This week, a bonafide travel hacker and self-proclaimed “bad boy of the travel industry” joins the show to discuss his two services that help millions travel more for less. Jonathan Weinberg is the founder and CEO of our beloved AutoSlash and, more recently, HotelSlash. So who better to hop on the podcast and make both Gunnar and Kyle smarter about the worlds of hotel and car rental booking? Jonathan talks about his career before getting into travel – including his firsthand experience being in the Twin Towers on 9/11 – and then walks us through how and why he founded the two money-saving booking platforms that Gunnar and Kyle use all the time. Plus, we chat about Georgia (the country, not the state) and get a little giddy about a handful of new Park Hyatt properties in the pipeline.
This week, a bonafide travel hacker and self-proclaimed “bad boy of the travel industry” joins the show to discuss his two services that help millions travel more for less.
Jonathan Weinberg is the founder and CEO of our beloved AutoSlash and, more recently, HotelSlash. So who better to hop on the podcast and make both Gunnar and Kyle smarter about the worlds of hotel and car rental booking? Jonathan talks about his career before getting into travel – including his firsthand experience being in the Twin Towers on 9/11 – and then walks us through how and why he founded the two money-saving booking platforms that Gunnar and Kyle use all the time. Plus, we chat about Georgia (the country, not the state) and get a little giddy about a handful of new Park Hyatt properties in the pipeline.
Thanks to HotelSlash for sponsoring this episode of the show! Try it out today: Use promo code THRIFTYTRAVELER for a free 90-day trial – plus, get $20 off your first prepaid booking!
00:00 - A quick note about today’s episode
00:18 - Introducing AutoSlash and HotelSlash CEO, Jonathan Weinberg!
01:48 - Ruffling feathers in the travel industry
06:55 - Something Hot: Why we can’t stop talking about Georgia (the country, not the state) and a flight deal to get you there
12:45 - Something Hotter: Park Hyatts are renovating, opening, and expanding all over the world - our favorites are…
16:40 - A word from our sponsor: HotelSlash, the easiest way to book a cheaper hotel stay - and rebook when prices drop
17:47 - Jonathan’s path into the travel industry: A travel-filled childhood, working on Wall Street, finding flight deals, & more
24:00 - A harrowing experience inside World Trade Center Tower 2 on Sept. 11, 2001 - read Jonathan’s firsthand account
29:20 - The how & why behind AutoSlash
33:43 - Pivoting to HotelSlash and how it’s different from other hotel booking sites
41:10 - Becoming “bad boys of the travel industry”
47:15 - International driver’s permits: Do you need them?
50:35 - Listener Feedback: Amy’s wins in Montana,including a sweet rental car deal
53:00 - On the spot: Gunnar and Kyle’s thoughts on hidden city ticketing (or “Skiplagging”)
Produced and edited by Sylvia Thomas
Show music: “All That” by Benjamin Tissot
Speaker 2 (00:00.194)
Hey travelers, before we start, just wanted to give you guys a heads up that my audio in this episode is a little bit funky, especially at the beginning. It gets a little better as you go, but I tried something new that I definitely won't try again for next week's show. Just wanted to give you a heads up so you didn't think that your headphones are broken. All right, here's the show.
Yo, welcome to the show. I'm your host Gunnar Olson here with two guys who have ruffled some feathers in the travel industry.
over the years. They're two expert level travelers who in the name of saving you money haven't always been super popular with the big travel companies. One of them, you know, it's thrifty traveler, executive editor, Kyle Potter. And the other one is someone you should know. So he's the founder and CEO of auto slash and hotel slash to travel websites that help you find the lowest rental car and hotel room rates. And most importantly, notify you when prices drop. He's also a former United Airlines baggage handler and crucially
has saved me thousands of dollars over the years on my travel and all I can do to repay him is have him on my silly little show. It's Jonathan Weinberg. Jonathan, welcome to the show. How are doing today? Awesome. We're really excited. Today on the show, we're going to talk all about the founding of Auto Slash and Hotel Slash. We're going to dive deeper into both of these tools and talk a little bit about the travel industry at large. Plus we're going to explain why we can't stop talking about Georgia, the country, not the state.
Hey, great. I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:24.396)
the state, but more frequently the country.
Yeah, more frequently the country. We talk about it a lot in the Traveler office. So we're bringing that discussion to you guys here today, as well as a few hotel openings we can't stop thinking about as well. You got all that and more. Welcome back to the Traveler podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:48.206)
All right, welcome back. On today's show, we're going to dive deep into one of our favorite ways to on rental cars that you've heard us talk a lot about already. It's Auto Slash. Plus we're going to talk about their newer site that they use to save on hotels called Hotel Slash. We sang Auto Slash phrases in an episode a few weeks ago, all about our favorite travel tools. It's a no-brainer for us. I've been using it for years. It's one of the first things I recommend to anybody since I've started here at Thrifty Traveler.
You're going to hear some hotel slash ads later on in the episode and on some future episode too, but that is not why Jonathan is joining us today. He's been on our short list of guests for a long time and we're huge fans of his company. So with that out of the way, I have a question for both of you, but Jonathan, I'll start with you. When you started Auto Slash in 2010, it wasn't super popular among the people in companies selling those rental cars, was it? What were those first few years like in a bit of an adversarial role in the industry?
The first few years were interesting, but the first week was actually really interesting. mean, we launched this with the simple goal of getting people the best possible deal on a car rental. And we were completely naive. We just signed up for some affiliate programs and hacked together a site. had a great founding co-founder, and he was an amazing developer. And we got something together pretty quickly.
And you know, there are all these coupon codes and discount codes out there. And we just grabbed a bunch of them. We said, wow, these things lower the rates substantially. And, you know, people would flock to the sites and they were booking immediately. And we thought we were on fire. We thought we basically invented the best things in sliced bread. And then, you know, it took only took a few days before the rental car company is caught on. And, all of a sudden we're getting these angry calls. What are you guys doing? You can't do this type of thing. And we're like, why not? You know, it's like you just you publish these coupon codes and these discount codes.
on your website and we're just trying to help people get the best deal. you know, we, guess we sort of burned the boats early, you know, there was, there was really no going back from that point. Um, you know, we, we, we sort of backtracked a little bit. attempted to work with the, you know, the industry players and stuff, but I think the damage was done at that point. And, you know, it was, it was, it was a rough couple of years, I would say to be getting rough few years. And, but, you know, we, we always felt that.
