Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Does each airline have their own way of exporting this data? Is there a single entity that aggregates from all of them? How does the actual data look like? (Is it a dump every X hours, or something more modern like a stream you can subscribe to?).
The GDS companies get this data from these sources and then in turn provide (crappy) APIs for customers to use to query it.
In general, if you're doing bookings you can get small amounts of the data (a query at a time) from a GDS. Otherwise you're looking at millions of dollars per year. And then you need to write code to parse it and price tickets using it (approximately 1M LoC if you're terse about it -- more like 30M if you're a GDS).
(I know all this because I co-founded ITA Software, whose software now powers Google Flights.)
Honest question (I swear I'm not trying to troll): what do you actually do with it that you can't do (or do as well as) with Google Flights or Kayak or some other site like that?
I ask because I've used ITA Matrix and never managed to find a cheaper flight than I can through "normal" means... but I rarely fly multi-destination (and basically never do more complicated stuff) so I'm not sure if the use case is beyond mine or if I just don't know how to utilize it in a useful manner.
- Multiple departure/destination airports (you can search SFO,SJC,OAK to LGB,LAX,SNA and back in a single search). To be fair Google supports this on desktop too (but doesn't on mobile).
- Better search for return flights with variable stay lengths (Google only does a 5x5 matrix, ITA Matrix does a full month).
However, perhaps the biggest downside is that you can't actually book through ITA Matrix. It only finds the fare, you have to find it elsewhere to actually buy it (although Hipmunk takes routing codes, which makes it easier)
E: 25% Mileage
L, U, T, X, V: 50% Mileage
H, Q, K: 75%
B, M, S: 100% Mileage
Y: 125% Mileage
If you search on Google Flights, these will all be called "Economy". If you search on most of the other OTA's, you can sometimes find the fare class during checkout or even as part of your search results, but you can't filter on it (Hipmunk is one that does support some of ITA's syntax for these filters, but not all). The buckets aren't always strictly more/less expensive, but they're usually not exposed very easily, if at all[2]. So, you're often left crawling from listing to listing, expanding to see if they are going to get you any miles. (I'll save the debate of whether miles are worth all the effort for another day.)
On ITA, it's not unreasonable to construct a query that says "During the month of November, show me round trips that are between 12 and 19 days that are going from Denver to either Narita or Haneda Airports, which will earn me more than 50% miles on either Delta or American or JAL, but also only ones that connect in Portland or Los Angeles, with no prop planes or overnight stops, and no <50 minute connections or 3+ hour connections". (I wouldn't actually specify all of these stipulations, but they're good for the example! :) )
[1] https://www.alaskaair.com/content/mileage-plan/how-to-earn-m...
[2] Delta, to its credit, does allow you to search by minimum fair class on its advanced search)
If you're only looking at flights out of a particular airport and with a specific (default) routing, you'll probably not find anything better.
If you know that certain airports are hubs, or that a particular carrier has a slightly longer route that takes you via a certain city and maybe have a longer layover then you might be able to find some really good deals.
Being in Australia, I really don't get to take advantage of these things at all.
2. As recently revealed by the company http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/27265924-post483.html you can avoid connections in certain countries which can be beneficial for visa purposes or certain personal privacy requirements ( I know a German physics professor who refuses to go to the US because of the fingerprinting. )
How did you go from games to developing airlines reservation and fares software?
As for the GDSes, their code is primarily TPF assembly. So now add the LoC blow-up of using a very low-level language.
There are like 25 people in the world who understand this stuff, and half of them likely work at ITA/Google.
As to the "categories", people at Sabre working with them used to say in some cases you can not even be sure if the calculation (of a ticket price - "fare") will end in finite time, so the "macro language" is apparently Turing-complete!
I've written elsewhere that I personally think the original Sabre system was/is one of the most impressive accomplishments in the history of computing. Using modern tools made things easier for us at ITA, though we compensated for that by trying to compute the entire (very large) solution space for every query, where prior systems used heuristics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Distribution_System
Downstream companies then query this data and show them to you. The competition comes from the complex caching and delivery mechanisms that the companies use to get you the best price.
It's not really an area that is ripe for disruption. The margins are extremely low and there are only really two companies that make a majority of the money. Expedia and the Priceline group.
I know that for airlines like easyjet you need to visit their website to get fares though. (Or Google would have to build a site crawler)
I work with a lot of smaller airlines, and from my experience I can tell you no. Many of them can't even tell you their actual route list or flight schedule or pricing logic. They typically buy a booking engine solution from just a few major players (Sabre, Amadeus, TravelPort) who do have centralized data, but access to them is slow, expensive (at scale) and restrictive.
I've been told by one of the GDS's that our use case doesn't apply for direct GDS access, and we have to go through the airlines' access method. I don't know if these booking engine solutions include access to an API or not, however most airlines have said either they don't have an available API, or don't know how to share access to one.
