Two years of TravelSupport
There are different ways to deliver a seamless travel experience. It has now been two years since we launched our own travel agency, hoping it would stand out from the crowd. You tell us your desired destination and we take care of how to get there comfortably—all that based on a homegrown web app at travelsupport.eu, which lets you plan out your travels, communicate with your travel expert and store all your tickets in one secure place. You’re always taken care of by our team, and regardless of how complex or convoluted your itinerary may be, you only pay once and get a single invoice instead of visiting multiple booking sites or ticket counters.
We are now at a point where TravelSupport gets massively expanded with new features. The past two years have helped us get a better understanding of what the application and our service should accomplish. We have grown from an enthusiast experiment to a complete solution with a loyal base of satisfied customers—individuals, companies and even large conference groups. We’ve managed their travel to many interesting destinations and sometimes faced quite a challenge, but that’s where we thrive, after all. Some examples:
- We planned and executed a business trip for a corporate customer from Ostrava to Heidelberg. We’ve managed to wildly exceed their expectations when we were able to secure 60% savings over the initial cost estimate.
- Multiple trips from Hradec Králové to Timisoara have been a major test of our skills. We managed to push the costs down quite dramatically thanks to our intimate knowledge of foreign discount fares and our ability to source those tickets in a way that no other Czech agency has access to.
- Yet another great story revolves around a Czech Technical University group travelling from Prague to Malles via Brennero. There’s no easy way to get local tickets remotely, so we just had to actually go to the Austrian-Italian border to get them. It was still worth the effort.
We’re really excited about such stories. Quirky travel plans are a speciality of ours. The reality is, just about anyone can order a taxi or hire a coach, whereas we believe in more creative solutions that maximize the use of public transport without sacrificing comfort and convenience. We planned a number of company trips with this principle at heart, sometimes using cost-effective group fares, sometimes by chartering whole parts of scheduled passenger trains—on that note: nothing gets a Christmas Party going like a ride in a private salon car with en suite bar and catering.
And since we’re talking of groups: our largest project to-date came about when we became the official logistics partner for the 2015 National Model UN Europe conference in Olomouc. We assumed responsibility for managing accommodations and transportation of more than 300 attendees who were to arrive to Czechia from all over the world. This meant several firsts: the first-ever commercial passenger train with a checked baggage facility in the country, and direct delivery of bags to attendee hotels. Our team welcomed conference participants at Václav Havel Airport Prague and even operated a dedicated bus service from airport to the city center to ensure adequate capacity and comfort to our arriving guests. However, a major factor of the overall comfort has to be our custom-designed web portal provided to the organizer team. It was simple, stunning and provided easy management of all the logistics for the entire run of the program, from participants’ touchdown to take-off.
We are now starting our third year as geek-powered travel agent that cares. We’re now an official ticketing partner for Czech Railways, SNCF and other railways companies, the long-distance bus behemoth that is FlixBus, Czech Airlines, Lufthansa Group and a number of other carriers. Above all, we are gearing up to deploy a new version of the TravelSupport app, inspired by two years of travels and hundreds of customers—to achieve our single biggest goal: invent easy and seamless travel for everyone.