Show HN: AirHelp flight scanner finds all past flights and checks for eligibility

A quick pitch for Tripit. Although you can let Tripit scan your email, you can instead just forward airline and hotel receipts to it and it automatically parses the data. It then puts it in an iCal calendar that you can import to Google Calendar. Personally, I use a Zapier to copy the Tripit calendar entries into my main calendar so that my colleagues won't try to book me into meetings while I'm on flights.

Finally, Openflights.org is an awesome site that imports and visualizes your Tripit data.

https://openflights.org/user/dankohn1 In the last 7 years, I've flown 44 days in the air for 428,989 miles which is 1.796x of the way to the moon (i.e., I'm almost home!).

More travel info https://www.dankohn.com/travel

I'm not sure if the app works as advertised. I submitted my claim and 4 weeks later their team is still reviewing it. A question to their support team has not been answered for 2 weeks. All in all, it looks like a scam to get inbox access.

IMO, the legal network and a reputation of always suing airlines are the most important things in this line of business. For example, if you are seriously delayed while departing from an EU airport, you are entitled to a compensation. Inside the EU this mostly works, but consider the case when you live outside the EU and the non-EU airline basically tells you: "sue us". I'm currently using the services of one of their competitors to try and extract 250 euros from one small airline that thinks that because they're outside the EU they can delay a flight for two days and not pay the legal amount.

That company does offer this for one reason:

"We’re here to end your flying woes once and for all. We help air passengers around the world secure compensation for delayed, canceled, or overbooked flights. We’re also the first service to provide a free map with your personal travel stats in just one click."

Giving a third party access to my mails next to my ISP: no way.

There a bunch of services like this that scan emails and offer something valuable enough in return that they might be worthwhile... Earny is another one.

I really like the idea of them but I just wish there was just some better security model. What if granting read access to Gmail could give you an auditable log of every email read through the API? That way, services like this could prove that they are being responsible with their access rights.

Must have a Google, Hotmail or Outlook account. Yeah, nah.

I filed my first claim with AirHelp a few weeks back. It’s “sent to airline” now, so we’ll see what happens.

I don’t think that I’ll hook this directly into my email, but if the one-off service works well, I’m sold.

Any chance of support for KAYAK or AwardWallet? Both offer a TripIt style forward booking email to add to an itinerary - I think AwardWallet offers an API for access to account data.

I wish I could import my flights from App in the Air

Yeah absolutely not giving access to scan my emails. Sorry. I don’t care what service you have, if you can’t provide an alternative way to get the data I’m out.

Also where’s your privacy policy? I don’t see it. You’re also not the first service to show a map of flights I’ve take. There’s been services around for YEARS.

http://www.jetitup.com/ https://my.flightradar24.com/ https://www.flightmemory.com/ https://openflights.org/ https://www.jetlovers.com/

To name a few.

No way. E-mails are incredibly sensitive data, you are not getting access. I'd consider using this if I could manually put my flight details in, but F-U-C-K T-H-A-T.

What reason do I have to trust you at all?

What if you got hacked?

Plus I don't use any of these emails. This is an awful idea.

Ever wondered how many flights you’ve taken or how much money you’ve spent on tickets? With AirHelp’s new travel map you can find out. From now on you'll know EVERYTHING about your traveling habits, such as: - how many flights you've taken - how many countries you've been to - how many days you've spent in the sky - how many km/miles traveled - how much money you've spent on flight tickets - how much time you've spent watching safety demonstrations - how much time you've waited in line at security and everything displayed in the dopest dope travel map!!!

And here's the kicker! If you've been on a delayed flight that is entitled to compensation, we'll automatically let you know and offer to claim the compensation for you. You'll NEVER miss out on compensation again because AirHelp automatically got your back.

Finding 10-12 flight itineraries among tens of thousands of other emails is more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack. Therefore, the first step of the process is selecting all emails that potentially contain an itinerary. We achieve that by an algorithm that combines some good-old-rules with a machine learning piece based on Extreme Gradient Boosting model. The next step is extracting all flight details from emails. In order to do that effectively, we use a set of our home-grown parsers and partner with 2 vendors to process less popular formats. This way our coverage and accuracy is higher than what any of our competitors can provide, and is paralleled only by Google’s Inbox. Even before the official launch of our email parser, our systems were processing around 500,000 emails every week. It meant that at peak times quite powerful machines were needed to keep up with the demand. Anticipating the official launch, in order to drive down the costs the critical parts of the system got re-written to the Go language, and today’s launch was handled from one of the smallest AWS EC2 instances. Currently we repurposed the tools created for building itinerary parsers to construct software for verifying other documents sent to AirHelp by claimants and extracting from them necessary data.