Business Plan internal · v1

01Executive summary

Travellers crossing borders are routinely required to show proof of onward travel for visas and immigration. Buying a real, expensive flight just to satisfy a counter is wasteful, so a market of "onward ticket" services sells genuine, auto-expiring airline reservations (real PNRs) as proof. The category is established and profitable — but every incumbent looks the same: web forms, card/PayPal only, human support.

Temporary Flights's wedge is two things none of them have: a conversational AI agent (no forms — book by chat or WhatsApp) and crypto-only payments (BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL, ADA, USDC, USDT). Same genuine reservation, far less friction, and a payment rail purpose-built for the exact customer: borderless digital nomads whose cards get declined abroad.

• Immigration officers and airline check-in agents frequently demand proof you will leave the country.
• Buying a real onward flight you may never take wastes hundreds of dollars and is non-refundable in time.
• Existing onward-ticket services are form-driven, card/PayPal-only, and human-staffed — slow to use, and they exclude the unbanked, the privacy-conscious, and travellers whose cards are blocked while abroad.

An AI agent that books a genuine, verifiable, auto-expiring airline reservation under the passenger's passport-exact name:

• Chat, not forms — three guided questions, an in-chat calendar, and a one-tap confirmation card.
• ~2-minute delivery of a real booking reference (PNR), verifiable on the airline's own website.
• Crypto checkout in seven coins, via a payment processor that settles to the business in fiat.
• Auto-expiring hold — proof when you need it, nothing left to cancel.
• Two channels — web and WhatsApp, same agent and state.

The product never produces a fake ticket — the legality of the category depends on the reservation being genuine, which it always is.

Buyers: digital nomads, visa applicants, backpackers, frequent border-crossers, and last-minute travellers under time pressure at a check-in counter. Demand is recurring (every visa run / border hop) and globally distributed.

All incumbents deliver a real PNR — parity on the core product. None offer a conversational agent or crypto. That's the entire opening.

• Conversational booking — the agent handles messy, out-of-order answers and validates the passport-name rule; lower friction than any form.
• Crypto-native — the only onward-ticket service payable in crypto. Solves real pain: card declines abroad, the unbanked, privacy, and the nomad/crypto cultural overlap.
• WhatsApp distribution — book from the app travellers already live in; inherently viral.
• Lean, modern stack — serverless, cheap to run, fast to iterate; the flight provider is swappable in one module.

Marginal cost per order is small: a modest flight-API fee, crypto-processing (~0.5–1%), and serverless infra (cents). The service fee is almost entirely margin, so the model is high-margin and scales with volume rather than headcount.

Illustrative: at a ~$12 fee and ~$2 cost, ~$10 contribution/order → ~$10k/mo gross profit at 1,000 orders/mo. Figures are illustrative, not projections.

• SEO on high-intent terms ("onward ticket", "proof of onward travel", "dummy ticket") — incumbents prove demand exists there.
• Nomad & backpacker communities — Reddit (r/digitalnomad, r/solotravel), Facebook groups, nomad forums and newsletters.
• Crypto communities — lead with "pay onward tickets in crypto," a genuine first.
• WhatsApp virality + referral — share-a-booking, affiliate for nomad influencers.

Node + TypeScript · Anthropic agent (tool-use) · Duffel flight reservations (provider-swappable) · NOWPayments crypto checkout · Twilio WhatsApp · Vercel serverless + Supabase. Fully deployed; conversation state persisted; payment→issuance idempotent.

• Now: web chat live (Apple UI), guided flow + confirmation card, crypto-forward positioning.
• Next: Duffel live booking + NOWPayments crypto checkout end-to-end; PDF itinerary; WhatsApp channel.
• Then: round-trip / multi-city, multi-language, refund-on-failure + alerting, admin dashboard.
• Scale: affiliate program, more flight content (Amadeus fallback), volume pricing.

• Regulatory (crypto/AML, company/tax): use a licensed processor that handles the crypto leg; register an appropriate entity; professional tax advice before live revenue.
• Airline / API terms on holds: keep the flight provider swappable; consolidator partnership as fallback.
• Payment disputes / refunds: auto-expiring holds mean nothing to cancel; clear refund-on-failure policy.
• Price competition: compete on experience (chat + crypto), not the lowest cent.