Speaker 1 (03:59.254)
if we just did right by the consumer, if we try to get people the best possible deals and be as consumer centric as possible, the business would eventually materialize and people would, they would appreciate that. And I would say that ultimately we were proven right, but it was just an unbelievably difficult time to get there. But we built a sizable business and customers love us and we're one of the few travel websites out there. They're not really beholden to the industry.
We work on behalf of the consumer and if it means we make a little bit less money than the other guys, well, so be it. We wanna do the right thing and ultimately we can look ourselves in the mirror, we can go to sleep at night knowing that we're in the consumer's corner and that's what it's all about for us.
I just love that ethos of obviously being consumer first. one of the fun things about auto slash, especially when you're on there, sometimes it feels like you're cheating. So I understand why the rental car companies weren't very excited about it at first, but it's one of those things where you get a deal and you just can't believe that it's true, especially when you're perusing rental car websites themselves. But that ethos is something that you also carry into journalism, Kyle. And I want to pivot it to you a little bit because
You are no stranger to pissing off major travel corporations. Do you like stirring the pot? Is it just something that's a byproduct of what you like to do? what, you know, why are you constantly in the cross hairs of, of the head honchos?
Well, I just want to be clear if we're talking about feather ruffling, Jonathan and auto slash and hotel slash are somewhere up above the ceiling of the of the studio that we're in. And I and thrifty traveler as a whole is far below that. So let's just be clear about our respective roles in this. Now, it's it's honestly verbatim what Jonathan just said, which is that if you put the consumer first, nothing else really matters. You can justify everything that you're doing if your number one interest is helping people.
Speaker 3 (05:57.41)
book a rental car for less, book a hotel for less, or just in general, our motto is travel more for less. So that is the North Star of everything that we do. And that means we are going to write stories and put things on social media and create tools that airlines and hotels probably don't like. But we're also going to do some things that they do like. We're going to help fill seats. We're going to help fill hotel rooms.
So it all kind of comes out in the wash, but as long as the number one priority is helping people, your customers or your readers or your subscribers, if we're not focused on that, what are we doing here? Like what is our purpose? But that is the purpose. That's cool.
Yeah, I want to be super clear that you guys being feathered rufflers and rabble rousers and disruptors or whatever is definitely a good thing. And I think everybody listening today would definitely agree with that as well. Let's jump into something hot and something cold. Well, it's usually something hot and something cold this week. It's something hot and something hotter. Sometimes there's only good news out in the world and I'm to take the chance to be positive when we can.
No, if it does something called segment gets a little bloated in this show sometimes so it's fun to talk about things We're excited about and one of these things When we search for a thrifty traveler premium flight deal alerts, we love doing what we call being the hits and that is Japan Hawaii Mexico Europe, you know the things that people always love the flight deals that people always want to book
But sometimes the strangest ones are the ones that just set our office ablaze with conversation and our team Slack goes nuts for deals like the one that we sent to Tbilisi, Georgia, Georgia, country folks.
Speaker 3 (07:42.407)
There is not a city, so far as I know, called Tbilisi in the state of Georgia.
That's right. Kyle, I've heard you talk about Georgia and the Caucasus Mountains before. Why is Georgia on your mind?
principally because I've never gotten there yet. But all of my friends and family members and just acquaintances who have been sing nothing but its praises that the landscape is jaw-dropping, that the food is amazing, that the culture and the warmth of the people there is just second to none. And I think you found probably something that excites you more than anybody else in the world, which is the prospect of doing some
five-star skiing for eight euro a day. So when you think about eight euro a day lift tickets, how many times could you go skiing in the Caucasus Mountains as compared to one trip to Vale or Aspet?
God, and yeah, I mean, for that, that money is just so crazy. And you know, the hotels too, that you can stay at their five star hotels for a hundred bucks a night. And it's just the prospect of going all the way over there for a ski trip is probably pretty daunting to a lot of people, but man, it just seems pretty unique over there. And those mountains look incredible, like real Alpsian gnarly steep mountains that I'm.
Speaker 2 (09:01.41)
very, very intrigued by as well. Jonathan, what do you know about Georgia? Have you ever been, have you ever thought of going to Georgia?
I have not been to Georgia, but one of the guys on our team is actually traveling through Eastern Europe right now. And he's supposed to be in Georgia in another week or so. And one thing that he and I share, we're both huge foodies. the thing that I know about Georgian food is kachapuri. I don't know if you guys have ever had kachapuri, but it's basically this boat of bread and cheese and egg and stuff like that. And strangely enough, I was first introduced to kachapuri.
by a tour guide in Jerusalem. And he said, I got to take you to this amazing Georgian restaurant, like right near the Wailing Wall over there. And I just thought it was the best thing I ever had. I'm a huge fan of like bread and cheese, a pizza's like my, if I had one food for the rest of my life, pizza would be it. So I was in heaven and know, I got back to New York and I sought out some Georgian restaurants here and I had Kachapuri.
It never quite measured up to what I had in Jerusalem, but I'm like, man, I'm like, if I go to Georgia one day, the country, I'm like, that's the first thing I'm gonna do. So, Kachapuri is really high on my list there, so.
There are carb bombs and then there's Kachapuri. Exactly. Which is just as you put a boat of butter and cheese and cholesterol and I cannot get enough of it as well.
Speaker 2 (10:22.388)
If you can, yeah, sold on a Georgian bread boat after a day of skiing. Goodness.
my god. I don't know if this is intentional enough, but you guys said, you know, what's hot? mean, I don't know if you know, but the word Tbilisi itself, it means warm. And I guess there's sulfur springs there. And that's what the city is named after is these like sort of hot baths there. So that's a big attraction there. So I know that Chris is interested in going there and checking those out when he gets to Jordan in a week.
You are giving us way too much credit for thinking that we came up with that connection and making this something hot. We are not that smart.
Yeah, Jonathan, stop selling too. I'm already sold on going to Georgia.
You mean the Georgia on your mind with the reference that you was into the original song? I get a 30s. You guys are on the wall here.
Speaker 2 (11:08.558)
Georgia on your mind was definitely a reference to the song, but I did not know about Tbilisi and its origins either. the reason why we were talking about it so much in the office was this deal, this flight deal was flying from Delta hubs, Atlanta, Detroit, LA, Minneapolis, and Seattle with connections in either Amsterdam or Paris and connecting onto Georgia. Some of the connections on Georgian Airways on some Ferris, which was very curious to me, didn't know they were a Sky Team member.