Some of the larger airlines do seem to have their stuff together. But we're just starting to work with them, and because of all the bureaucracy involved it will likely be months before anything happens.
The screen scraping method djhworld mentions is a worthwhile approach if you'd personally like to track a few routes. I've done the same to watch prices to NYC (I visit friends often) on a few of the low-cost airlines. It's nice because you can tailor the logic to your preferences. Such as don't bother searching flights that don't include a weekend in the trip; or set my alert threshold 25% higher when the trip involves a holiday or long weekend.
For screen scraping, there are a number of companies that do this already for multiple carriers. I'd suggest making use of one of these rather than reinventing the wheel. Example: http://xmldocs.travelfusion.com
About screen scraping, I guess it depends on how quick you are at writing scraping scripts (and if you find it fun). I could probably write one faster than I could register for that API. You're also adding a layer between you and the prices. You don't know how long Travelfusion has cached these prices for, while it's simple to write a script that opens the real booking engine to get correct prices. I typically only run mine when I'm ready to purchase a ticket, but don't know which dates, rather than running it constantly to find deals.
And if I were doing anything more than a few routes on a few carriers, I definitely would use a real API instead of reinventing the wheel. In this case I just think it's kinda fun.
…and then decide if you still want to pursue this.
Wrong example. I have worked on the Southwest Project when I was at Amadeus.
Not sure on the legality of it though.
If an airline sells seats, bags, and other ancillary services, why aren't they trying to find more sales channels, to sell more?
I believe that airlines haven't been pushing for innovation, and rather, have been slowed down by their very own current third party providers, or "core business partners".
Travelling technology applications or reservation systems, first appeared a long time ago [2] and because at that time, they were innovations, some airlines signed up for them, to make more sales by globally or regionally distributing all of their flight related information (seat or ancillary availability, fares, code share agreements, etc.). For this reason, we can consider reservation systems as the very first technological airline business partners.
Typically, the reservation systems provided innovation on a distribution factor, which is the travel agency distribution factor. Travel agencies could, and have been connecting to reservation systems and making purchases that increase the number of airline sales, resulting in a win-win, for both agencies and airlines. [3] Reservation systems have other goals, such as flight code share agreements, but these are out of scope. [5]
Today, these third party business organisations do not want to lose market share, so they make things expensive or maintain the old prices, and open very little doors on the borders of their systems.
Therefore, only typical rich individuals or companies can afford to purchase and maintain the costs of direct connections to these providers, which is a win-loss, win for the reservation systems, and loss for airlines.
Fortunately, companies such as Google (with QPX), perform a re-engineering of what these big reservation systems players do, and make it much more affordable and simple to implement [4], and with that, not only they improve the understanding effort of the whole business, but also, provide more sales leads to the airlines, and better user and developing experiences.
The future should be standardised, airlines should distant themselves from the reservation systems (if these do not innovate), and open the doors of their businesses, by creating booking process APIs, that allow, developers and startups, to create powerful and innovative applications, that bring sales.
[1] https://www.tnooz.com/article/why-is-the-travel-industry-so-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_agency [4] https://developers.google.com/qpx-express/v1/pricing [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codeshare_agreement
I don't understand the future sometimes. ¯\(°_o)/¯
Disclosure: I own another competing flight search tool, https://concorde.io
Even if assume the other fares and the lowest published fare do track there is still an issue. Hopper doesn't/can't track or predict seat availability, so when Hopper gives me a notification that I should continue to wait because prices should fall I can't have any faith that the number of seats I require will be available when they do. This is especially a problem for me because when I fly I am usually purchasing tickets for multiple people.
Given these limitations I find Hopper almost useless for my needs. I would love an app that would allow me to enter a departure date and time window, return date and time window and the number of passengers then provide feedback regarding both future price direction and seat availability. I'm not holding my breath.
I've waited out a week to get cheaper flights to from Japan to NZ.
Still was a rip-off though - one way cost more than a return layover flights to Eastern Europe.
> The Low Fare Forecast (beta) API forecasts whether the lowest published fare will rise, fall or stay the same within the next 7 days.
Edit: Memory served: https://web.archive.org/web/20060630050308/http://farecast.c...
The farecast team left and formed Decide, a way predict prices for electronics and other goods. Eventually purchased by ebay.
Bing also had a fantastic thing that let you earn points when shopping through Bing Shopping. That was quickly discontinued as well.
nothing novel has happened since then
web services are just easier to use
The one drawback is sometimes they are missing local / smaller airlines from their list of flights (which can be a major price difference from the major ones) on short flights.
Funny, I was just thinking of how dissapointing the Google UI was: it took me three clicks and two page loads to see where and for how long a layover was. Have you tried Hipmunk[0]? Their interface for flight listings is the best I've ever used.
