Welcome to our product update post from July 2024!

In addition to unveiling our new name, we have now officially launched into beta. With that' we want to connect with you and learn more about your experience with work travel, and how we might be able to help you and your company.

So go ahead, log in at app.finch.travel. And share Finch with a colleague, a friend, or both. 🤗 

Now, moving on to product updates, there’s a lot to cover, so let’s dive right in. 🤿

Meet our AI-powered travel planner, Finch Assist

Way back in our first release, we introduced AI tooling to read and process your booking details via email. Now in beta, we've shipped our conversational trip planning assistant into production!

Finch Assist aligns nicely with our mission to make trip planning more streamlined and efficient. Unlike other tools that produce text based itineraries for you, Assist can build your trip in the shared itinerary. It can also help you ideate on where to go, what to eat, and has an understanding of other locations of your trip (e.g. your hotel), and can make suggestions nearby.

With this conversational trip builder, you can now offload many of the manual, repetitive tasks that come with collaboration and trip coordination. In the coming weeks, we’ll do a deep dive into how Finch Assist works. And we'll continue to evolve and improve what Finch Assist can do you for.

For now, we’re excited for you to take it for a spin, and as always – let us know what you think! You can find Assist now in the primary side navigation bar, as well as in your trip by clicking the "Build my trip" button.

An updated plan, with smarter organization

Over the last two sprints we made some small but mighty improvements to how plans and booking ingestions work, and fixed a few usability issues in the process. 

We improved the way blocks are ordered, so you’ll now see a more accurate, chronological view of all of your bookings. We also fixed the date logic to ensure that bookings are mapped to trips correctly and shipped a fix to ensure ingested booking dates and times match the standard way of showing them in our UI. We also now show cost data as a standard field in booking details. We’ll be doing a lot more around budgets, cost estimates, and expenses in the coming months.

The best way to see this in action is to forward any booking confirmation email to plans@bookings.finch.travel. Then log in and see the new itinerary blocks in your plan!

Maps made better

It’s about the journey, not the destination. When it comes to traveling, maps are an integral part of making your trip enjoyable (because getting lost when you’re running late to a meeting is never fun). This month, in our constant efforts to improve your navigation experience, maps will now show your current location, making it easier to get around during your trips. 

We also improved our map zooming function so you can find Places you’ve saved and created a more seamless way to link from mapped pins to view on Google maps. Also, if you click on a specific day, you’ll see all of the pins for that day so you can have an at-a-glance view of where you’re headed. 

Resource widget & bi-weekly rlease notes

In addition to product changes, we released a new help center widget. We'll continue to add more resources here. You can check back every two weeks for fresh updates on what we’re working on in the product. For a look back at July’s updates, check out the release notes from sprint 1.65 and sprint 1.7.

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That's the big things for this month. As always, if you have thoughts or feedback, you can reach out to me at craig@finch.travel. Or, book time with us cofounders by using this scheduling link.