Business journalist Indrek Kald turned his hobby of searching the web for cheap flights into a startup selling that information.
“At first friends started to ask me for the best deals and then their friends, so eventually I thought to check whether there could be a business in this,” says Kald.
The first 400 paying clients have signed up, but there is much more needed to make traffel.com a sustainable business as only a part of it is automated.
“We look through web pages and discussion forums and search through booking tools. It is manual work, but some of it is surely also automated,” he said, adding the unique deals are the key sales argument. “We have been just sharing 330 euro flights to Bali from Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga – am pretty sure no-one else had them,” he said.
As Traffel does not sell tickets it charges 60 euros annual fee to get access to the best deals, and offers also shorter subscriptions.
Some of the offers are stunning, like from Stockholm-Aruba return for 206 euros or Helsinki-Rio de Janeiro for 312 euros, but even typically one can find tickets at half of the list price.
The biggest difference comes from the open approach to flight deals. You don’t need to search for Helsinki-Shenzen or any other destination in Asia on November 16 or around those days. You can let Traffel alert you for any offer to China for example from Helsinki/Stockholm/Tallinn.
Kald teamed up with Cinzia Siig, founder of a travel agency which she sold to Finnair, and web entrepreneur Henrik Aavik to launch Traffel last year.
And Traffel’s offer to you – until end-November you can use ARCTIC15 code to get 35% discount on the annual subscription.