I don't see how it could appear any sooner unless it telepathically, I mean, machine-learningally knew your destination and dates before you entered them.
Not to mention a few other missing features, such as google's explore nearby destinations map, which is very handy.
Historically my flight booking priorities were pretty much 100% price related, but now they're a combination of price and duration.
Alas most sites only let you order by one or the other (literal example: 35 hour flight for $1850; change the sort to duration; 15 hour flight $3300, scroll through the list for _ages_ to try and find the best combination of the two).
Then select the best option outbound, only to find out the return flight is 36 hours... Or that the 16 hour option adds another $800 to the price.
The HipMunk UI was really nice for finding good duration flights in both directions, whilst also making it clear the price implications of which return leg I used (which to me is uncommon, because so many sites treat them as disparate steps, so a change in return flight means you get kicked back to step one.
Not strictly comparing the experience to Google Flights (as I haven't really used it), but to a lot of other flight search sites I've used (Kayak, SkyScanner, WebJet, Airline sites, IWantThatFlight, HelloWorld, among others).
The HipMunk UI actually facilitated that search really well. Very impressed :-) (And it seemed to have equally good prices for the flights I looked at compared to other sites.)
I like how prominent Google Flights makes the layovers in text form, but it's not visual, and you can't sort by agony.
These days I pretty much only fly nonstop or the shortest possible route if a layover is absolutely necessary. Looking at flights right now, the cheapest flight SFO-Frankfurt is 15h of travel and goes through Dallas (!!) vs 10h of travel for the nonstop. No-brainer, especially when you factor in getting on and off the planes, the risk of missed connections, etc.
Not to mention they're missing Southwest, but that's Southwest's fault -- they seem to have some sort of policy against allowing any third parties to list their flights. In addition to being really annoying since I have to make two searches rather than one every time I want to book a domestic flight due to a lone holdout, it also makes zero sense to me. How could not having all that free advertising from flight search engines possibly be a good thing for Southwest? I care enough to go to the trouble of searching in two places, but I doubt most people do.
It's not 'free'. See this quora answer for more: (https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Southwest-choose-not-to-offer...)
Short Answer: It costs money to be there and they can control the variables and environment better on their website.
Long Answer: It dates back to Southwest's routes in competing with the car for travel. In order to be price competitive, they did not want to pay travel agents a 10% commission. (This was the 1970s) So they sold tickets by the phone, at the airport, or at their office, but always direct.
As computers evolved, travel agents began connecting to an airlines fares by computer, rather than books and a phone. Airlines began developing proprietary systems for managing ticket sales, allowing other airlines to be in their systems for a fee. The biggest were Apollo (United) and Sabre (American). Southwest still refused to pay the distribution costs of the tickets.
When the internet became more broadly available to consumers, Southwest jumped on the opportunity, becoming the first major airline to sell tickets online. Other airline followed and soon after, 3rd party sites came to be, using the GDS' (Global Distribution Systems) like Sabre and Apollo to display all of the flights and fares. Acting like modern day travel agents, and putting many travel agents out of business.
Today, while Southwest has become a much larger airline, it still does not want to pay the GDS' for access to their systems. However, today Southwest has a much stronger brand which can drive more people to their website. And by having the website as the primary channel of distribution, they can control a lot of things that they could not within the confines of a GDS.
It has been debated whether the GDS' are really necessary anymore as middlemen. And besides Southwest, other airlines are trying to bring more people to their controlled distribution channel. In the past few days, Delta and American have removed their flight from several 3rd party websites.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on an unrelated project.)
(This thread started with me arguing that "it costs money to be there" was not the reason Southwest flight prices aren't in Google.)
So the way this is working is: Google, Hipmunk, etc. use GDS for queries, and then send customer to airline to book? Does GDS have any ability to sell tickets?
Has Google tried to scrape data directly from Southwest website and Southwest won't let them? Or is it just that Southwest will not provide APIs to make it easy for Google to pull the data?
When's a cheap day to fly to and return from Las Vegas? Sorry. Can't answer that, you need to specify the exact day you want to depart and the exact day you want to come back, and we might let you look at results + or - 3 days, unless you don't specify the exact departure airport.
These sites all seem to be geared toward business travelers who must travel on particular days from and to particular airports. Anything off that beaten path is an exercise in frustration.
When's a cheap day to fly to and return from Las Vegas?
Sorry. Can't answer that, you need to specify the exact
day you want to depart and the exact day you want to come
back, and we might let you look at results + or - 3 days,
unless you don't specify the exact departure airport.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on an unrelated project.)
Finally the pricing models are non-intuitive and different airlines have different administrators who all type in their respective pricing slightly differently. To get the the best prices you have to tune each query to the particular style used by the administrator.
Yep. They're pretty clearly designed for the 99% or so case and just (ungracefully) throw their hands in the air for the other 1% or so.
