Melbourne startup Alfred Journey has launched an AI-powered journey planner that builds itineraries, integrates with on-line journey brokers, and guarantees future crypto rewards. However can it compete with incumbents and heavyweight LLMs?
Journey itineraries have lengthy been touted as the proper process for agentic AI. Alfred Journey, based by Billy Ka Keung Chan and Andy Kwong Ching Tsang, is the newest to check the concept, pitching itself as a light-weight various to bloated reserving engines.
Launched in July on iOS and Android, Alfred generates journey plans by way of prompts which might be fed throughout a number of giant language fashions, together with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and xAI’s Grok.
It’s an API frenzy, producing prompts from easy person inputs (the place and if you’ll fly, your finances, pursuits) and validating them with a string of LLMs earlier than connecting via affiliate integrations with the likes of Journey.com, Traveloka, and Expedia. Restaurant suggestions are there however the reserving programs integration are nonetheless in improvement, as is the blockchain pitch.
The plan is to challenge “Alfred Tokens” to customers who give suggestions and interact with the app. Tokens may later be used for reductions or traded on exchanges. The tokens may also be used to unlock superior options of the app.
Ka Keung, who beforehand labored in Hong Kong’s crypto sector at OSL, stated the product got here from seeing the potential in disrupting an business that adopts tech slowly.
“Ten years in the past we thought a one-stop store for travellers was attainable however the tech wasn’t there. Now AI can do the heavy lifting,” he stated.
The Alfred Journey nonetheless feels uncooked: itineraries may be overly packed, there’s a notable lack of pricing transparency, a number of odd bugs, and it’s not fairly in a position to collect and act on the complete context of a person immediate.
For instance, Startup Each day tried to plan an itinerary for a visit to Melbourne for the AFL Grand Remaining weekend. Whereas Alfred recommended ‘Sightseeing at Melbourne Cricket Floor’ on the Friday afternoon, it didn’t clock the Grand Remaining parade or attempt to recommend methods of getting a ticket for the final Saturday in September in the best way ChatGPT did.
After all, ChatGPT is an all-in-one chatbot made by an organization valued at US$500 billion, whereas Alfred is three guys utilizing AI to carve out a distinct segment. And so they’ve solely been on the app retailer for a month.
Based on Ka Keung, AI is in all places from the information parsing via to advertising and marketing supplies. It means the small, bootstrapped workforce can ship a fairly effectively polished app and hold iterating as they put together to scale. The startup’s “secret sauce”, he stated, is its 576-line immediate, refined to supply the structured itineraries in a single shot.
“The quantity of labor and the quantity of price that AI has saved us is unbelievable,” the Alfred Journey co-founder informed Startup Each day. “Our runway is loopy. The month-by-month costline is 3 figures, beneath $1,000 per 30 days. We will go for a really very long time.”
As an alternative of elevating enterprise capital, the Alfred workforce is banking on scaling its lean operation. Ka Keung stated he’s hoping to hit 5,000 itineraries generated by the top of 2025, with breakeven forecast at round 15,000 itineraries, generously assuming 10% of these converts to bookings.
“We’re very aware about price as a result of we wish to personal many of the enterprise, however we’re interested by strategic partnerships,” Ka Keung stated. “If Flight Centre stated ‘hey we’ll offer you a buck for a stake’ perhaps we’d have an interest.
“The best way we see it, why couldn’t Flight Centre brokers themselves use Alfred? As an alternative of digging via databases, they may print out an AI-generated plan and give attention to the client relationship.”
