Launch of Darjeelin.com : Europe’s first crowdsourcing travel platform

For the first time in Europe, a startup offers travelers to crowdsource their flight search to a community of experts competing to find the best fare.

Paris, France, December 19th 2012.

An innovative solution to avoid getting lost in the myriad of different players and promotional offers, and save a considerable amount of time … and money (an average of 25% on long-haul flights).

Darjeelin offers its users to save time and money by outsourcing their flight search to an expert community – frequent flyers, experienced travellers, professional travel agents – who make use of all their know-how and compete to find the best flights.

With the advent of OTAs (Online Travel Agencies), the success of low-cost companies and the thousands of special promotional offers flooding the web, searching for flight tickets can be very tricky for the layman, take a considerable amount of time and lead to disappointing results.

Darjeelin has gathered an expert community to help users travel in a smarter way. Darjeelin experts know all the tips and tricks of flight search (“flight hacking”) and are capable of being extremely creative to find airfares 25% cheaper than traditional OTAs and metasearchers.

So how does it work ? Darjeelin links every user looking for a flight ticket with four experts, who will compete to find the best ticket or ticket combination on the web. This is called a “flight contest”. During three days, the user receives “flight proposals” from his “flight experts”. The user then selects the best flight proposal and the expert is awarded the “contest fee”. To launch a flight contest, users pays a fixed fee of 20 €. Winning experts are awarded 15 €.

Bringing “crowdsourcing” to the travel and flight search sector

Crowdsourcing (which consists in outsourcing a service to the “crowd” on the internet) has already consistently changed other sectors with well-know examples like Kicktstarter (funding), Wikipedia (content) or 99designs (design). Darjeelin to reshape flight searching thanks to the help of the crowd.
“Ariplane ticket distribution evolved too quickly from a brick and mortar shop to dematerialized online platforms. In the process, the know-how of human travel agents was lost. We believe in a hybrid solution: human experts who are reachable through a web interface”, says Thibault Lorcy, co-founder of Darjeelin.
“The power of our concept lies in aligning the interests of both our travel experts and users (travellers): finding the best airfare; and that’s only possible though crowdsourcing”, adds Charles Guilhamon, the other co-founder.

An original launching operation in Beauvais airport

Last Friday (December 14th, 2012), the startup was in Beauvais airport to meet travellers and potential users, and appear as a new non-conformist actor.
Remember Suzy McLeod (Newbury, Berskhire), this holidaymaker who complained last August, that she was charged 300 € by low cost company Ryanair to print out five boarding passes on a flight home from Spain ? Her post on facebook had been backed by 500 000 people. (source : Telegraph)
The Darjeelin team, brought along a table and a printer, and offered passengers who had forgotten to print their flight tickets to do it for them, thus saving them the 60€ charge. The message was simple: “Let’s get smarter together !”

In short, Darjeelin provides :
- savings of hundreds of euros on long-haul flights, compared to traditional agencies or metasearch engines
- major time saving
- competition between experts, which in turn guarantees the best price for the user
- a human powered flight search engine, which means that experts and users engage on the forum

More information on: www.darjeelin.com

About Darjeelin
Darjeelin, which was founded in 2012 by Thibault Lorcy and Charles Guilhamon, with respective strategy consulting and entrepreneurship backgrounds, promotes a smarter way of travelling, thanks to the power of the crowd.

Darjeelin
27 rue du Chemin Vert
75011 Paris
FRANCE

www.darjeelin.com

Press contact:
Charles Guilhamon: +33 6 66 33 91 23 – c.guilhamon@darjeelin.com

This release was published on openPR.