Startup Stage: BreckenWander wants to offer all-in pricing up front

BreckenWander

Durward Johnson launched BreckenWander as an online travel agency (OTA) to help travelers avoid hidden fees, aiming to help eliminate a common booking frustration.

BreckenWander surfaces prices from Expedia, Hotels.com, Trip.com and Booking.com and compares them with its own price, which includes and shows taxes and fees from the start.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

BreckenWander is a full-booking OTA built around one idea: The first price you see is the price you pay.

Hidden fees are the top complaint in online travel. Regulators have begun handing out fines for hiding them. I built the alternative: flights, hotels (and other accommodations) and experiences with taxes and mandatory fees included in the first price you see with competitor prices beside mine. The whole trip planned and booked from one screen. An investor would care that there is almost no burn to finance. One founder built and runs it with AI. The company can be patient while trust compounds. And every dollar that comes in can go to growth instead of payroll. I bootstrapped it from zero to a live booking platform. And for the right partner, I'm listening.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

The business is an independent OTA, live at breckenwander.com since June 15, 2026. It sells flights, hotels (and other accommodations), experiences, and airport transfers, with travel insurance through a partner. Pricing is all-in from the first screen. And next to my price I show competitor prices, even when a competitor is cheaper. Those comparisons are live: tap one and you land on that competitor's site looking at the same number. If the competitor's price changes in the minutes since, you'll see that too. They're also disclosed affiliate links.

On technology: I'm not an engineer. I built the platform end to end with Claude as my entire engineering team. As far as I can find, it's the first full-booking OTA built that way by one person. And the first to put planning, live market comparison and complete booking in one place across the whole trip: flights, hotels (and accommodations), experiences, transfers. Live inventory comes through supplier APIs (currently Duffel for flights; Hotelbeds and LiteAPI for hotels; Viator for experiences), with more supply integrations in the works. Wander, the built-in AI concierge, searches that inventory and lays out a trip based on the traveler's desires anywhere in the world. The traveler chooses what they want and books. Most importantly, a large share of the codebase exists to verify the rest of it to ensure there are no critical bugs, especially a regulated, money-handling product.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths: A structural, not cosmetic, trust position (all-in pricing that goes beyond what the law requires, competitor prices on the page). A founder who reads fine print for a living. I am an attorney. And a cost base near zero. Time is on my side.

Weaknesses: It's just me. No brand recognition yet. Supply comes through aggregators rather than direct contracts. And I promise an honest comparison, not guaranteed price superiority in every search. When a  competitor beats my price, the page shows it. And some of those travelers will click away to that site.

Opportunities: The FTC's junk-fees rule (effective May 2025) and state-level enforcement are raising the cost of the drip-pricing playbook. AI answer engines are reshaping discovery in ways that can favor small, well-structured brands. And military families, the community I'm starting with, are chronically underserved on exactly this problem.

Threats: The giants could adopt the honest-pricing message with budgets I can't match, though their revenue models make the substance expensive to copy. Aggregator dependency means API terms can shift under me. And the AI platforms could someday want the booking layer themselves; today, the labs say they don't.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspectives?

For the customer, two things. First, the advertised price isn't the price: You pick a $99 room and it's $138 at checkout. Hidden fees are travelers' number-one booking frustration (61% in Fullstory's 2026 survey, with nothing else close). Most travelers I talk to don't know a federal rule exists that requires every mandatory fee to be in the most prominent price a hotel or booking site shows.

Second, the browsing ritual: five tabs across three sites, re-entering the same dates everywhere. Planning, comparing and booking a trip in one place gives a traveler their evening back.

For the industry: the drip-pricing playbook bought short-term conversion at the price of long-term trust, and the bill is arriving as regulation, fines and AI-assisted comparison. There's also an accountability gap in the AI-booking conversation. A model can't be a merchant of record and can't stand behind a refund. Someone accountable must own the transaction. The industry needs working examples of that layer, and I'm trying to be one.

Now that the product is built, what's your strategy for customer acquisition?

I can't outspend anyone, so I don't try. Acquisition is earned and niche-first. Earned media built on real expertise: Military.com used me as its named expert source on hidden Permanent Change of Station (PCS) travel fees in June, and practical content like my FY2026 PCS playbook gives that audience something usable.

