Today we’d like to introduce you to Brett Snyder.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I suppose the story began when I was growing up in the Valley. For some reason, I was always fascinated with airplanes and more specifically airlines. I used to collect timetables (old paper schedules the airlines used to print) and force my brother to plan imaginary trips. By the time I was 11, I convinced my parents to let me go to school to be a travel agent and I did that through high school. I even went so far as to become a volunteer with Travelers Aid at LAX just to be around the action. By the time, I went to college at The George Washington University, I had decided I wanted to run an airline someday. It wasn’t flying I loved but rather the complexity of the business that captivated me. Out of school, I joined America West Airlines as a pricing analyst where I really learned the business. After going to get my MBA from Stanford, I joined United in marketing, and that’s when I realized that maybe I didn’t want to run an airline after all. The big guys were just too big and bureaucratic. It didn’t seem like fun once I saw what it looked like on the inside. I left the airlines and found myself building a travel comparison site for PriceGrabber.com. The company was sold and the travel piece of the business was shut down. They shifted me to a non-travel area and I wasn’t happy. Some good friends of mine saw how much I knew about the airline industry and convinced me to start writing a blog. They bought the domain name crankyflier.com and I started writing.
In 2008, PriceGrabber laid me off and I was at a crossroads. Instead of looking for a new job, I decided to try to see if I could turn blogging into a business. I had already built a solid following, but it didn’t take long before I realized the kind of writing I wanted to do, writing about the airline business itself, wasn’t going to put a roof over my head. But, I noticed that as my readership grew, I’d find people coming to me asking for specific advice. After testing that a bit, those same friends who convinced me to blog also pushed me to start Cranky Concierge. At first, I just helped people fix problems when they ran into trouble: delays, cancellations, missed connections. But, over time it grew and I returned to my roots as a travel agent. Today, Cranky Concierge has 15 employees, and we help travelers with all things air. We book trips, we help people use miles and monitor for issues, and we handle urgent requests. We have 15 people scattered all over, so we’re an entirely-virtual business. We’ve further grown into small business travel (beyond just air) and there’s more to come.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Is it ever a smooth road? Even getting the idea of Cranky Concierge off the ground was a huge challenge for me mentally. I knew that in the early years, it would be grueling. You can’t limit yourself to certain hours when airplanes are always flying and I knew that once I started, I’d have to be available 24/7 until I could grow enough to add staff. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through that, but I ultimately decided to do it. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes, those 2 am calls were brutal to take, but I just kept plugging away. Over time, we grew and that aspect got easier. But being able to manage people in a 24-hour small business presented a whole new challenge. We’ve had our share of issues from costly mistakes to angry clients, tech snafus and tough personnel decisions. Sometimes, it’s the seemingly little things that cause heartburn, like the inability for me to convince a health insurer to provide us with insurance for a few years since we’re scattered all over the US. (We’ve solved that problem, but our options are still far worse than they should be.) I know there will be more struggles to come. That’s just life running a business.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Cranky Concierge – tell our readers more, for example, what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Cranky Concierge primarily provides air travel assistance and that makes us unique. It’s hard to put us into a category, but you can think of us as a travel agent on steroids who specializes in air travel. Most travel agents that remain are focused on land packages, hotels or cruises. Ever since airlines cut published commissions back in the 1990s, travel agents have shifted away from flights. But in the meantime, buying air travel has become more complicated than ever before. The airlines have created these a la carte pricing options that can be confusing. At the same time, the onboard experiences can vary dramatically. We hire people who can help our clients cut through the clutter and find the best options that suit them. This isn’t solely about finding a cheap flight. (In fact, when people come to us saying that’s all they care about, we usually tell them we aren’t the right fit.) This is about finding the best options for each traveler and we train our people to be able to handle those situations. Then we proactively monitor those flights, send updates and help if anything goes wrong. Even if nothing goes wrong, our clients are happy because air travel can be stressful and they know they had someone looking out for them for the whole time. There’s real value in peace-of-mind. The greatest thing for us as a company is when we’re able to help people get where they need to be after a problem arises. We’ve saved many vacations, helped people not miss weddings… you name it and we’ve been there. Airlines are complicated and their rules are byzantine, so we can really add value by knowing the lay of the land.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
We’re almost nine years in, and we just continue with measured growth. Historically we’ve avoided marketing because we keep growing without doing anything along those lines. It’s a nice place to be. We’ve added new services over the years including award travel and small business travel management. The latter is a growing focus for this year. We’ve been able to put together some pretty unique programs, including one where if you have company credit card points, we can compare that vs buying a ticket and help you decide the best way to spend your money. Going forward, we are working on developing some technology to make our service better. We want to make it easier for people to interact with us, but we also want to be sure that we never remove the personal interaction. That human touch is our niche, our differentiator.
Pricing:
- Flight Monitoring (if you’ve already booked travel) starts at $10 each way per person for domestic and $25 each way per person for international
- Flight Planning (includes booking flights and Flight Monitoring) starts at $20 each way per person for domestic and $35 each way per person for international
- Award Travel (using points and miles) starts at $75 each way per person for domestic and $95 each way person for international
- Urgent Assistance (if you haven’t signed up in advance but need us to fix a problem) is $100 per person
Contact Info:
- Website: crankyconcierge.com
- Phone: (888) 747-1011 or if outside the US +1 747 200 4200
- Email: [email protected]
- Facebook: facebook.com/crankyconcierge
- Twitter: twitter.com/crankyconcierge
- Yelp: yelp.com/biz/cranky-concierge-long-beach
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
