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Tomo Cheap Flights — Save up to 70% on flights around the world ✈️
Tomo is a Facebook Messenger bot specialized in getting cheap flights. You can save up to $700 per ticket and it's as simple as a conversation with a friend.
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Vinish Garg
Hey Vlad, I see it and I like it. Right from StarterKit days ... your relative absence around meant that something was brewing. :) And it is so good. How is life otherwise?
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I think is a great idea. Personalisation is the future of travel!
Also I think the chatbot and chatting systems are very good in terms of UX: people knows already how to use messenger and they feel more confortable to book on a platform like facebook instead moving to new websites.
@luxlongo Exactly! However now there are different challenges we're facing (none of them impossible to solve!). We're learning, growing and improving with the help of our users :)
So many services offer to find the cheapest flights
Why is this better than the rest?
Maker
@bentossell Hello Ben, probably the main difference is the medium. You'll get them on FB Messenger on real time. Also, because we have more info about the users than a normal service, we aim to personalize the offers and offer a much better experience for the users.
@vladstan @bentossell Yep! The main selling point (besides saving money) is personalization.
We're working on understanding our users' patterns so we can provide several other features: say we find a deal from London to New York but you're in Edinburgh, we'll also find you a flight to London; or say you want to receive only during a specific time period, or for a continent you're interested in, or under a certain budget, etc, we can customize all of this. We're working on these features.
Also, additionally to having our 3 deal hunters, we also check other sources to make sure we don't miss anything!
I've been playing with Tomo for a while now and I love the experience! Although there are many services offering the cheapest flights (as @bentossell also noted), I enjoy Tomo more because of its friendly chat feeling. It's like I have a buddy who's doing his best to help me travel cheaper and learn more about new places - the tips & info on destinations make it even more fun.
@vladstan & @aluxian, one question for you: how do you source the deals? Also, it would be nice to be able to have a wishlist ❤️
@andreeamih Thanks for the kind words, we're so happy when our users are happy!
For sourcing deals we have 3 flight hackers helping us (America, Europe, Asia+Oceania), but we also have automated processes to scan lots of other websites as well. Right now we're partly manual because we want to understand our users' behaviour and what the best way to find deals is.
We've been reading about hacking flights for the past few weeks and soon we'll be ready to automate most of it. AI will play an important role as we plan to not only customize the service to our users' preferences but also learn what they like so we can send the best deals.
Maker
@andreeamih Thank you. And thank you for the awesome feedback you gave us. Keep it coming. <3
@aluxian @andreeamih so do you give these sites any credit for the work they put in?
At Flystein we are thrilled to partner with Tomo, a Facebook Chatbot with travel deals. It’s a great product and our partnership is a natural match, like peanut butter and jelly :)
We’re looking forward to working together with Tomo and finding personalized flight deals for the Facebook audience by combining human travel pros, insider airline secrets and proprietary technology.
To celebrate this partnership we're giving to all Product Hunters an exclusive discount of 20% on any service in next 72 hours via this link: https://www.flystein.com/?dcnt=P... (discount will be automatically applied at checkout).
Maker
@flighthack Thanks for parenting with us. I know you're doing an awesome job helping travelers to save for specific flights and really looking forward to making this integration as simple as possible for the users.
@vladstan @andreeamih Love the UI. Congratulations. I especially liked the promo video on Tomo Site using the comic character. I'm trying to build a product video, may I if you got any external help to make the video?
I think this is really cool. However, would be great if I can up front set alerts for a specific route. I also don't want to connect with Messenger considering I get a ridiculous amount of messages from friends and bots all day that another bot to add to the list would drive me nuts. Maybe email alert can be a different way to opt in?
Maker
@prokotasic Thanks for the feedback Luka. We're going to add this feature soon. Working on it. About the email stuff, not sure. But we plan to develop this for other chat platforms. Maybe you will find one wich is not so often used by your friends.
Just signed up! As someone who travels a lot but have to be a bit more careful with money now that I'm starting my own company, I love the concept. Also appreciate the custom onboarding experience for Product Hunt users. :) Excited to receive my first deal!
@anthilemoon Thank you, we really want to make Tomo useful for travellers so please let us know if there's anything you dislike (or like) or if you have any ideas how we can improve. Enjoy! :)
I realise I'm going to be going against the grain here - BUT...
I can't stand products that rely on Facebook. I want to use this product, it looks great, but I don't use Facebook and I won't ever use Facebook. I'm not alone in this.
