Exactly, I wanted to try and see what it said about a flight I had planned, and I only got "Sorry, flights from Belgium are not currently supported. Sorry, flights from Germany are not currently supported.".
Strangely, it did support Greece (or so it said), but it doesn't seem to handle transfers very well, giving me no way to fly from Athens to the Newark.
Well, it's an excellent metric of measuring the worth of a product for the only "market segment" that matters to us. That is, us.
Second, intentional coverage just goes with the domain for a flights application. Are Americans supposed to just switch back and forth to some competitor for non domestic flights?
By that logic, all of the startups that begin only serving their local market (many start in SF and expand beyond once it's viable; true in many other locations as well) would be 1/10 or 2/10.
I use Skyscanner here in Europe for regional and international flights, however really the prices are only useful as an indication. For example, one flight I found the cheapest option was Ryanair, but when I actually booked it the price was €10 cheaper than listed on Skyscanner.
I used to find that Ryanair had a tendency to lowball the aggregators, and then whack on ridiculous extra charges at the end of a tedious and lengthy purchase process. Have they stopped doing that now?
Also last month they were forced to remove the 'you have to pay €12 to pay with a Visa card' policy, so now the fee is 2% for all cards. However, they now make the admin fee mandatory however you pay :)
That's not just an aggregator thing. Ryanair (and similar airlines like easyJet) have long been guilty of advertising low headline prices, then tagging on all manner of fees.
Add on the baggage fees, landing fees, priority boarding fees, tax, credit card fees, etc. and the price isn't so impressive.
I'm a big fan of https://www.google.com/flights/explorer, since it gives me an immediate picture of how far in advance I should book to get the lowest prices.
I find it interesting that it basically has the same function as Kayak Explore: http://kayak.com/explore - but with a completely different presentation.
So sad to see matrix.itasoftware.com's amazing search engine get most of it's features ripped out and replaced with a pretty UI that does so little.
For folks who like hipmonk? Do you really travel? Their search engine also fails to find most good fares. Pretty but useless.
Most people who are serious use expertflyer.com and matrix.itasoftware.com to find fares. Yes you have to learn a bit about how air fares are constructed, but this is hacker news not consumer news isn't it?
I can't agree more. hipmunk is totally useless for truly finding good fares. matrix is the only site i start with, then i go to sites that aren't on ITA (jetblue/southwest/some south american airlines like gol) but i try to avoid those airlines anyway (and like you i'm usually travelling internationally so they're not relevant)
Is there some way I can contact you directly the next time I find an example of this? I'm happy to send you all the diagnostic data your heart desires.
I suspect in some cases it may be due to timeouts or row count limits. I tend to do very broad searches, and then narrow the results with filters. This works great in Matrix, but with Orbitz (which uses the same data source), I tend to hit invisible limits where I can see that some of the rows have just been cut off from the results. (E.g. I can book flights A or B for leg 1, and flights C or D for leg 2, but for the combination I can only book (A,C), (A,D), and (B,C). The B-D trip is in Matrix results but not Orbitz, and this kind of truncation only happens when I have lots of results.
I don't know for sure that Hipmunk follows the same pattern, because I haven't used it in quite some time, but I'm happy to send bug reports IF AND ONLY IF I can have confidence that a real human is reading them.
> Is there some way I can contact you directly the next time I find an example of this? I'm happy to send you all the diagnostic data your heart desires
Yeah, just use the Olark (live chat) bar on the bottom of the page, that should get you a real human
I like being able to select a number of possible departure airports (Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Detroit) and then my days I like being able to say +/- 2 days.
You can do a lot more than that in Google Flights, just hit the plus sign on the right side of the departure box and you can add as many airports as you want, ditto for the arrival airport. Also, for the plus or minus 2 days just click on the little bar graph at the top right of the page instead of map view and it will show you months on either side. That feature is probably one of the best, there is a huge difference in prices depending on the date.
Matrix and ExpertFlyer also let you search fare classes, so if you know your upgrade instrument is based on the availability of X inventory, you can look for flights with available X inventory so you can upgrade.
