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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Almost all flight searching / pricing tools have comically bad user interfaces. It's as if the product designers at these companies deliberately went out of their way to limit my options and make me search over and over and over and over.

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.

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    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.

Google Flights has this: https://www.google.com/flights/?f=0#search;f=SFO,OAK,SJC;t=L...

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on an unrelated project.)

The user interfaces are poor because the quality of the underlying data is poor. The GDS I worked with simply did not offer any useful queries so it was impossible to get good results. A GDS usually charges per request so it quickly gets expensive and slow to aggregate multiple queries into a view that would be useful to the user. Also the terms and conditions of a GDS usually prohibits caching that could be used to make the user experience fast and inexpensive.

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.

>These sites all seem to be geared toward business travelers who must travel on particular days from and to particular airports.

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.

That's the exact sort of scenario you would want a travel agent for--if you can trust the agent to get a good fare.

Yeah. I actually have broken down and used our company travel service for this. Then at least it's out of my hands. But usually I have too much sunk cost :-) and have sufficient preferences that I just motor through on my own.

> When's a cheap day to fly to and return from Las Vegas?

This is exactly the problem I have addressed with my flight search tool, Concorde: https://concorde.io/sign-up

I don't think its just business travelers, most people in full-time jobs tend to want to leave and return on specific days - i.e. fly out on Friday night, return on Sunday night (not necessarily in the same weekend).

> When's a cheap day to fly to and return from Las Vegas?

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.

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