Transport

Travel company Duffel has launched a self-serve version of its platform to help sellers rebuild the industry following COVID-19. 

Duffel’s software platform acts as a bridge between airlines and merchants, enabling them to offer customers the best flight and paid extras deals online.  

It lowers the barriers to entry for anyone looking to start a travel business, or those in need of digitising their existing processes. 

At a time when the industry has been shattered by the ongoing pandemic, it is making its new self-serve platform free throughout 2021. Merchants can join and start selling flights from more than 20 international airlines. 

“A frictionless, hassle-free experience is even more important and crucial to the future of the industry now,” said Duffel founder and CEO Steve Domin.  

“Travel has taken a substantial hit in 2020 and airlines and agents have had to cut hundreds of thousands of jobs around the world.  

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“Not surprisingly confidence among passengers is down, revenues have sharply declined and the industry urgently wants to recover.  

“We hope our new platform, and our decision to offer it free for 12 months through the new starter tier, will help the industry build back better and give travel sellers who are considering new technology the confidence to make this move.” 

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Duffel Content, one of the products offered, allows a new travel business – or any business looking to offer flights as part of their wider service offering – the power of a full-stack travel agency with a single integration. 

For instance, Australian banking app for travellers Pelikin was among the first customers to use Duffel’s self-serve platform to prepare to offer users the ability to book flights from within its app.  

“Offering flights via our app has been a feature we’ve been keen to add but getting all of the various accreditations and building a platform capable of doing it in a way that benefits our customers made it almost prohibitively difficult and time consuming,” explained Sam Brown, Pelikin’s CEO.  

“Not only does Duffel remove these barriers, its self-serve platform is incredibly intuitive. Each step is self-explanatory and we were pleasantly surprised by just how quickly we were able to offer this game-changing feature which we’ll soon be making available to our customers.” 

The new self-serve product features will offer companies the ability to activate their accounts, track their spend, and fully service their tickets, all from one easy-to-use dashboard.  

Last year Duffel raised $51.5 million from investors, including premier venture capital firms Benchmark, Blossom Capital and Index Ventures.  

In 2020, the firm quadrupled its team, tripled customer numbers and expanded to the US with an office in New York.