All of the flights that I mentioned, all of those departure cities, $545 round trip in economy, which is an insane deal. We track these fares every single day, we Georgia and we go there every single day, which is my personal curiosity, and it's always $1,200 or more. So this is just half off for no reason other than trying to fill some seats connecting on to Georgia, which is a pretty amazing deal.
I mean, just to put a finer point on this, mean, Georgia is a destination that I would say has become increasingly popular within the last decade, but still is not anywhere near, you know, the entirety of Western Europe and even some other Eastern European destinations. And as a result of that, there just aren't that many ways to get there for us, us Americans and anybody throughout North America. So that makes it hard to find anything.
under $1,200 round trip. seeing this for less than half that price at $545 round trip is a real, real shock.
Yeah. Somebody, one of our members out there needs to book the Georgia to Georgia flight from Atlanta too. Please just do that and let us know. Podcasts at thriftytraveler.com. If you book it, please let me know. Um, let's move on to something hotter this week, which is park Hyatt's, um, Hyatt's highest end luxury hotels have long been a favorite of travelers considering you can book nights there from 40 to 45,000 Hyatt points per night. many cases, I've long been a fan of park Hyatt's. I especially loved.
Speaker 2 (13:03.47)
Park Hyatt Zanzibar and the Park Hyatt St. Kitts, both incredible hotels. But this hotel brand has been on a roll lately. And Hyatt put out a news release kind of highlighting that roll. it is pretty impressive when you look at it. They've opened Park Hyatt in Marrakesh and London in 2024. Johannesburg and Kuala Lumpur already this year. And they've announced new openings in Cabo, Cancun, Mexico City, Vancouver. Oh, I'm going have to pronounce this. Fu Quoc.
John, then you might need to fact check us.
Food quote? Okay, I should have...
And then.
These pronunciation is not my forte, but man, I'd love to go there.
Speaker 2 (13:42.89)
It sounds amazing too. yeah, the last one, Sisley, are all opening in the next two years. Any of these openings intrigue you guys more than others? Jonathan, we'll start with you.
The Park Hyatt Tokyo, I think the rebranded Tokyo one. mean, I'm a big foodie and know, there's Elaine Dukas collaboration there. I mean, that's got to be an unbelievable restaurant to go to. And I'm a big fan of the movie Lost in Translation, which was at the original Park Hyatt there. So, and I love Tokyo. So my family just got back from there, my cousins and I was like jonesing for it. I was like, man, I got to go back. So that's right up at the top of my list.
My parents just got back to Malaysia and guess the Park Hyatt Kuala Lumpur is the second tallest building in the world. They didn't stay there. I should have booked them there, but that one sounds pretty awesome as well.
Yeah, that's really cool, Kyle.
You know, I will join Jonathan gladly at the park at Tokyo. This is probably now the third episode in a row where we've mentioned it. Very excited to get there. But I guess more broadly, I'm just really interested in, I think it's undeniable again, just how much the entire travel industry is really pushing the needle on premium travel and the fact that we have what more than half a dozen.
Speaker 3 (15:01.336)
park riots that are opening within the next year and a half or two years says a lot about where these big hotel chains are spending their time and their resources. I mean, there are plenty of Hyatt places and, you know, grand Hyatt's and whatever that are opening over the next few years as well. But this is where they are the brightest light and where they're spending the most of their time and money. And I think that's really telling about how the entire travel industry is changing.
Yeah, well that is definitely very thoughtful and well informed industry analysis, but I need you to give me a name of a hotel, Kyle Potter. Which hotel are you most excited for?
The Sicily one caught me off guard. They're very clearly, obviously trying to cash in on the White Lotus craze from season two. And I think that would be a really, really fun one to check out. I haven't been to Sicily myself. This one might force the issue.
Yeah, that one definitely jumped off the page at me too. Also the Park High Vancouver, Vancouver, my favorite city in the world. It's going to be in the tallest building in the city. The views all around Vancouver are pretty special with the ocean and the mountains right there. So I'm sure that that'll be a very, very lovely stay as well. I'm sure Stanley Park will be their kind of park peg. I don't know if they're still doing that where they need to have, you know, the Park High, it's all are close to or if not on a park of some kind. think.
the London one, may have stretched to the point where they're done with that.
Speaker 3 (16:28.174)
It's a stretch. It's in a commercial area.
But I'm sure Vancouver's will be Stanley Park, maybe the best city park in the world for my money. But lot of exciting news with these park riots. Let's take a quick break.
Gunnar, you ever book a hotel and then find out the price dropped like a week later?
Yes, of course, it's so annoying, but now it's preventable. That's why I'm obsessed with Hotel Slash. Not only do they get you 20 to 40 percent off hotel stays right out of the gate, but every booking is automatically tracked. So if the price drops, they let you know so you can rebook and save even more. And you know, Kyle, the only thing I like more than booking travel is rebooking travel for a better deal.
I do know that. This is like having price protection for your hotel stays.
Speaker 2 (17:11.502)
Yeah, here's an example. I was looking at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Boston. Other sites, it came out to $324 after taxes and fees, but with Hotel Slash, it was just $302 all in. Same hotel, same dates, but a lower price. Plus, if the price goes down, I'm still protected.
It's easy to get started, just go to hotelslash.com and use the promo code thriftytraveller, all one word, and you'll unlock a free 90-day trial membership.
Yep, and that same code gets you up to $20 off your first prepaid booking as well. Hotel slash, where thrifty travelers slash their hotel bills. All right, welcome back. Let's get into our extra mile topic where we dig a lot deeper on a topic of the week. And this week we're going to talk about auto slash and hotel slash. But before we get into the nuts and bolts of these and how they work.
Jonathan, tell us a little bit about your path into the travel industry. What was your early career like and how did you get here running these two services?
My path into the travel industry actually started when I was a kid, believe it or not. My father worked for United Airlines when I was growing up. He actually worked for the computer reservation side of it. So he was the one who was installing United's system into the travel agencies. this was pre-GDS, pre-SABER and all those. They had a system called Apollo. And basically my father would go around and install Apollo into these travel agencies all over the New York metropolitan area.