The "beachhead" is military and veteran families: Hundreds of thousands of households get PCS orders every year, they're burned by exactly the fees I surface, and it's a community I belong to. Alongside that, a build-in-public founder story that travels on its own in the AI and startup world, structured data so AI assistants can find and cite the site, a small amount of paid media and repeat business from people who noticed the checkout total matched the first screen.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

Twenty years as an attorney reading fine print convinced me the problem was real. Then I checked that instinct against data I didn't produce. Hidden fees are the top booking frustration in third-party research, and the regulatory record points the same way. The FTC didn't write a junk-fees rule over an imaginary harm, and Texas didn't settle with Booking Holdings for $9.5 million over one either.

The market told me early, too. My first earned placement happened because an editor needed a fee expert for his readers, not because my pitch was good. The addressable market is anyone who books travel online, which the industry's own research (including Phocuswright's) measures in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. I need a trust-sized sliver of it.

How and when will you make money?

From the first booking, per transaction. BreckenWander earns margin on hotel bookings, where my LLC is the merchant of record, and on flights. It also earns commissions on hotels, flights, experiences, transfers and the disclosed affiliate comparison links, including when a traveler books elsewhere through one of them, and referral fees on insurance through my partner.

What I won't do is quote revenue figures I'm not ready to document publicly; a pricing-honesty brand doesn't get to be casual with its own numbers. The structural point stands on its own: with no payroll, no office and no growth spend beyond a small, capped paid-marketing test budget, break-even sits low enough that the business can afford to grow at the speed of trust.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

It's a founding team of one. I'm a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and Judge Advocate General (JAG) officer (my last assignment was Fort Knox), an attorney of more than 20 years and a published legal scholar. At home I'm a father of five in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. I'm not an engineer. Claude did the engineering, and the accountability is all mine. My careers taught the same lesson from opposite directions: the fine print is where the truth lives. Since launch, the outside validation I'd point to is that June Military.com piece on hidden PCS travel fees.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

I'll answer this honestly rather than impressively: I'm a company of one. There's no workforce to point at, and pretending otherwise would break the only brand I have. What I can control today, I do. Accessibility checks are wired into my build pipeline as hard gates, not afterthoughts. All-in pricing is itself an inclusion stance, because opaque fees fall hardest on the least experienced travelers. And the community I serve first, military families, is one of the most diverse in the country. When the business grows enough to hire, I know where I'm looking first: the veteran community I came from, where underemployment after service is a problem I take personally.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Verification. Building turned out to be the easy part. Ensuring what I built is true is what eats my time. This is a regulated product handling other people's money and vacations, and AI will confidently produce wrong things that I have to catch before they ship. So the job has made me a professional skeptic of my own tools: automated test suites, deploy checks that block a release and a rule that nothing touching money goes out without my eyes on it. The runner up is personal. Being a beginner again in my fifties, asking strangers to trust a company they have never heard of with a real trip.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact. Why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

Because my definition of lucky is modest, and my burn rate makes patience affordable. I don't need to win a land grab. I need to survive long enough for the trust position to pay off, and a company with no payroll can wait out a lot. The tailwinds are real. Regulators are dismantling the drip pricing my brand is built against, and the industry keeps circling the question of who owns accountability when AI plans the trip, including on your pages.

I'm one working answer: the application layer, with a person's name on it. Two more things tilt the odds. The platform is not static. The same AI that built it keeps improving, so when this industry invents its next checkout trick, I can answer it in software at close to zero marginal cost. And I answer to no roadmap committee, so I can ship in a week what a large platform schedules for a quarter. If I still turn out to be wrong, I'll be wrong cheaply, which is its own kind of luck.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

Still independent, still all-in on the first number. Concretely: the mobile app is in the stores (it's in final testing now), the remaining supplier certifications are behind me and the loud traveler-facing marketing I've deliberately held back is running. I want the PCS and military-family niche to know the name before next summer's move season, a first cohort of repeat bookers and possibly a first hire. I also expect company. The transparency I'm betting on will start getting copied, and I'd count that as winning, because I'd rather set a standard than own it alone. What I won't give you is a projection I'd have to invent.

What is your endgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

The endgame is the mission, not the exit. I bootstrapped to launch, and I'm open to the right outside capital to grow faster, so the structure will evolve as the company does. What isn't negotiable is the thing that makes it matter: the first price you see is the price you pay. Any future has to preserve that, whether that's staying private and growing, taking investment or someday something bigger.

The one ending I've ruled out is selling to an operator whose economics depend on the fee games. That would end the reason the company exists on day one. I want it durable, profitable and proof of two things: that one person plus AI can run a real piece of travel's application layer, and that honesty is a business model rather than a marketing theme.