For me three features are missing in Google Flights:
1. International flights
2. Flexible dates (simple +-3 or the whole month overview)
3. Ability to specify connecting airport
A few days ago my gf tried to book a flight. Like most people, she starts with googleing flight tickets. And sees Google flights for the first time and starts using it.
Gets to the point where Google kicks you off to the airline's own page, and that's where the trouble starts. She is forced to pick seats but can't, because the only ones available require being a specially background checked and known passenger. Eventually she gives up.
Then she googles Expedia. A few minutes later she has her tickets. Yesterday she printed out the boarding passes complete with her seat assignment. On the same flight Google Flighs couldn't book.
It is a confusingly-written comment, and I think the final bit especially is simply the wrong wording for what the author means, but beneath all that there's still a valid criticism of Google Flights over Expedia.
The unambiguous part is that Google Flights failed to account for the nature of the seats it had identified as "available", and went ahead with the recommendation when in fact they were not appropriate. The unclear part is whether Expedia did actually find the same flight and seats (as the author appears to be saying) but has some way around the security features (an agreement with the airline?), or whether Expedia was aware of the inappropriateness of the seats Google Flights recommended and in fact provided different ones on a different flight.
It would be nice if the parent had been clearer in the explanation but it seems that either way: Expedia 1, Google 0.
"Seats" is a terrible word to use. Airlines sell "inventory", not seats. You can easily buy a ticket when all seats are assigned: someone will probably not show up and you will get their seat instead. (If everyone shows up, then they'll pay you, or another volunteer, money to take the next flight instead.)
What airline? I've never heard of requiring documentation to select a seat (check-in is another thing altogether, especially if the flight is international), but I have heard of airlines reserving seats for passengers with elite status.
(It's typical to not get a seat assignment at booking time, BTW, especially if you're booking a few days before the flight.)
You may not get the best deal/least troublesome flight from here. Well, at least for international flights.
I was trying to book a flight from Chicago->Seoul, and the options showed at least $2000 for the cheapest flight, which involved a 33hr total journey through China and Japan. I then asked my Korean friends, who recommended a travel agent and they got me a $1700 ticket with only 17hrs direct flight
Same here. My travel agent can always find me cheaper international tickets than what I could find on the internet. Does anyone know exactly how this works?
The best part is they can put me on a wait list for cheap tickets!
Most travel agents on long-distance, well travelled routes work through consolidators. These consolidators buy tickets (or promise to buy tickets) in bulk far in advance, and then re-sell them later. This is what I've heard about segments like USA <-> India.
> Same here. My travel agent can always find me cheaper international tickets than what I could find on the internet.
Funny, I've always had the opposite experience: every time I've used a travel agent, they always found more expensive flights with worse timings (time of day, layover, etc), and I end up requesting specific flights based on what I've found online.
I've used a travel agent once; she found me a trans-continental flight for about $200 less than I could find anywhere else, but for some reason I've never tried calling again.
Matrix hasn't gone anywhere (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/).
And it still does things that Google Flights doesn't (such as working outside North America).
I just did try, and got an incredible quote for DTW-IST roundtrip for only $638. Funny thing is that when you go to the web sites it tells at the end gives twice the price. Seems like a joke. It does not really link to an actual sales opportunity.
I have it on reasonable authority that at least one X.25 era hacker has exploited ye-olde travel provider interfaces to:
A) automatically detect and utilize cheap global routes
B) brute force discount codes for global hotel chains
Care to elaborate? I am missing context here. Do you mean a Google Flights employee is that hacker? Or is X.25 accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and knowledge of ye olde software running on green phosphorescent screens?
This year I left booking my tickets back to the UK for the holidays until the last minute. The cheapest fare I could find myself, after what I considered to be extensive searching, was $1800.
I ran a contest on Flightfox (http://flightfox.com) and offered a $49 finders fee. Someone found me a fare for $1000 with only one stop (vs two on the fare I found).
Totally besides the point, but why $49? I thought the point of ending prices with 9 was to make them look lower. You wanted the opposite, so perhaps $50 would have worked better?