Speaker 1 (18:40.494)
And you know, I would tag along with him. I'd sit at his office there and play around with the computers. This is really the dawn of computers. And we're not talking like, you know, IBM PCs, we're talking green screen here, teletype machines, that sort of thing. you know, I got started early on. I was around the travel industry. Because my father worked for the airlines, we used to have what they call write your own ticket, which is exactly as it sounds. would literally have a blank ticket and you just write in the destination and you'd show up at the ticket counter and
they'd, you you'd be on standby space available. And back then you could actually get on standby. Unlike today, it's real hard. And, you know, we would, we would be going all over the world. I traveled with my grandparents. I actually traveled to Hong Kong on a United 747 when there was a piano in the upper deck of the lounge there. So it was pretty cool. You know, I just, to me, I thought it was normal growing up that way. And, you know, it was, was, was fantastic way. And, you know, I got involved in technology and I,
kind of got out of the travel industry. I was selling computers for a while. I was working for an early Windows software developer. And then I made a quick foray back in the travel work for a corporate travel agency kind of handling their MIS systems, their automation systems. But eventually I kind of went where the money was and that was finance. I went down to Wall Street and I was early in the technology game and networks and computers and that sort of thing. And I had a great career.
building financial products, building market trading systems, market information systems. But at some point I kind of got bored. You know, after the 2000s, I was looking around for something to do and I saw an ad posted for Airfare Watchdog, which was, you know, kind of a predecessor to you guys. I don't know how familiar you are with them. George Holbiger, the founder of Airfare Watchdog was sort of the...
granddaddy of the airfare deal sites and he was looking for someone to do airfare analysis and I had a bunch of time on my hands so I went over, I just walked from my Wall Street office over to Battery Park City where he had his office, a 10 minute walk and he had a bunch of people sitting around in his living room, know, searching for airfares on Expedia and Travelocity and stuff like that. And I just was just like, this is so cool. I was like, I wanna help you out. I was like, I can help you build your website, I can do product. He's like, yeah, I don't need any of that. He's like, I just need somebody.
Speaker 1 (20:58.456)
to do airfare analysis, I'll pay you like, you know, 12 bucks an hour or something like that. I was like, sure, whatever. was like, you know, I was making a good living doing, you know, working on Wall Street. For me, it was just something, you know, interesting to keep my mind occupied. And from the very beginning, I was like completely enamored. You know, I was, I was ignoring my day job and basically just spending all my time finding airfares. And, you know, I eventually started automating the system. You know, all these guys were searching for fares by hand. I'm sure you guys have some automation in some of the tools that you do as well.
But this was, you know, back in the day before any of this stuff existed. And I actually brought Travelocity's website down one day. This is something that most people don't know. I was actually running scripts from my Wall Street company's headquarters. And they thought it was a denial of service attack. And I think for years afterwards, none of the people at that company could access the Travelocity website because Travelocity had blocked the IP address of that company, which I won't name here.
But yeah, but the script worked really well. I just had to learn to like back off and not run a hundred threads at a time and bring the website to its knees.
Man, being so good at booking flight deals that you get banned from Travelocity is,
That's a sign that you're good at what you do, and it's also a sign that you need to change your career when you're spending your professional work hours running scripts to find deals.
Speaker 1 (22:21.736)
Exactly. Travelocity back in those days is one of the few that had flexible dates search. You could basically search destination by destination and see an entire month of availability, which you couldn't do at any other website. They were my go-to exploit site. I really enjoyed the time working with George at Airfare Watchdog. Eventually, he had sold to a division of Expedia called Smarter Travel. They also were with TripAdvisor.
And I, but by then I had bit by the travel bug and I started looking around for like, what else can I do here? I want to stay in online travel. So I was bragging to my mother actually, I would go down to Florida from New York and I would say, what great deals I got on car rentals. And she was like, you should do this for other people. You're so good at it. And I was like, yeah, whatever. was like, your mother tells you stuff, you kind of dismiss it out of hand.
But it was one of those ideas that I just couldn't get out of my head. went home and I was thinking about it I was like, you know, there are like ways I'm like, you know, find coupons and discount codes and I keep rebooking anytime the price goes down. said, I wonder if there's a way to sort of, you know, do this at scale. And I approached one of the guys that I was working with at Airfare Watchdog who was doing some contract development. He was an amazing developer and, you know, one thing turned into another. And I said, you know, let's give it a shot.
And we tried it and we were just astounded at how well it worked. And I think a lot of people were in, but as we discussed earlier, the rental car companies were pretty astounded as well. And that set off a series of events that led us here to where we are today.
I want to get back to that and I want to get back to a little bit of the secret sauce or at least as much as you can share about kind of putting auto slash together and where you've brought it in the year since. Um, but before that sometime between, know, your career on wall street to where you are today, um, you've shared and written very eloquently about your harrowing experience being in world trade center tower two on nine 11. And so I'm wondering, you know, 24 years later,
Speaker 3 (24:24.12)
How has that shaped your life and the decisions that you made and maybe even the career choices that you've made?
Yeah. Great question. I think that the overriding thing that it imparted to me was that life is short and you never know what's going to happen. And you got to seize the day, you got to seize the moment. there are things that I don't want to have any regrets and that means traveling, it means trying different things in business, it means just kind of taking the opportunity to live your life to the fullest. I think that there were decisions that
people made that day that determined whether they lived or died. mean, my own story, I was on the 77th floor of World Trade Center Tower 2, which was the second tower to get hit. I had a view of World Trade Center 1 out my window. I didn't actually see the plane hit the building, but I like literally five seconds later, I turned toward the building and I saw this gaping hole there. And you've seen the footage on TV and stuff like that in newsreels. mean, it was
pretty horrific what was going on there. And it was, we didn't really understand what had happened. We didn't know if it was assessed. It was just hard to tell scale at that level. And your mind is sort of like in this overrides that you're sort of in shock. And my company had offices on 77 and 78. And I had actually gone up to the 78th floor. was head of IT at the company at the time. And I went upstairs and there was a conference room up there to turn on the TV.
And I was watching CNN for a couple of minutes. Nobody really knew what was going on. I went back downstairs. And about 10 minutes later, plane careened through the conference room that I was standing in a couple of minutes before. And had I not gone down the escalator when I did, had I stayed up there a couple of minutes or gone up there a few minutes later, I wouldn't even be here. And I have colleagues that were up there at the time, unfortunately. And I never saw them again. And it was very difficult.
Speaker 1 (26:25.4)
horrific and I feel for their families and stuff, it imparts to you a sense that it's now or never, you and you gotta not sweat the small things, you know, it's not worth it. just, you I try to take a very calm outlook on life and, you you do what you can and, you know, try to grab those opportunities as it goes.
