Show HN: Ambulate – Detailed Trip Planning

If anyone needs a good (related) startup idea, here's one for free:

Complex trip planning for professionals, but in a different way from Ambulate - not hiking trips, but transactions across Web sites: I really hate the way how today you cannot "properly" book a flight, hotel, train like you would do it in a SQL transaction

  BEGIN TRANSACTION
    book train
    book flight
    book hotel
  COMMIT;

Only if all three are available and execute the reservation without error do I also want to execute the other ones; that's a prime use case for DB-like transactions, but across Websites. Because no point getting only the flight if I have no-where to stay etc.

This is what booking.com kind of tries to do, but I think it's actually a pretty hard problem not only because of scheduling quirks, but often times stuff being delayed, bad weather, etc. will totally throw a wrench into plans.

It would be nice to book a trip with planned contingencies. So basically, no matter what happens, you'll have something to do. This seems kind of a luxury product though, so I'm not sure how many people would be interested in paying a premium.

I can't remember if it was booking.com or some other site like travelocity, but I booked a hotel for work in Dublin, I arrived, and they couldn't find my reservation. After about 30 minutes of the desk staff confusingly clicking around on a computer they 'found' it and I was able to check in. This was a modern hotel too. I stopped using those sites and now only book through the hotel's website, even if it costs more.

They are not perfect, but they do provide value. My wife does not take showers more than once or twice a year; she takes a bath. Usually twice a day. This is a surprisingly difficult piece of information to find on hotel websites. Booking.com will at least tell you if the property has rooms with bathtubs.

I have resorted to making most reservations by phone, rather than Internet, because it’s the only way to be sure. I don’t like it, it wastes my time, but I have a specific person I can call out who flat-out lied to me if I get there and the room has no bathtub. That is usually enough to get the manager to upgrade me to a room that has the one amenity I specifically requested as a condition of booking.

That’s a lot of water!!