I feel like products that require you to have a FB account either to login, or to use, are massively limiting their potential user base.
About 1.2billion people use Facebook. What that means is that 6.3billion people don't use Facebook. Am I crazy?
@angus_halen Hi Angus, I get your point and I agree that from some points of view it is limiting. It's always a battle between pros & cons when choosing a platform. However, we chose to build it on Facebook for the following reasons:
- users don't have to download/install anything, just open the link and get started (if they have Messenger installed)
- it's faster to build as we don't have to maintain/build/ship our own user interface or entire app; on Messenger it's just the server and the interface and UX patterns imposed by Facebook (with which users are already familiar)
- it's easier for users to share; again, just send the link to the bot
- our target audience spends a lot of time on Messenger
- if it were an app users would mostly not do anything on it, but just keep it for notifications. I dislike apps that convert to a bot only to have a more cumbersome experience. That said, our bot is not a "better app", but "better email"
Maker
@angus_halen Hi Angus, agree this is limiting. But we are a small team right now, trying to see if this is a useful product. We plan to build Tomo using another chat platform as well.
Love this Vlad and Alex. I could see futuristico trying to superfuture the way people travel 🤘🏻
Nice time to be a traveller!
Maker
@tweetyunus Thank you, 🙏 Mohamed. Agree nice time to be a traveler. Give it a try, and let us know what you think.
@vladstan No doubt!
Do you have any integration service for TOMO so that I could brew/offer something beautiful for my users ? Win-Win makes more sense :)
Maker
@tweetyunus man this is something we should definitely explore. Let's get in touch. I'll ping you on twitter.
Thanks @kwdinc for the hunt! We're thrilled to be on Product Hunt :)
We love to travel, but what's even better is when we hack the airfare prices for our flights. This is the reason we built Tomo, a Facebook Messenger bot with only one job: to find cheap flights for your next trip.
Tomo searches 24/7, all the airlines. We named it Tomo because in Japanese, “tomo” means “long time friend”, and that’s the spirit of the project. Tomo is your travel mate, always searching the best price for you.
Don't hesitate to ask us anything!
I love to travel, I actually did a world tour for about 5 years by hitchhiking. Now that I'm married, I have to skip the hitchhiking part but still have to travel with my wife. So I subscribed to different websites to receive emails with great flight deals. But, within a few days of subscribing, I unsubscribed from all those emails. Who likes an overwhelming inbox, right? However, when it comes to Facebook notifications about flight deals, I don't mind it. It feels like a buddy telling you about a deal he found online. I had the chance to play with this bot for a week or so and I have to say, I love it. Vlad, Alex, I believe you're onto something good here.
Maker
@pavelciobanu Hi Pavel, and thanks for the feedback. We've built the product having people like you in mind. So this means a lot to us. Stai close we have many improvements on the pipeline.
As a bot developer, I gotta say this looks like an excellent implementation of the conversational interface. Just tried it! Bot developers should note how un-intrusive and easygoing the initial notification setup is.
The only thing I'd look into is:
If it's possible, connecting with Flystein to have a backend partnership rather than sending the user to Flystein via webview may be a great way of keeping the experience slightly more smooth.
Great job :)
@zalmay_karimi Thank you, Zalmay! We definitely tried to optimise the interface and we still have ideas on what to do to make it better.
As for integrating with Flystein, that's our goal haha! Once we understand their process better we'd like to integrate it completely into our bot. We've been in touch with them for the past few weeks.
Nice work. How do you know if you're getting the best deal on Tomo relative to other deals on the market?
@dankurani Thanks! Two ways:
Obvious: these are the easiest to spot, when we see something like Oslo -> Shanghai for $300 return we instantly know it's a sweet one.
Data-backed: we compare the price with the average and this helps us spot deals. We also have a threshold so we don't send too many deals, we only want to send the best (for instance, when we can help you save 20%–70%)
@tom_downs95 Thanks! We're actively working on improving every aspect of it :)
Facebook Messenger is a great medium to do business! I already started talking with Tomo! Keep up the good work!
Congrats, guys! Been knowing Vlad for a long time and I'm happy to see his entrepreneurial stamina is still strong :)
Hi the bot asked me to ask questions here. My home city is Chicago but my first deal was out of Orlando. I selected extended range but I assumed that was nearby e.g. midway, Milwaukee etc.