I mean, thank you for sharing that story. would just encourage anyone who's listening. Jonathan, you wrote a really amazing piece, I think on Medium, just kind of recounting your experiences that day and where it's brought you. I mean, is it fair to say, fair to assume that, you know, without that happening, you know, did that kind of put you on the path towards working with Airfare Watchdog and starting doing something that you really believed in with Auto Slash?
I think so. It was definitely one of the contributing factors. mean, I obviously at some point had a career change. I was actually doing both. was working my finance day job and working on AutoSash at the time. I actually hired my first employee before I even quit my quote unquote day job. But it was what I think led me to do I really want to be doing this for the rest of my life? mean, finance was great to me. I enjoyed my time on Wall Street, but.
I didn't feel passionate about finance. I felt passionate about travel and whether that was because my father and my upbringing made me passionate along the way or it was just more interesting to me. I'm still not sure to this day, but it's something that I wanted to look back and say, I wanna go to work every day. I wanna be excited. And that's how I feel. I I'm a workaholic. I probably work at least 12 hours a day. My team knows and...
I'm online all the time, but it's something that I do because I love it. I don't do it for the money.
Speaker 2 (28:10.872)
So without giving too much away, we're going to talk about Hotel slash Dube because Auto slash came first. We'll dig in a little bit here and say that we're definitely all grateful that you made the career pivot you did to go to Auto slash. But tell us a little bit of what you can, I guess. How does it work?
Yeah, so AutoStush is based on a simple concept. Number one is that coupons and discount codes can significantly lower your rate. There's no lack of coupons and discount codes out there. The rental car companies publish them on their own websites. You know, you've got Costco and AAA and AARP. And so we said, well, if we could design a site that was sort of agnostic that would test all these coupons and discount codes, I mean, think of it as like a brute force attack against the price.
And it gets a little complicated because for some companies you can apply both the discount code, for example, the AAA discount code, and there's coupons as well. So you first have to figure out what gives you the best discount and then is there a coupon code that can match up with it? Computers are great at this sort of thing. Computers can, you put them all the codes in the database and you run it against the price. But for average traveler to do it, they'd need to sit there go to five different websites, put it in a spreadsheet, compare rates.
So we basically built a system that, know, the secret sauce, it's actually not that secret. It's just go through every possible combination of discount code and coupon code and let us spit out the best rate per company. So that's number one. The other side of it is tracking the price over time. The great thing about car rentals is that in most cases, you don't have to pay upfront. And even for prepaid rates, you can generally cancel up to 48 hours before pickup without penalty, depending on where you book.
So that gives you an opportunity to arbitrage the price. If you keep just rechecking the price, and obviously this works for airfares, it obviously works for hotels because we're doing it with hotel slash. But I think car rental is more so than the other types of travel. There's just a lot more volatility. It's kind of in the weeds because you've got mid-sized cars and minivans and SUVs and like...
Speaker 1 (30:18.156)
What's the pickup time? Is it a weekly rental? Is it a daily rental? Is it a monthly rental? And what's the delineation between what becomes a daily versus a weekend rental and which specials, which coupons. So it actually starts to get super complicated. And we've been sort of layering on building the system over time. I got to give a shout out to my co-founder, Mike Miller. He built an incredible system. mean, without his underlying technology, we would not be here today.
But we've built on top of that system over time to get better and better. And people sometimes say, aren't you worried that someone's going to copy what you do? And my answer is have at it. We've been doing this for 15 years now and it gets complicated. So I welcome anyone who would like to try.
Yeah. The thing is, listening to you say that it is complicated. And I think for lot of people whose job it is to analyze these things and understand the travel industry and myself included, I don't, I don't understand all the ins and outs of the rental car industry. So the ability to use auto slash and what I love about it is just, it's, it's very simple. Like you get a questionnaire more or less where you're putting in your information, you know, when you want to pick up and from where, then auto slash will then ask you prompt you.
to click, you know, all of the loyalty programs that you're a part of, including, like you said, the Costco membership and things like that. basically you're, they're taking all of your information and they'll send you an email usually like 30 seconds later with all of the options. And almost always it so much far below what I'm finding on rental car company websites. the simplification of all of those ideas.
into an email that comes 30 seconds after I submit my form is why I autoslash so much. It's such a valuable tool. use it all the time. It's saved me $100 a year.
Speaker 3 (32:07.404)
Yeah, I mean, I've said before on the show, but I'll say it again, every single time I need to rent a car, autoslash.com is the first place I go. And Jonathan, I think you said you don't really have a secret sauce, but to me, the price tracking is the secret sauce. I mean, that's what you can get to check for you, to do the work for you. Because as you pointed out, these prices are so dynamic. The example I always share is
Years ago, renting an SUV on the big Island of Hawaii, I booked it for $485 and got an email about two weeks before we actually flew to Hawaii to get the car and start the trip. It had dropped by more than $220. So more than half of the price, which I mean, that's very real money. And that is something that I don't think anyone has the presence of mind to even think to go back and check once, let alone on a daily hourly basis.
And even if you do think, I mean, you've got better things to do with your life than rechecking rental car rates. I mean, that's the beauty of auto slash let us do the work for
Yeah, and one other plug it for people who are you know rental car loyalists out there if you like really are tied to one program or the other Well for one loyalty is usually costing you money in this game But if you are a loyalist you can still put your loyalty number into these reservations It's not you're not losing out by booking directly with the airlines like you would for airfare that kind of thing so it's just really There's no way to lose using this tool
And I assume the success of this tool led in part to you founding Hotel Slash. So how did Hotel Slash come about? What problem were you trying to solve on the hotel side of things, Jonathan?
