The beginning of refund.me
I already talked about how the basic idea for refund.me was born (see Interview). Here I continue to describe how this personal trend of mine further evolved. After the initial conversations it took us a while to shape the ideas. Take a look at Gallery refund.me below at the page from a notebook where you can see RefundMe for the first time, probably around August 2011.
RefundMe then morphed into refund.me and we purchased the domain in December 2011. The following months were busy with developing version 1.0 of refund.me and finally on May 16th of 2012 we were ready to organize our pre-launch party at the Schlosshotel in Berlin Grunewald.We had an amazing time and it was exciting to demonstrate the system to a group of skillful peers.
Two months later, on 7/24/2012, we received our first commercial claim! That was an unforgettable moment in the young history of our company.
We have learned an awful lot in the meantime and come to the conclusion that EU261 claim processing is a multidimensional problem and has challenges in many areas. Technical, judicial, international law in the EU, customer care, cash flow, marketing, and many other aspects come into play. But most importantly: it is a lot of fun to operate such an international system with customers from more than 110 countries and doing proceedings against more than 350 airlines around the world. That’s why refund.me continues to be one of my favorite trends.
Gallery refund.me (click on image)
refund.me