You're right, that essentially, we just want to get somewhere... but flying (in the US at least, my last Air France flight in 2007 was wonderful) has become a degrading, terribly uncomfortable experience. I'd rather take a Grayhound bus than fly (and between Boston and NYC I do), and most planes are just busses with wings.

Gone are the days of in-flight martinis, flying being a somewhat classy experience, and anything resembling comfort.

At this point, maybe its not even worth the airlines trying, as the TSA degrades the experience at the door.

The airlines have to try. Flight safety is expensive.

I mean you can conceive of solutions:

* Why does the luggage not get treated like container transport. Load up cages next to check in desks for the same destination.

* Take back control over your booking. There is absolutely no need for any airline to not take bookings direct. Want to sell through your partners - fine but they come to your API/site to actually book it. Then everyone has real time info. Think that will drive your prices down? No, don't sell at loss making prices.

I could go on. I am having a hell just trying to find somewhere nice and sunny to take 2 children. There is just so many options and so little information to trust.

But this problems exists for every service - hair cutting, selling houses and airlines. One and only one URI is really selling an actual seat or an actual house or an actual chair with a hair dresser.

So one and only one URI should publish what is available.

And then aggregation and search is simple(ish)

It seems to me that the next evolution of the search engine is to tell the people selling stuff that they don't need to do SEO, or marketing. They just need to use a standard micro data / format for whatever they are selling.

A long time ago I worked for an ISP that gave 1MB of personal disk space free to everyone. We bumped to to 10 then 100 when we realised no one actually used it.

This failure to put our own stuff online is the cause of huge problems - real estate agents, facebook, AOL, every walled garden, every agent, all stem from people and businesses not publishing their own needs.

Must stop ranting now

I had a strange experience recently trying to book a ticket through Hipmunk/Orbitz. I found a ticket. Tried to buy 3 times. Each time it said the ticket was no longer available, but it kept showing up in search results (stale cache on the server?). Same ticket was found on the airline's website for $20 more, which I was able to purchase.

Why it's more expensive to purchase direct, I don't understand.

Airlines and hotels often have agreements with the aggregators that they will not offer fares lower than what they are making available through the GDS aggregators.

This is why hotel sites will offer discounted prices based either on prepayment, or package deals, so that the price isn't directly comparable to Expedia, etc. It's also why those deals are sometimes the best - with sites like Expedia/Travelocity taking something like 30-40% of the nightly rate (versus a much lower % for airline tickets), hotels should be willing to bend over backwards to get you to book directly.

Also, it's possible to put a hold on a ticket without buying it; I'm guessing here, but if you're looking at one system the available fares list might reflect that some seats are on hold (by not showing those fares), while another system might not, resulting in different fares being visible... that will generally show up as a difference in the lowest-priced fare, since most of the search sites highlight that parameter when displaying search results.

Interesting.

I'm also scratching my head as to why we're now ~3 (maybe 4 counting ITA?) levels deep for purchasing of airline tickets? Hipmunk -> Orbitz -> ITA -> Airline

That seems to be the sign of a broken system.

Well, you can also do it in one layer: http://google.com/flights

There is a lot of "slack" in how travel is priced due to all kinds of agreements about what rates you're allowed to show. That's partly why package deals can be so good. These are not simple problems to solve, even in a best-case scenario.

Sometimes you can actually game this. For example, I have noticed cheaptickets.com sometimes fails to update their prices quickly enough. All of the other websites have moved their prices to the new fare, but they slack behind. I know there is an issue since the airline does not ticket their mistake immediately (i.e. make the ticket more than a stub and actually consummate the transaction). I wonder who takes the hit on this?

If you look into all of the issues surrounding the United and Continental merger, there some fascinating material exists on airline reservation systems and back-ends. In summary, I think they get build to defense contractor standards, which does little to reassure me.