Speaker 1 (33:48.494)
Yeah, so on the hotel side of things, it was similar. mean, to be quite honest, we had customers for years emailing us and saying, hey, we love what you do with auto slash. You've saved us tons of money. Is there a similar service that does something for hotels? And various people have tried over the years. think even TripAdvisor had a service for a while called Tingo, C-I-N-G-O, where if the price dropped after you had booked, they would basically send you a check for the, you know, for the savings after you had gotten back from your trip, which was
which is pretty cool actually. But I think that, similar to our discussion earlier of being sort of beholden to the industry, they quietly shut that down because TripAdvisor was partnering with these same hotels and these same booking partners and they were getting pressure. The hotel industry didn't really like that model very much. And I think that they ended up shutting that down, which was a shame. And I said, well, it works on the car rental side. Is there volatility on the hotel side as well? And we undertook a...
some analysis, we worked on that for a while and we've said, yes, there is volatility, there is opportunity to rebook at a lower rate, the better deal comes along. It wasn't quite as much as car to be honest, but it was there and the savings were tangible. And then we said, okay, well, let's put that aside for a second. Like how do we actually get people the best deal upfront? Like we do with car rentals. How do we get people a better deal than what they can find elsewhere? And what we eventually learned is that
you need to have what's called a closed user group. that means that you need to have a specific targeted group of people, like for example, like teachers in Ohio or something like that, or plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills. If you're targeting to a specific.
I don't think plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills are as price sensitive as teachers in Ohio.
Speaker 1 (35:34.798)
I don't think so either. You'd be surprised. We've got people booking two weeks stays at the park, hide over Christmas and $20,000 stays on our website. So even plastic surgery on Beverly Hills, need deals. But Closed User Group is a specific type of profile of person, but you can also have a Closed User Group if you have a membership sign up. we said, okay, well maybe that's...
Here's a Minneapolis.
Speaker 1 (36:00.534)
that's our in here. It's like, we're going to require people to sign up for a site. We're going to charge a nominal membership fee in order to basically have what's considered a closed user group. And that will allow us to provide better deals to our customers. And then it was like, okay, where do we find these deals? And that was the next step was doing, we had to go out and we had to, know, source this inventory from places. So that's sort of the, you know, one of the secret sauce of hotel slash is, know, how do you go out and find these deals? And we work with lots of different partners all over the industry, OTAs and
some of the business to business type folks in the ecosystem. And little by little, we put together a service where we feel we can get better deals than anywhere else for our customers. And I will say it was a lot harder than we ever expected. The hotel industry is, it's like herding cats for lack of a better term. There's no standards whatsoever. This hotel calls it a premium room. This hotel calls it a superior room.
This hotel calls it a super luxurious room and stuff like that. So it took us a very long time to figure out how to normalize the data, find partners that would work with us. But we've come to a system now where I feel like it works fantastically well. It gets people unbelievably good deals. We've taken to basically auditing every single reservation before the customer checks in.
to avoid issues, make sure that the hotel has the reservation, make sure that it's the correct room type, all that kind of stuff. These are sort of value added things that other sites don't do. And that frankly, we weren't doing at the beginning either until we realized, hey, these things are important. You got to make sure that the customer is taken care of. So we put a very high bar on ourselves and what we want to provide to our customers.
What, addition to really the hallmarks of all things, auto slash and hotel slash, the lowest price possible and price tracking, what are the defining or maybe even underappreciated features of booking through hotel slash? But it sounds like you just answered that question, which is the dedicated service and managing reservations to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks in this admittedly patchwork system of how hotels actually get booked.
Speaker 1 (38:11.374)
Absolutely. mean, and that's after the fact. I mean, there are other unique aspects of it. One is transparency. And again, this goes back to us wanting to be, you know, the quote unquote good guys in the travel industry. We want to be a hundred percent consumer focused. That means showing the all in price upfront. Now some websites are starting to do this now mainly because of these new regulations on junk fees and that sort of thing in the travel industry.
But this is something that we were doing from day one. We were showing you all in pricing and that includes all mandatory tax and fees as well as resort fees. We can talk about resort fees a little bit. To me, that's the scourge of the hotel industry. I hate them like with a passion. the reality is, yeah. The reality is we have to deal with them. They are something that exists. And it's disingenuous to show one price.
on the shop screen. And then when you get to the checkout screen, it's a completely different price. But even on like, for example, Google Hotel Search, they don't have to show you the mandatory tax and fees. They only have to show you the base price plus the plus the resort fee. So it's still hard to compare apples to apples, especially when you have certain sites out there and they'll remain nameless, that basically, you know, they don't include the resort fee. So they look like they're lower than you click through. And you realize it's like bait and switch and stuff like that.
We don't want to play any of those games. We're trying to bring transparency to the market. And I think that our customers who use us, they appreciate that and they know it, but it's always a challenge for us because you may come to hotel slash and see a price that is higher or what appears to be higher than some other website. And until you go to that other website and click all the way through, you realize that the price is not really the price. And we feel that over time people are going to appreciate that.
and they're going to use us for that reason.
Speaker 2 (40:06.2)
Yeah, the idea that all in pricing is something that makes you guys unique is amazing. Bravo. Kudos to you guys for that. But my God, all in pricing everywhere all the time, please. Like, just it drives me crazy that that when you're selling something on the internet, you don't actually have to tell people how much it costs upfront is insane. So yeah.
And I think the sites that don't do this know that there's inertia, that it is complicated to book travel. And that once you get somebody in the door saying, oh, this hotel room is $19, the fact that it is, in fact, actually $50 or $60, they've already made up their mind that they're going to book. And so until there is real regulatory structure that forces everybody to
to follow the rules and disclose all of the exact same fees upfront. There's always going to be sites out there that try to skirt the rules on this and find a way to get people in the door by teasing and advertising a lower price that isn't actually lower at all. Jonathan, I will never forget talking to you in 2023 as you were getting ready to launch Hotel Slash and kind of talking about the backstory of Auto Slash in that conversation.
you referred to yourselves as, and this is a direct quote verbatim, the bad boys of the travel industry, which you touched on at the top of the show in, in, uh, angering some of the, powers that be in the rental car industry. As you got that service out, I'm wondering, has that perspective changed at all? Or is that still kind of in the heart of what you're doing with hotel slash as well as auto slash.
I don't know if it's changed with Auto Slash. I mean, we still don't partner directly with the car rental companies. It's something that, you know, it's like I said, we sort of made our bed and we lie in at this point, you know, but we're completely comfortable with being very consumer focused. In hotel industry, we certainly took the...
Speaker 1 (41:57.122)
the lessons to heart that we, like I said, we sort of burn the boats and never look back for the car rental industry. But hotels, I think that you want to build a sustainable business. You want to make sure that what you're able to offer to the customers, work with your partners and be able to deliver them with great results, but also work within the framework of what the industry expects. I think that we've done, I would say a better job with that on the hotel side, frankly.
