Seatfrog - upgraded travel made easy

by Startacus Admin

Seatfrog are aiming to make upgraded travel a painless, even pleasurable process, with their app that allows users to bid in an auction for an upgraded seat.

Sometimes, we like a bit of luxury when we travel. Sometimes, we only decide this after we’ve booked our seat in economy class next to the livestock. Unfortunately, not everyone we travel with is as accommodating to our whims as we would like, and the process of upgrading is not always a simple or inexpensive one.

With offices in London, Tokyo, and Sydney, Seatfrog is a startup that wants to make the process of upgrading at the last minute a painless, even pleasurable and fun one. The core function of the Seatfrog app is to allow users to bid in an auction for an upgraded seat.

The fewer people using Seatfrog on your plane, train, or automobile, the more likely you are to get into a luxury leather seat next to the businesspeople for a steal. In turn, this will increase word of mouth and bring more users to the app, wanting to get an upgrade for a pittance. And then the auction begins in earnest!

Similar to eBay, there is an option to ‘Upgrade Now’ without bidding, for a set price. If disaster should befall you and someone else outbids you for a seat, the app will notify you by push notification of another upgrade. This will be a straight sell rather than another auction, but it means you can pretend it wasn’t you who lost the auction because £16 was just too rich for your blood.

Seatfrog says that the scale of the opportunity in air and rail is huge. They say that, annually, more than 37 million premium seats are empty across the top 30 airlines. Across the top seven European rail providers, it’s 480 million. That’s a lot of bidding.

Seatfrog is currently live with only London North Eastern Railway - previously Virgin - but with 5 or 6 more partners coming soon. It is a simple, useful app that we think, with their recent £4.5m Series A funding round led by Octopus Ventures, will get a lot of mileage.

If you like the sound of this travel tech startup, you might want to read up on: 

• Early-stage startup CityRadar aims to track and increase tourism consumer spend

• Sherpr - The travel startup that's making shipping sports equipment a doddle

• TravaPlan wants to make business travel management a one-stop pursuit

 

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• #air travel

Published on: 26th August 2018