Flying Rental lodging

Selling unused travel to strangers

Stuck with an airline travel voucher that expires this year but you’ve already booked all your trips? Or maybe you have a vacation booking you can’t use? Some of these travel purchases can be transferred to other people. For these cases, TransferTravel is a new business facilitating buying and selling unused travel.  They launched in 2016 and the website doesn’t have many listings yet. But TransferTravel just secured £100,000 in funding so I expect to see significant expansion soon. 

I noticed that there are a lot of airline vouchers being sold at a decent discount on this network. That’s a good option for those of us who frequently buy flights. And there are some very good discounts on hotel vouchers. If you can take over someone’s cruise or resort booking you’ll also save a lot of money, but these are date specific. TransferTravel charges sellers a 15% fee for completed transactions.

Roomer has been in this business since 2013, specifically in the hotel space. If you have a non-refundable hotel booking that you can’t use, you can list it on Roomer and hopefully recover some of your costs. TransferTravel is an expansion on this concept including hotel rooms but also other travel bookings.

I like the concept but it will be important that TransferTravel set up a secure system of payment and transfer so that buyers and sellers are protected. I also hope they can arrange so that personal information doesn’t need to be exchanged. For instance, if my name is going on a cruise booking I don’t want to supply all my personal details to the random stranger from whom I’m buying it.

I asked TransferTravel for more details on how they handle airline vouchers:

The Transfer process for vouchers works in a very similar way to that of all other available listings on the our platform. Upon purchasing a voucher for example, you would have 72 hours to receive your voucher & pin code. In line with this the “seller” would provide a screenshot of the voucher displaying the prior mentioned details as well as the balance and expiration date. This in turn will verify for the buyer the value / expiry date / pin code and the voucher code needed for redemption.
Upon receipt of the above you as the buyer would “download” the document satisfying the document received condition for sellers. This would provide TransferTravel with sufficient information allowing for the arrangement of the payment release.
As with all available items in the world, there will be instances where the voucher purchased has already expired or does not have the value specified when received. In these cases we will approach any potential cancellation / refund attempts on a case by case basis. As the Escrow funds holder we would only release funds to the seller / refund the buyer should sufficient evidence be provided to validate and confirm their claims.
It sounds like they have thought this through pretty well. Though all processes need some improvements when they start to be used by lots of people. I’m definitely going to keep my eye on this site for good deals on airline vouchers in particular.