But we're still always pushing the envelope in terms of trying to get people the best deals. mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, we want you to get a better deal with us than anywhere else. We've got some innovative stuff that we're working on. We recently introduced our loyalty program called Slash Cash, which basically gives you money back on every prepaid booking that you can automatically apply to future booking. So that's a way of rewarding our customers for their loyalty. I know that a lot of folks in the
A lot of consumers love the hotels.com loyalty program and they sort of bemoan the demise of that, you know, once Expedia took over. That program was probably a little bit too rich and I think that's why it really didn't survive. But, know, in terms of loyalty, you know, one thing that folks ask us sometimes is will I get, you know, loyalty credits for my stay through Hyatt or Marriott or that sort of thing. In some cases,
You will, in other cases you won't. If it's a third party booking that you're not booking directly through the hotel chain, you might not. We personally feel that loyalty, especially these days is overrated. We feel that being a free agent and saving money at the end of the day is the most important thing. But we acknowledge that folks like to earn those points and stuff like that, like to earn cash back. And that was our attempt with slash cash is to provide a loyalty scheme for our customers to earn something back on each booking.
Yeah, I mean, you're preaching to the choir about loyalty being expensive. That's maybe the most common phrase here in the office other than, holy crap, did you see that flight price? I'm curious, Jonathan, I mean, we talked earlier in the show about the emphasis on premium travel as evidenced by all of the park hyats that the Hyatt brand is building. And you see this across every major hotel chain and all of at least the successful airlines in the United States and abroad as well.
Speaker 3 (44:21.494)
And so, you know, in this new age of premium travel, do you feel like, do you see that lower prices and price drop alerts move the needle the same way that they did, you know, like a decade ago?
I think so. mean, let's be honest. mean, hotel prices are only going one way and that's up. You know, it's more expensive than ever to travel. mean, airfare prices as well. I mean, we see it with car rentals, frankly, across the ecosystem. You're just going to pay more for a vacation. So services like Auto Slash and Hotel Slash and frankly, services like Thrifty Traveler that highlights these deals. You know, they're oftentimes going to be the difference between somebody being able to afford a vacation and not afford a vacation.
We've had people tell us many times, know, my sister's, you know, in this state over here, I don't get to see her that often. If it weren't for, you know, hotel slash or auto slash, I wouldn't be able to visit her at all. I'm, you know, I'm on a fixed budget type of thing. So I do think that, you know, it helps tremendously. I think that even at the higher end properties, there, it becomes even more important because, you know, you're looking to travel, you want to stay at the nicest place you can. I mean, typically,
I'm traveling on a budget. looking within a certain range. I don't really want to spend $3,000 a night on something, but oftentimes prices will drop for short periods of time. And if you can jump on those deals when you can, you can basically save anywhere from 20 to 50%. I was actually shocked. My wife was traveling for a conference in Vegas. the conference was, I believe it was at the Blasio.
And the price was like, you know, $600 a night or something like that, because the whole city was filled up with convention goers and stuff. And then all of a sudden the price had dropped $250 for the stay per night. And I assumed it was a mistake. And I went and I double checked it and triple checked it. And I ended up rebooking the stay for like, know, significantly less than what it was before. And then two days later, the price shot back up and it was even higher than what she had booked originally.
Speaker 1 (46:33.196)
And this is not uncommon in the industry. What will happen is hotels and car rental companies, they want to basically fill rooms. want to maximize their utilization. And when they find that maybe utilization is not where they need it to be, they're going to temporarily lower prices. And there's an opportunity for folks who are paying attention or folks who are tracking their booking through AutoSash or HotelSash to get a good deal. like I said, these things are often short-lived.
You either need to get lucky or you need to be persistent and persistence is what we're all about. Just keep rechecking the rate multiple times a day and when that price drops, boom, send out that alert so folks can rebook and lock in those savings.
Alright, Jonathan, on behalf of, I'm sure, hundreds of listeners and definitely myself, do I need an international driver's permit when I go abroad?
It depends on where you go. So in Italy, the rule is that you, by law, you are supposed to get an international driver's permit. The reality is that the major rental car companies don't really enforce it. These smaller rental car companies absolutely do. And we've had customers denied for not having an IDP and we've had to put specific covering.
verbiage in our confirmation emails to make sure that that doesn't happen again. So we're trying to do everything we can to inform people. Technically, if you get pulled over by the Italian police, they can ask for your IDP. So it's something that we do recommend getting. It's absolutely necessary if you're going to a place that doesn't use English characters natively, which means Japan. I got an IDP before I went to Japan and I would not have been able to rent it all there.
Speaker 1 (48:16.064)
In truth, the answer is you just don't know. So it's something that you want to get. The good news is that AAA, previously you had to visit a AAA office in the United States to get an IDP. You can now order one online. One of our guys ordered one online and it came like two days later basically. So you can upload your stuff. So it's a lot more convenient now than it was in the past.
That's great. All right. Last question in this rapid fire around. Jonathan, what's next for both of your services? Are there other problems left to solve in the travel industry that you guys are going to have out here? Or, yeah, what's next for auto slash and hotel slash.
think on the hotel side, I mean, we're really excited about a lot of different features that we're working on right now. I one of them, I think that there's opportunity to leverage AI, both in terms of being able to provide more transparency to customers. And that means with regard to being able to see information about a hotel reviews, TripAdvisor and Google reviews and some of the ones on Expedia and booking.com are great, but you got to be able to wade through these reviews.
and kind of get a sense of a property and that can take anywhere from five minutes to five hours, depending on how down the rabbit hole you go. I think the AI is one of those things that can suck up huge amounts of reviews and provide a summary really quickly. So we're working on that right now. I think things like, is this hotel pet friendly? What are the parking fees? What is the check-in, check-out time? mean, that information is not always as transparent as possible.
So that's something that we're looking at Releverage AI for. But the thing that we're most excited about on the hotel side is typically in order to get the best possible deal, you have to pay upfront for a booking. Now that doesn't mean that it's not cancelable or refundable, but you do have to lay out the money. We feel that there's an opportunity to basically let people get the best possible deal, but not make them pay the entire amount upfront. So we're working on some functionality that we're excited about. That's gonna make.
Speaker 1 (50:20.696)
prepaid booking, pay a property booking. So you won't have to pay upfront or you won't have to pay much more than a small deposit to hold that reservation.
