer often more than make up for the relatively small investment. Nevertheless, it is hard to compete with free. As a result, most travelers still prefer to arrange their own travel through a do-it-yourself booking service like Expedia, despite the time, money, and frustration they would save by going through an agent.
Over the past year, our team of former Google and Venmo product managers and engineers have been reimagining how people book and manage travel. What we’ve created is a new kind of travel agency that brings expertise and assistance on-demand, at no cost.
Book travel over chat
Hyper is a full-service travel agent that you can message anytime through our iOS app, email, or SMS. Hyper’s interface is built around chat because chat is the most efficient form of communication on mobile. Chat is fast, personal, and familiar. It’s asynchronous so you’ll never have to wait on-hold. Chat is also flexible in a way that more traditional user interfaces can never be: There’s no UI to learn, just human language, which allows Hyper to accept any travel request you can put into words. Whether you need to book a complex trip for your family, change your flight, or check the status of your lost luggage—Hyper makes it as easy as just sending a text.
Behind the scenes, Hyper is powered by both real travel agents and AI technology. When you send a travel request to Hyper, our system routes the request to the most relevant expert within a network of experienced travel agents, assisted by our proprietary back-office technology. Our travel agents then apply their deep domain expertise to respond with only what they believe to be the best options for your trip. While DIY services like Kayak and Expedia must return hundreds of results, Hyper only gives you a handful of the top choices, curated exactly to your needs by a real human expert. This unique combination of human ingenuity and empathy with machine automation allows our travel agents to provide their expertise to an unprecedented number of travelers, without sacrificing trust and quality.
In addition to knowing exactly what to show you, like any ideal assistant, Hyper knows how to listen. Every travel-related detail and preference you mention in conversation with Hyper is automatically added to your traveler profile, so you never have to repeat yourself. Over time Hyper learns your travel preferences like what type of hotel you like or what kinds of neighborhoods you’d enjoy visiting, and becomes an invaluable friend in exploring the world.
Enterprise travel, reimagined
From the beginning, we have seen ourselves as a brand straddling the worlds of consumer and enterprise travel. In previous roles, we have had the uniquely unpleasant experience of working with tools provided by traditional travel management companies. We’ve had enough frustrating experiences trying to navigate poorly designed software or spell out our names over the phone to know that business travelers are eager for something better.
We’ve aspired to craft Hyper to be powerful enough to eliminate the headaches of business travel while maintaining the look and feel of a consumer product. Over the past few months, we’ve already helped hundreds of travelers, and have begun to work with major companies that spend millions of dollars annually on travel. So far, people have been blown away by the power of the service. After all, travel has always been best handled by a travel agent. Hyper has finally put that expert in your pocket.
I hope you’ll give Hyper a try for your next trip.
Minqi Jiang and Peter Zakin, Founders of Hyper Travel
