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Comment by VSpike | Hacker News Reader

One thing the aggregators do well is offer a consistent and more flexible search than the airlines' own sites which are often pretty terrible. For example, I live within 2 hours of about 5 airports, and when flying within Europe there are often two airports near the destination. Being able to search with multiple departure and arrival locations, with flexibility across several days, in order to find the cheapest combination of airports and dates is still a useful service.

I'm interested to know where Google Flights fits in to this picture. It is not well publicised but suddenly seems to have become quite good. A key feature for me is inclusion of the two big UK low-cost carriers, Ryanair and Easyjet. I'd assume Google are not working on commission but are just trying capture another area of search with their algorithms and data. Does anyone know more about it?

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Usually I search with an aggregator find the cheapest carrier, then book directly with that carrier. I've found booking sites to be a bit hit and miss - often they add extra booking fees that make the chosen flight more expensive or you miss out on certain options. In Europe I usually use a combination of Momondo, Skyscanner and Kiwi (formerly Skypicker).

The aggregators are also always showing the cheapest fares, regardless of the restrictions on those fares. More and more airlines have fares like Delta's "Basic Economy" which does not even let you pick a seat. Everyone is familiar with the long standing "non refundable" restriction on most of these fares but the newer restrictions vary from airline to airline and the aggregators don't do a good job of detailing those.

Contrast that to booking on most airline sites where they very clearly and very obviously show you the restrictions because they publish the fare alongside of the less restrictive fares as a way to up sell.

Flights also has an awesome tracking feature that charts the price of selected flights over time. It's very interesting to see how ticket prices fluctuate for different destinations and can help identify the best time to buy.

Google Flight also has this nice bar chart of what departure date is the cheapest for, say, a two-week trip to XYZ (and of course the usual departure date/return date matrix).

Google Flights also tells you when a particular flight is often subject to delays. Very handy.

> One thing the aggregators do well is offer a consistent and more flexible search than the airlines' own sites which are often pretty terrible.

That's the classic benefit of intermediation in an industry, which is the ability to focus more on the market and market needs, and increase the flexibility of offerings by picking and choosing from suppliers. Of course suppliers don't necessarily like this, which leads to the situation described by OP.

I don't know about flights, but I believe the previous Google "Compare" service (now shut down) was generating revenue from commissions.

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