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Comment by shimon | Hacker News Reader

Not to knock Hipmunk, but this visualization has been available for years as the "graphical view" of ITA Software's matrix demo app:

http://matrix1.itasoftware.com/

Do a search and then View Flights - Graphical. It's excellent and has been my preferred way to find flights for ages.

It's nice to see that someone who might actually care about marketing is offering the same useful tool!

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(I work at ITA on the QPX flight search engine).

The new Matrix (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) has the color bar functionality, too, but looks a littler friendlier! When you search, click "time bars" on the right below the carrier matrix. It was one of the most-requested features.

Just downloaded the iPhone app, just what I've been trying to find forever!

Comments:

- after doing a YYC to YVR search and getting the result, clicking on a price brings up a blank screen, is that a bug? Clicking on the airline shows results.

- the iPhone version doesn't seem to have the same flexible dates option as the website search, is this going to be added?

Thanks for your feedback! I've passed it on to our iPhone people. If you find anything else, there's a feedback button in the app, or you can email onthefly-comments@itasoftware.com. I wasn't able to get a hold of the development schedule or a developer just now, but I imagine flexible dates would be on the list.

Seems to have been fixed the next day, nice!

Please answer me this:

Why did I not know of this website? You don't even seem to have a front page, on the link another person posted, yet when I tried your link it is easily and by far the best fare search engine I've seen. All the others are bloated, slow and plastered with ads.

Who has been doing your marketing?

Because ITA doesn't care, they power the back-end of a lot of big players (eg. Orbitz) and they use some serious tech (which is why GOOG bought them), they don't really care about the consumer market and don't really want to play there. Makes sense to me.

Oh, I see, I didn't know that, thank you.

I'm curious why ITA doesn't actually make it possible to BUY the tickets. It seems silly to walk people through the entire process, provide them with so much information about available flights and prices and then say... go and find someone else to sell this to you.

Why not just partner with a travel agency and make life easier for people?

Mega-volume travel agencies / search engines are their customers, not you.

Do I have to know the airport codes? It didn't recognize San Diego at all.

Thanks for your feedback! That's a bug - we should have a fix out tomorrow. The issue is with spaces in completion, so if you just type "san", you should see San Diego in the list.

ITA is probably the most underrated travel app on the Net. It's my favorite, cleanest, and also the most powerful tool for searching for good value flights (you can also find flights that will net you maximum miles that sites like Orbitz don't make easy, even with ITA powering the backend).

I think Hipmunk is facing an uphill battle. I don't want to be a naysayer because I want them to do well (and thereby have more choices), but ITA spent years and years to get the kind of buyout they're getting now.

ITA is awesome, but their value isn't their interface so much as they supply the fare/availability data to practically everyone (Kayak, Orbitz, fly.com, and us, through via Orbitz).

Curious, who is "us"?

spez = long-time nick of Steve from reddit (hi Steve!) and now hipmunk

How difficult is it to get a deal with Orbitz or ITS for access to this data? Do you need a bizdev guy to talk them out of a six figure annual commitment?

I've got a very different travel idea, and would love to be able to try it out, and send everyone to Orbitz to book it if they end up finding what they want on my site.

But without the data it is very hard to experiment in making a better travel site.

The main reason flight search is so far behind the rest of the tech world is that the inventory is so difficult to access. You have to either be very well connected and able to persuade one of the gatekeepers to give you access on a trial basis, or have money to purchase data from commercial suppliers like ITA, OAG, ATPCO, each of which is hugely costly and limited in the type of data they provide and the completeness of coverage.

For bootstrapping a travel search product, you're best to get busy building crawlers to scrape airline websites directly.

Look up the affiliate link on orbitz site and start from there. I think you'll find it pretty easy to at least start something out. If you have no special needs above the api they offer their affiliates, then you will be good to go pretty quickly. If not with Orbitz, try booking.com or expediaaffiliate.com

Hipmunk seems to basically just be an attempt to mimic ITA's graphical UI with the ability to purchase tickets, which seems like a dubious business proposition (we'll see). I would think Orbitz could easily just stop doing its affiliate program with them, and then quickly enough make its own identical layout...

And matrix.itasoftware.com is indeed awesome-the query language lets you do incredibly useful stuff you cant to anywhere else. The hard part is then twisting the arm of orbitz/travelocity/etc to get you to book the exact same flights.

Or more likely Orbitz does the affiliate deal with them now. Then if it appears Hipmunk is popular and getting traction then Orbitz tries to buy them, at the very least to keep it out of Google's hands and/or beef up their UI features relative to ITA/Google.

Similar take here. I used to work at Orbitz and I know for a fact about 4 years ago an engineer created a UI extremely close to Hipmunk, in his free time, as a solo prototype project. Not sure if it ever got product-ized however. Travel search visualization and travel completeness/door-to-door still seem like have plenty of opportunities to innovate. So much crapritude in the travel industry.

The visualization, yes, but there's a lot more to what we're doing than that. Better sorting, pruning out dominated flights (80% of results), trains, and time sliders, for example.

True—but Matrix doesn't let you book tickets. :)

An example is here (for the lazy):

http://matrix.itasoftware.com/flights.htm?session=91c4f25b-e...

Sadly the links ITA provides are session-based and expire, which is very sucky.

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