Did you know that you can get cheaper flights to Antarctica from Chile than almost anywhere else?
How about that round trip international tickets are often cheaper than a one-way international ticket?
Or that almost everywhere you travel there is a small airline that doesn’t show up on most search engines?
Lauren McLeod knows, and she and her partner have assembled a team of flight experts at Flightfox to help others find the best (and cheapest) flights that fit their needs.
Today Lauren joins us to talk about the inception of Flightfox, her original site Globetroopers, and to share the ups and downs of creating your own business on the road.
She also shares some great travel stories and tips, including one of our best travel mishap stories to date, so make sure to listen after the “ending!”
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In This Episode:
- How she became the first Australian to cross Mongolia’s Gobi Desert entirely on foot.
- What Lauren did to try to set herself up for an independent travel lifestyle.
- The flight that was the inspiration behind Flightfox.
- Why your mom is the best person to pitch businesses to first.
- What an incubator/accelerator is, and why they can be amazingly helpful for startups.
- Why waiting until you’re ready to retire to travel isn’t the right fit for everyone.
- Lauren’s luggage tip that’ll save you a ton on airline fees.
and much more!
Links Discussed in This Episode:
- FlightFox.com
- www.GlobeTrooper.com
- Start Mate – Startup Accelerator in Australia
- Y Combinator – Incubator in Silicon Valley
I Need Your Help
Thank Lauren for sharing her startup story by clicking “Tweet This” below:
Thanks to @flightfox co-founder Lauren McLeod for sharing some great #travel & #startup tips on the @PackofPeanuts travel podcast! http://bit.ly/1maquGt
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Todd, I’m afraid John has got a point. Yes you guys did a lot to try to make it a smooth running company, but YES, you did write an email that some changes would happen, but suddenly many hardworking experts were blocked access to the site.
How do I know? Because I’m XtremeTravel, one of the experts that did it just for fun, and even won 1 contests, and hit second on another contest.
I don’t care about being barred access, as my livelihood was not dependent on it.
What is less nice, is that Lauren when starting FlightFox was all nice as she wanted to make the place grow, but after a while emails just started being ignored. The nature of those emails was to try to give constructive advice and some suggestions, so completely ignoring is NOT the way to handle things.
For the record, I’m at least as busy as you.
IF you want to be transparent, please be transparent.
Flighfox collected best tricks from experts then fired most. Why to lie on this interview that they took best 10-20 experts? Everybody knew who are the best experts and most of them are were fired without notice. How would you trust this company after this?
@John- I can’t deny or confirm your statement, as I have no idea what went on behind the scenes. Do you have proof to back this up?
Todd from Flightfox here. Of course this isn’t true. @trav: we’d be happy for you to interview *any* of our people, past or present, to get the real story of how we have always done as much as possible to protect them. Not just protect them, but pay for them to fly across the world first-class (yep, first-class), pay $1,000s to cover the costs of their mistakes with customers, cover 100% of their customer chargebacks, and a lot more. In fact, if our investors read this they may think we were being overly generous :) In all seriousness, the model had to change for us to survive and we’d never been more sad in our lives. But we were extremely transparent and always put our people first. Best, todd.
@Todd- Thanks for chiming in and responding. All my experiences and dealings with FlightFox have been excellent, which is why I was happy to have Lauren on the show to tell the FlightFox story. Continue the good work and thanks for the transparency. There’s always going to be pushback, no matter what you’re doing!