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Peter Fabor

Location Finder - Find the optimal location to meet with your remote team

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Any plans for meeting your remote team? We've built a simple free tool that calculates the most optimal location to bring everyone together. It considers:
⏱Average travel time per person
🛬 Average number of layovers per person
💸 Estimated flight costs

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David Stefanides
Can I actually book these flights directly from your tool?
Peter Fabor
Maker
@stefooo You can click on the search results and you will be redirected to the Kiwi.com (the tool is built on their fantastic API) where you can book that specific flight. However, Location Finder is not really a booking tool. Rather it acts as an "advisor" to help you decide the best location for your next company meetup ✈️
Peter Fabor
Maker
Booking the flights and getting a remote team together on one spot can be a quite a challenge, even with the flight search tools like Google Flights and Kayak. They are optimized for individuals, not groups. We've built a tool based on Kiwi.com API that solves this problem. It searches flight connections of more than 500 airlines and finds an optimal destination to meet your remote team. It is not a booking tool - it acts as an ‘advisor’ to help you discover the optimal location to host your next retreat or company meetup. Read more about Location Finder: https://www.thesurfoffice.com/bl... It is the 1st version of this app so we can't wait for your feedback :)
Tone
This is awesome! We're a distributed team so I can really empathise with what you're trying to do. Genuinely considering having our team meet up now..... We're working on a platform to help remote/distributed teams be more productive (https://www.getstreak.com), but sometimes an in-person connection is the most valuable thing. Thank you for building this!
Peter Fabor
Maker
@tonymaguire90 Thank you Tony! We also have a service for planning remote team meetups (https://www.thesurfoffice.com/), check it out. Streak is very interesting! Have you considered to connect it with existing project management tools? We use Trello and I can imagine Streak as a powerful "gamification layer" on top of it.
Tone
@faborio Thanks for the suggestion, I'll take a look! We have :). Our roadmap is: • Slack integration (manage everything from Slack super seamlessly) • Project management integration (Asana, Trello etc.) • Additional team owner powers • Better task planning
Peter Fabor
Maker
@tonymaguire90 Nice! I'd go very niche: "Add gamification to your Trello boards and increase productivity of your remote team" Much easier to market a validate the product + you can always expand to more project management tools, etc.
Tone
@faborio Thanks for the suggestions! Good luck with Location Finder & The Surf Office - I'll be taking a deeper look at them today. :)
Martin Rariga
Awesome tool! We just recently planned our meetup and finding the right location has definitely been a pain point. Have you guys thought about adding an option to slightly filter out results? (e.g. find Europe-only destinations?)
Peter Fabor
Maker
@martin_rariga Awesome feedback, thank you! We've discussed few filter options already: - locations next to the beach - budget locations (based on Numbeo or Nomadlist data) - locations where you can eat paella and drink sangría 😀 Filtering by continents is a great idea!
Alex Vasylenko
Good problem, simple solution. Love it. How did you come to this idea? Own experience?
Peter Fabor
Maker
@alex_vasylenko Thank you! We have a platform for planning company retreats/offsites (https://www.thesurfoffice.com/) and many of our customers are remote teams. We observed that they very often choose the retreat location because of the personal preferences (nothing wrong about it) but some team members have to fly with multiple stopovers and spend unnecessary time in the planes and airports. We wanted to give these remote teams more options to find an *optimal* retreat location. All the tools for searching flights are focused on individual travellers so we decided to build one for groups.
James Crowley
Love the idea! CSS looks a bit broken for me on Android mobile though. The search button is missing (you have to invisibly scroll the inner panel with the data entry to see it)
Peter Fabor
Maker
@james_crowley Thank you for the feedback 🙏 Mobile UI is definitely something that needs to be fixed (already on our to-do list). We first wanted to test if (then how) people will use the tool :) The desktop version should work OK.
Vladimír Seman
Maker
@james_crowley can you pls tell what device are you using and what is the android version? (to make sure, we can do QA after we fix it)
Juraj Ivan
Gread idea! The web could use some fine tuning and bug fixing, but overall great not only for teams but also groups of friends.
Peter Fabor
Maker
@jurajivan Thanks for the feedback! We noticed few more use cases (sport teams, meeting of a distributed family or friends, etc.) but the main focus is on remote teams now. The web definitely needs some fine tuning, especially the mobile version 🙈
Michal Makoš
Looks nice. Can it potentially be embedded to my website? Thanks
Peter Fabor
Maker
@michal_makos Interesting idea, we haven't been thinking about it. On what website would you like to embed it?
Alex Pyzhianov
Very nice! I now want a distributed team to have a reason to use it
Vladimír Seman
Maker
@alexey_pyzhianov maybe you can already use it, if your friends are living in the different locations and you want to meet them all at once ;-)
Zsolt Kocsmarszky
I have one suggestion for the tool: there should be an option to meet at the location of one of the teams.
Peter Fabor
Maker
@kocsmy Great idea! It could be a checkbox ☑️ when you start the search.
Vladimír Seman
Maker
@kocsmy that's a good suggestion. it partly works this way now, i.e. if you have big team in one location and small one in the other, it would probably suggest to meet at the location of the big team. example: type 30 people in barcelona and 5 people in rome. 30 people from barcelona have travel time 0 so when you count all the travel time, barcelona will be the best option.
David Horowitz
What wonderful timing! We are just about to plan our retreat and came across this exact issue just a few days ago. Couldn't be happier about this :) One small problem I've come across. I typed in "Portland" into the search box and it came back with two results: 1. "Portland, United States", and 2. "Portland, United States" :) Now, I know that's because there are two Portlands in the US. But I couldn't differentiate between them, so I had to guess. Simply adding the state to the results box would make a big difference! Otherwise, great stuff. Thanks!
Vladimír Seman
Maker
@ds_horowitz thank you very much, david. i didn't think about when i was writing specification. i make sure we fix it in the next version, stay tuned ;-)
Roman Leinwather
Do you plan to add a search for busses and trains?
Peter Fabor
Maker
@lewro Great question! Few people have suggested it already, we will think about it.
Michal Marek
Well done :) Btw do you collect stats which destinations are the most popular? Would be curious to know top3 cities to meet...
Peter Fabor
Maker
@michal_marek4 Yes, we collect them but I'm not sure if they are relevant now as most people are just testing how the tool works. These are TOP 3 now: 1. Barcelona 2. Berlin 3. Amsterdam
Rob de la Cretaz
Surprised this doesn't accept airport codes. Great idea though!
Vladimír Seman
Maker
@robjdlc, yes, right now it doesn’t accept the airport codes. this is the first version, we will added to the next one ;-)
Gabe O'Leary
Nifty idea! I get that this is built using a flight API and my request would be more complex, but it would be cool if you could incorporate other costs into the suggestions. If you all take really cheap flights to a very expensive place (like Zurich) you might end up spending all that money you saved.
Vladimír Seman
Maker
@golear, thank you for the feedback. right now, the price of the flights is not the most important factor, the most important is the average flight time per person. few people already suggested to take other costs into consideration, i am bit afraid that it would make that simple tool more complex. we will think about that once again.