That's awesome. Very excited for what's to come here with, with your two companies there. let's pivot to some listener feedback that we got this week. so the first is from Amy from Chicago who actually wrote in for the mailbag episode we had a few weeks ago. And she asked me what to do at Glacier national park. And I gave her a rapid fire itinerary. it sounds like she hit a lot of my recommendations. So Amy, thanks for making me feel and sound smart there, but
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (50:59.042)
I know it feels pretty good. She had Bonsai Brewing and Lula's Cafe and several other of the hikes in the park. Sounds like she had an epic trip. She also outlined two of what she called quote, thrifty traveler style wins as they were trying to do a trip that was as close to zero dollars as possible. One, the Amex Platinum refresh happened while they were there. So they're able to use a hundred dollar Rezzy credit in Whitefish on their last night of their trip. Pretty awesome.
Did we find out if Bulldog Saloon is on the Rezzy list? I'm guessing no, but I just want to check.
I would be so surprised if the Bulldog was on Rezzy.
Spoiler alert, it is not.
But the second was and I'll read from her here. She said I was planning to book the rental car with points via one of the travel portals I had plenty of points but every option I found seemed so expensive I saw Kyle's article on auto slash before I had booked Checked there and found a great option for less than half of what I had seen anywhere else. This was awesome Kyle kudos to the article and Jonathan, of course kudos for the platform
Speaker 3 (52:01.666)
really messed up the order of the kudos on that one. think all kudos goes to Jonathan. And again, I just want to say, know, Jonathan, it's been great talking with you about both Auto Slash and Hotel Slash. Hotel Slash is the sponsor of this episode and many more. But the reason why we're talking about these things is because they are tools that we actually use day in and day out. I can't remember a time that A, I didn't use Auto Slash to search for a rental car and B,
the time that I didn't get a price drop alert for that rental that I booked to save, I mean, at least $15. But I mean, in many cases, $50, $75. In the case of that trip to Hawaii, $220. And so I'm glad that Amy saved a boatload as a result of that advice.
Absolutely. Amy, thank you so much for reaching out. If you want us to answer your question, have some feedback for us, email us at podcast at thrifttraveller.com and your question might be featured in next week's show. All right, it's the closing segment. It's on the spot. And we actually asked Jonathan to come and put Kyle and I on the spot today. We have no idea what's coming. Jonathan, what do you got?
All right. I am curious what you guys think about Hidden City Ticketing. Is it a clever consumer hack or is it exploiting the terms and terms of service of the airlines themselves?
I think both things can be true at the same time. There's no question that it's a hidden city ticketing and this has been popularized by the site skip lag. So those terms are basically synonymous at this point, skip lagging versus hidden city ticketing. So I try to find a flight from Minneapolis to Atlanta, but by flying from Minneapolis to Atlanta to Charlotte and then dropping off halfway through, can save $200. It's a airline terms and conditions are nonsensical and I don't think that we should
Speaker 3 (53:48.376)
congratulate airlines for writing these things about their confusing pricing into their terms and penalizing travelers who do this. But it is real, it can happen. I think it's one of these things that has become popular because it feels like you're beating the airline at the system. And as a result of that, it's become more popular than it really needs to be. It's kind of become like this North Star of travel hacking that, you see an expensive flight price, I should try skip lagging or I should try hidden city ticketing.
And sometimes it works, but it is not a silver bullet. would say that the cases where you're going to come out significantly ahead are probably few and far between. What do you think Gunner?
Yeah, you know, I've never done this, to be honest. I've looked into it a few times and in the end, I guess I'm just too much of a good boy rule follower and I just retreated back and paid a little extra to book to where I wanted to go. But also, you know, a lot of my travel I do with skis and now with a kid in car seats. So when you check a bag, this doesn't work. So, you know, for instance,
between Minneapolis and Salt Lake City. Salt Lake is some place I always want to go skiing every year and no matter what, fares to Salt Lake City are 450 bucks round trip. And it's a perfect place to do hidden city ticketing because of that Salt Lake City hub. You book something to Pocatello, Idaho instead of Salt Lake and you're probably going to save money on the fare, but my skis are in under Pocatello, that doesn't really help me that much. You know, as far as deceiving the airlines or violating the terms and conditions, I don't really...
care about that. I'm not going to pearl clutch about all that stuff. But it just seems like a bit of a risk. And I don't want to end up on anybody's naughty list, other than speaking badly about them and their businesses on this here podcast. That's a great question. Great question, Jonathan. What do you think?
Speaker 1 (55:39.89)
to using Hidden City Ticketing on multiple occasions. It honestly is not my go-to. I generally will start looking at Hidden City options if I feel that the fares are way higher than I want to pay. There was one sort of epic one when my family took a trip. It was about 10 of us in Costa Rica and I just couldn't find fares that were reasonable from Liberia, Costa Rica, back to New York.
and we ended up booking something through, it was a stop in Fort Lauderdale where my parents are from anyway. I think it was at Charleston or something like that. It was literally like 80 % less than what we can get to New York. And we just got off in Fort Lauderdale, I think it was American, like to Charleston through Fort Lauderdale. We got off there and I booked JetBlue home from Fort Lauderdale Airport. I spent the day in Florida and it literally saved the trip. It would have broken the budget had I not found that.
I think it's okay. think that for the average traveler, it's tough because obviously you can't check a bag under most circumstances. I think that if there's irregular operations and you get rerouted, so it's probably not for the faint of heart for the person who likes that certainty in their travel. like I said, my brain is sort of wired on figuring out what the hack is. Auto slash, no tell slash, all about the hack.
So I like it conceptually, but in reality, I just find that maybe there's more trouble than it's worth in many cases. But I do think that it has a place out there, but as long as you're aware of the risks.
Awesome. That's a great on the spot, Jonathan. Thank you so much for bringing that. And that's going to be it for us. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been really, really fun.
Speaker 1 (57:23.65)
been a pleasure, a lot of fun talk with you guys.
Awesome. Well, thank you all listeners for listening to the Thrifty Traveler podcast and for watching us over on YouTube. Please rate us five stars on your platform of choice if you can. Send this episode to someone you know who needs a vacation, who needs to save a little money on their next hotel or rental car as well. And like I said before, if you have feedback for us, send me a note at podcast at thriftytraveler.com. I would love to hear from you there. Kyle, tell us about the team.
This episode was produced by your favorite host who is shutting his laptop and going to the airport to head to Tbilisi and ski for eight euros a day. Gunnar Olsen. It was produced and edited by Sylvia Thomas. Our theme music is by Benjamin Tissel. Thanks, Jonathan.