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Comment by natch | Hacker News Reader

Ouch, their site triggers one of my pet peeves about travel sites, listing prices without clarity whether the deal is one-way or round trip.

    NYC to Paris: $260
    Normal Roundtrip Price: $900

So did people who got that deal save $380? Or did they save $640? Which is it?

As feedback to Scott and Brian, this actually makes me hesitate to sign up for premium, because I don't know what level of discount we're talking about here. A 2x difference (one way versus RT) is significant.

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Wow, thanks for the feedback! Almost every single deal we send out is roundtrip. This is actually why we put "normal roundtrip price" instead of just "normal price" to help clarify this.

Maybe instead we should do "Roundtrip NYC to Paris: $260" and then put "Normal Price: $900" to help clear this up.

Thoughts?

Doesn't sound like you lose anything if you include roundtrip

I had the exact same question and hesitation.

Why not just put Roundtrip in both to be as clear as possible?

I'd actually rather put "Past Roundtrip Deal" above the deal info just because of how big the word "Roundtrip" is. We have to keep design in mind... and if we just put RT that would likely lead to confusion as well.

"NYC to Paris and back: $260" is only one fewer letter but I feel it reads more clearly and you don't need to include the "and back" in other lines of the message to get the point across you're comparing RT to RT.

Redundancy and specificity are slippery slopes. Why not say "Normally $XXX roundtrip coach redeye" because someone might think you're comparing a coach fare to first-class prices?

I think the "$XXX roundtrip, normally $XXX" clarifies it enough without the redundancy. You wouldn't benefit from comparing a roundtrip price to a normal one-way fare.

Yes you should make it absolutely 100% unambiguous because a lot of sites use this ambiguity intentionally for a kind of bait-and-switch design, and I am extremely wary of it. I think a lot of other people would also be very wary. It's a well known trick to make the price look lower by quoting the one-way deal even though most people are looking for roundtrip.

So.. I'm glad to hear you do mean RT in both cases.

If it's a matter of wanting to avoid clunky long layout for the copy, you could consider using RT instead of roundtrip. With a tooltip on hover, or some other accomodation, for people who need to know what that means.

Cool I like the tooltip idea. We're working on a lot of changes right now so I'll definitely keep this in mind.

Also, I'd like to filter at least on departure airport (!)

Then perhaps you'd like to pay for the premium subscription.

https://scottscheapflights.groovehq.com/knowledge_base/topic...

That wasn't clear at all when I subscribed.

Anyway, I'm off writing a mail filter.

Agree with putting roundtrip on both. Always my biggest annoyance.

Even though I always assume it's RT, I still need to keep that state in my brain.

I'm a Kidwell too btw :).

All of their listings are roundtrip.

I have personally booked sub or around-$400 return trips to Europe from the US using this service.

Huh? I subscribe to lots of travel sites and it's pretty accepted that a price is round-trip unless stated otherwise.

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