Actually it's much better than hipmunk. I used to be a fanatic user of hipmunk. But once I tried google flights i immediately was amazed by its speed, browsing different dates is super fast and easy.
Google Flights' instantaneous search allows you to freely explore the option space opening up new ways of travel planning. Free for spring break and don't know where to go? Set your travel dates and pan around the map looking for deals.
Kayak doesn't even come close to this. At best, you can set the month of travel; useless for most busy people.
As with all things Google, it's an order of magnitude beyond what hipmunk does. If you keep the window open long enough you will actually see flights disappear if they fill up.
I still think the hipmunk interface is more humane.
There's presenting the existing data well (Google) and there is adding value to existing to make it more useful (Hipmunk).
I find that Google's innovation for almost every one of their products is in saying "we have oodles of data, how can we display it effectively"? They have done well at collecting and quickly accessing large amounts of data, linking loosely coupled sets, and in some cases, adding meaning (image searches understand the concept of "bright" or "dim", for example).
But I rarely see them taking the data they have and merging it in a way to create new meaning or value. Hipmunk, beyond co-opting a gantt chart, did this with their "agony" score. Google not only didn't try here, they didn't try for local search either, and just acquired Zagat for their score (and brand name and loyal following, etc.). And many startups offer meaning above and beyond that combined in the data: through their experience, their ability to merge context from being subject matter experts, or just their flexibility to experiment without a spotlight on them. Google tends to stop short of any of these.
So, yes, it's no Hipmunk: it's a typically well done Google product taking hairy data, merging it up, and displaying it well. Doing more than that, however, is left to the rest of the world.
(Though, one wonders why ITA didn't do some of these things before when they first created this better way of looking at flights a few years ago...)
Both Hipmunk and Google Flight Search help you sort out bad flights in ways that other websites don't - Hipmunk calls this "agony". To see this in Google Flight Search, scroll down to the bottom of a results list, you'll see something like "123 longer or more expensive flights hidden. Show all." - these are the longer, no less expensive layovers that you probably don't care about.
Longer or more expensive is simply filtering. Agony is creating a new metric. I see those as different.
Now, if the metric is useless or synonymous with some of it's underlying drivers, then you are right, nothing there. I find the agony score to be more useful than any small combo of filters, but perhaps that's just me.
ITA licensed their engine to the whole industry, instead of competing against it. So they focused on what they did well and let Orbitz et all work on UI and customer service.
Many companies start there, and then start competing against their licensees. Google is a great search engine for finding credit card deals, and they now recognize that and offer their own credit card aggregation engine: https://www.google.com/advisor/uscredit Looks a lot like all of the other aggregator sites (creditcard.com, etc.) out there, right? Now, compare to CreditKarma (http://www.creditkarma.com/) which attempts to change the process. Again, Google does great work, but I think they stop short at times when our industry really needs to be pushed. Startups can only do so much.
BTW, ITA released their "matrix" front end to the world (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) around a year or so after Orbitz and others licensed it. The clicks still took you to externals to complete the purchases, but new filters and capabilities were often tested on the live ITA site before 3rd parties took advantage of them. The problem I always felt was that they were just new filters: fast, live-response, rapid return filters on very large and nasty data, to be fair, but still just filters. I enjoyed sites that added additional context to the flight experience, few though they have been.
Again, thanks to both Google for organizing hairy data, and startups for doing more with the data. Glad both have room to play.
I love hipmunk but they are resting on their laurels a little too long if you ask me, you still can't edit an individual search tab (I asked and was told to fiddle with the url values to edit the search). And you still can't move tabs around, plus Google flight actually makes it look really slow.
That being said, it is rare that I can find a better rate than what I see on Hipmunk, and their agony ui is still frickin' amazing.
I tried using Hipmunk a few times, but the prices were always at least a hundred dollars more than if I had just gone to Orbitz.com and dealt with their crap interface--I've always found that Orbitz has prices at least as good as anywhere else, so I tend to judge against them.
Google, on the other hand, gave me exactly what I needed at prices competitive to Orbitz. It was a bit disappointing that when I was done, I had to buy the tickets through the carrier's site, but it still found me a flight at a good time for a good price.
