Travel app JourneyHero says it is ‘shaking up the travel industry’ by offering consumers money back on their trips, even after they have booked and paid. Jenny Southan reports
Have you ever paid for a trip and then been annoyed to find out it has later gone down in price? Journey Hero is a new travel app that is giving more power to individual travellers by giving them money back if the cost of the vacation goes down up to two days before departure.
It says: “When you book with the JourneyHero app, we always watch for lower prices. This means that after you have booked and even paid, we search for new itineraries of the same or better quality as your original search. If a similar or better booking for less money is found, and you choose to accept this new deal and swap, you will receive a refund directly to your wallet.”
How does it work? Competing travel companies typically connect to a small number of flight, hotel, and car rental providers and process travellers’ searches on the Cloud. By utilising the vast processing capabilities of smartphones, JourneyHero is able to access more travel providers than its rivals and processes thousands, rather than hundreds of search results.
Travellers do not need to trawl through thousands of results, however. Using a private profile constructed solely on the user’s phone, JourneyHero searches based on the customer’s personal likes and dislikes.
From this personal profile that users fill out, JourneyHero calculates a “match score”, which helps people find trips that suit them instead of having to review generic options. This means booking travel is “quicker, prices are better, and satisfaction is higher”, says the company. “This is how Journey Hero levels the playing field between buyers and travel suppliers.”
Rosa Shah, co-founder of JourneyHero, says: “We are travel disrupters who want to shake up the existing paradigm. We see the lengths customers go to trying to secure the best trip at the best price. Travellers spend hours trawling numerous websites, setting up price alerts, trying to predict flight prices, and optimal times to book. These methods are both exhausting and flawed. Trying to co-ordinate the different modes of travel is difficult, time consuming, and nearly impossible to change once booked.
“Put simply, JourneyHero finds better travel deals more quickly and easily. Plus, importantly, we are transparent. We continue to look for a better deal for our travellers even after they’ve booked and paid, and offer them money back if we find a lower price for the trip with the same or better quality.”
The JourneyHero app is free to download on the Apple Store and is coming soon (May 2022) to Android. A free £15 voucher (or “Traveon”) is applicable towards the traveller’s first booking.