As you say, it's hard to really make the system do the work around finding a cheap flight within a set of parameters.
I've also spent hours booking complicated multi-destination flights, especially in Asia when you need to use multiple carriers. Simply booking as a series of one-way flights can end up costing thousands of dollars more than something more optimized. So you need to end up manually trying various combinations of one-way and round-trip flights and then piecing together the separate itineraries at the end.
This is exactly the problem I have addressed with my flight search tool, Concorde: https://concorde.io/sign-up
Hopper, an app on iOS, has exactly this. You give it a date, and then it gives you a month view with each day color-coded according to how expensive it will be to travel.
It also gives you recommendations about whether to buy a ticket now, or wait until prices go down.
I've bought tickets a few times through Hopper and it worked well. I have no business relationship with them at all--just a happy customer.
Accurate: Google Flights often leaves out the mandatory "additionals" such as booking fee/credit card free, etc.
Cheaper: SkyScanner has more third party companies offering flights. This depends on which language/country you've set SkyScanner to. Try setting it to the country you're departing from. Flying from Amsterdam? Set it to Dutch! Suggest to try it now, sometimes difference is surprising. Though check out if that third party is trustworthy.
I often do e.g. a long trip (+flight) and then various short trips / flights after that. I book the first one early when on discount. The short ones much later.
EDIT: And here's a ridiculous itinerary it found for reference:
$286, LAX <-> Oslo Round Trip, December 2 - 6, Norwegian Airlines: https://www.kayak.com/flights/LAX-OSL/2016-12-02/2016-12-06/
Maybe it's load but as others have said it doesn't seem to be returning complete (or in my case, any) data.
Does anyone know why the prices would be that much different? For the searches I've done, Google Flights is close to $150 more than what Hipmunk shows. Does Hipmunk maybe just have some sort of promo or lower price that Google Flights can't offer?
EDIT: This curiosity also relates to what "karakal" is asking in their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12736433 - Like is this data just universal or do some services get better deals than others?
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on an unrelated project.)
In general, I based my original comment on what Google Flights show as the "Best Price" vs what Hipmunk is showing as "Best Price." And there isn't any filters on either platform that would be quick to explain why the huge price difference.
However my favorite site now days skiplagged. The site united try to sue.
That would be I feel very dynamic in part, though still something that plays more of a factor in price than other aspects.
I'm not sure how much Airlines adjust for that and given all fuel is ties tot he USD($) then more a factor for non USD pricing with the exchange rate of the USD.
Now a feature that monitored that and fuel cost changes could potentially give people a heads up before the airlines adjust and might be a good feature.
Though I can count the number of flights I have taken on my hands, so not that afay with the dynamics Airlines use to adjust prices and the frequency.
In general, flight pricing seems rather opaque; I'm always confused by flights from city A to city B that are more expensive than flights from city A to city C with a layover in city B. I'm all for more transparency of the air travel market.
Interestingly, low-fare airlines have tried working around the problem by setting prices super low, such that they lose money on each flight by default, but making it up in auxiliary services - either selling addons that cost them nothing on margin to implement (priority boarding, early checkin, seat selection), upselling external high-margin services (car rental, hotel bookings, airport transfer services, insurance, phone cards) or directly extracting money from customers (obtrusive advertising, in-flight sales pitches, extremely punitive charges for baggage/airport checkin/over-weight fees/not following obscure rules). This seems more sustainable than the traditional approach of customer price segmentation if price transparency increases over time.
That example is pretty simple. If you consider a non stop flight as a different product than one with layover, non stop has less competition, people who don't mind a layover are more price sensitive and if there's a layover the airline will compete with all the other airlines trying to fill their hubs.
It's like coupons. In theory, coupons are pointless because the coupon price just becomes "the price." In practice, a lot of people can't be bothered to deal with coupons.
Like coupons, this becomes another mechanism for price discrimination. People who really want to pay a lower price will use tools like this to accomplish it. People who don't care as much won't bother and will likely pay more.
Granted that shouldn't matter quite as much for the "when will fares increase" question, since they have to have a baseline to evaluate the increase magnitude, but it sure matters simply for the "I'm planning to fly in for a popular event a year from now and I know tickets are being snapped up so I want to compare fares for flights as soon as they become orderable" scenario.
The bar-graph had been hidden from the usual UI by decree of UX designers (Maths is hard!), but was always available as a kind of easter-egg.
Perhaps this feature is the compromise?
- Latest version of Google Images
- Better Google Search results
- etc. etc.
Let's not talk about codeshares.
This is the daily price graph for a recent flight I was watching. Often the price was changing hugely multiple times per day.
The baseline price is also related to the wholesale price of fuel, which is publically available.
It seems like it should be possible to forecast prices.
I haven't seen it, but I hope that it also tells you 'when fares will decrease'.