I like Hipmunk's interface better than Kayak's, but Kayak seems to have better data: there are sometimes good fares that appear in Kayak but not Hipmunk, while I haven't found the reverse to be true yet.
We get our data from mostly the same sources, so this should almost never happen. (There are also lots of times we have better rates than Kayak, e.g. on Amtrak and Airbnb, which they don't have.) Next time you see this, could you email contact@hipmunk.com?
Love that you put in date ranges in Hipmunk, since I am usually not sure which days have the best deals and am not strongly tied to returning/leaving on a certain day
Just looked at your travel website. Very interesting. I'm also in Australia with an interest in the combo of travel & start-up. What exactly is it that you start up does?
The current focus of everydaydream holiday (www.everydaydreamholiday.com) is to entertain travel lovers who are not currently planning a holiday.
And rather than an endless stream of newsletters or FB posts with random destinations, we are actually taking readers on a single, realistic holiday with input from locals.
That's the focus so far. We launched less than 2 weeks ago, so we expect there to be evolution and change.
[Edit: Feel free to drop me an email if you want to shoot the breeze about what you're up to as well.]
Searched for New Zealand and got nothing. Searched for a specific city like Auckland or Christchurch and got matches. I am used to better results from Google.
It's for US originating flights only. e.g. New York -> Paris will work, however Paris -> New York will not. But i guess they are adding additional counties.
i use bing flights for my flight needs, and probably that's the only MS service i ever use/used. I like bing flights just because of two checkboxes, and nothing else; the checkboxes to search nearby airports on departure and arrival destination.
I also found cheapest or next to cheapest flights on bing for some reason.
This is a partial product still being built (as it's domestic at the moment and will obviously go international I'm sure).
But the speed and data quality is where they will win out. The faster the interface allows people to do what they want to do: many searches until an ideal candidate is found. Other sites appear slow and most of the information they bring back is useless (to the user) so speed is the name of the game.
Turns out Google is pretty good at that game. Just my thoughts.
If you do mileage runs, you probably know about matrix.itasoftware.com, but in case you don't - visit http://matrix.itasoftware.com/?showPricePerMile=true and then do your search to see and sort by price per mile.
Avid frequent flyer miles collectors hunt for abnormally low cost fares which travel long distances (often due to multiple out-of-the-way stops). This results in a great cost per mile for them.
Opened a few tabs with HN items in it. Booked my trip to SF, then started browsing the tabs. Hit this tab, tried it, found a flight for about $80 less than I just booked.
Lesson learned: always read HN before doing actual work.
Kayak allows you to search for flights that are +- a few days around your desired dates, and shows you fares on a calendar. Indispensable when you're just exploring prices.
There is an interface for exploring prices on calendar, click on the "Lowest prices" icon next to the map icon. It shows changes in the prices when you change dates etc and its usually very fast.
For some reason they don't have pricing information for Singapore Airlines, but do have the flights which are mostly filtered out because "unknown" sorts as the most expensive.
I don't use it because, last I checked, it's unable to handle what I think of as basic corner cases, like booking a roundtrip going out from one airport in a metro area and coming back to a different one.
E.g., depart Chicago from O'Hare to Denver, then return to Chicago from Denver, arriving at Midway?
Choose Multi-city, and specify specific airport codes at the originating / terminating metro area. E.g., American 1017 ORD to DEN on 7 Jan and Frontier 534 DEN to MDW on 14 Jan for $211.
Replying to myself since I can't edit: I see two replies suggesting that what I want is a multi-city trip, but that's not the same thing. Flights will happily let me do the same search I can do on Orbitz, with my start/end city being "SF metro area, any airport". But unlike Orbitz, when I use that I can't book an itinerary that goes SFO-BOS-SJC, for example. (I don't want to search it as multi-city, because then I have to _manually_ try every combination of SFO/SJC/OAK until I find what's cheapest.)
It's a pretty cool release though. I'm liking whichairline.com quite a lot these days because of it's visualisations. I also use kayak and hipmunk. Pretty excited about what Google can do in this space.
