Show HN: Travel spontaneously on a budget
wander.am
wander.am
Bug 1: After searching, I clicked to another tab for a couple of minutes, and then back to it. It popped up a dialog saying "it's been a while, we need to refresh your results", and then reset my search to the original form state. Quite annoying, especially since I'm on a VPN and location-detection therefore has me in a different state.
Bug 2: OK, so I stuck with the original $1000 budget. It offered me a trip to New York, NY, for several nights. I click into New York, and now it shows hotel rooms starting from $2500 and down -- i.e. it forgets the budget as soon as you start looking at details, making the entire premise of it useless. When you click into a "package" why don't you divide results into frugal ("save on accomodation to have more spending money"), on-budget ("here's what you can afford"), and spend-a-little-extra ("for a bit more, you can upgrade to...") sections?
Bug 3: And as said elsewhere, get rid of the dark patterns. It makes you look scammy.
It's such an annoying dark pattern that me and my wife have been working on our own weekend travel website [0] that is upfront about all pricing, e.g. we include fees in the price when possible, e.g. deposits for rentals, cleaning fees, etc. And we won't show outdated flight information (some of these sites show fares from over 24hrs ago).
1. Consider shortening the name, this is really just a subjective thing but a shorter name is easier to remember/type. Maybe just "Alpaca"
2. Load time is really slow after clicking "Find a getaway", the loading screen sat there for a while. Consider showing only first few results and dynamically loading the rest
Nice work!
Definitely shorten the URL. But I second the other comments - really nice UI, looks great!
I did some Google searches to find competitors and wasn't able to find anything. But I imagined the space was pretty crowded. This thread is proving my original suspicion true.
Anyway, I hope to use your site in the future. And I wish you luck [=
Just snagged travelalpaca.com, though. Thanks for the tip!
$1,000 in the hand is way better than $2,500 that never comes.
Hope it takes off. Such an awesome name and simple format.
So a "$100/night" room can easily end up costing $125 or more.
Small suggestion: the "what city" input threw me off because there was no autosuggest menu, like on most other travel sites. It felt like I was blindly typing in something, and that I'd only find out if you accepted that value after clicking "Find" (instead of knowing right away thanks to the autosuggest, what works and what doesn't).
Case in point: when I type "st petersburg" without an autosuggest, are you defaulting to Florida or Russia? What about "springfield"? :-) [0]
Second point: I entered "yul" instead of Montreal, and that threw a 400 error. An autosuggest menu would have helped here too :-) and I do think that you should support three letter airport codes.
Ah.. just saw "We only support US travelers" in small print. I hope you expand..! Cheers
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Found small typo on [1]: "Casinoa" instead of "Casino"
Also: the underlined, but not hyperlinked text threw me off. I understand it as a design choice (it does look nice), but wondering if there'd be another way of conveying "this is important" without using underlining.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield#United_States [1] https://travelalpacamybags.com/bookings/new?listing=6b0c1c8d...
Especially like the design and color palette.
I want to see a stack-ranked-by-price list of all international flights on arbitrary dates from my home airport(s), possibly with some filtering such as "exclude Asia" or "Europe only" etc.
This would be cool because it would let me decide "I want to go somewhere on day X, but I don't care where. Let's pick the cheapest place." I can see this leading to adventures.
In principle, yes you can build this. In practice, no air provider/aggregator wants you to be running that many low conversion searches across their inventory. So you can try to (very slowly) aggregate results yourself across a wide variety of free services to cover a sufficient number of airlines+destinations, or sign some paid deal with an aggregator to do it for you, and then probably still have to run a bunch of distinct searches for every destination you want to cover. This isn't particularly economical to provide as a service.
One suggestion - could you add some way to filter results? By state, by city, etc - searching from my hometown i see like a dozen results for the same city with different lodgings. Would be great to say "No, I'd rather not go to Tennessee", or "I want to go to casinos, show me the ones with that tag".
Edit: also: rarely interested in flights with 2 stops for a 1 night holiday - "direct only" needs to be an option.
Also I'd like to see a savings calculator. If I'm in Oslo, a $500 trip to Copenhagen feels like I could find it almost every day (the normal might be $520) but next to it might be a $500 trip to New Zealand - that HAS to be a more rare deal that I really should jump on. Or is it?
Otherwise - great idea and neat execution.
I have started to refuse to use sites that employ this "high pressure" nonsense such as booking.com/hotels.com. Even if you could trust this information who cares how many people are currently looking or have booked a hotel room in the last day? It makes for a really sleazy feeling experience and and a visual nightmare. It's like a virtual used car salesman.
Would you shop at a store that insisted on annoying you with such "pressure tactics" while you trying to buy food or clothes?
Vote with your wallet if possible.
This site was telling me that "54 people are currently looking at the same route" when I was looking at Perth to Singapore. That felt unlikely to me, were there really 54 people from Perth all viewing that page at once?
That was one reason I left the site, but the other was that the search results were taking forever to complete.
I find easy visas a privilege that not many western travellers are aware of; If I wanted to travel somewhere most of the time I need to first apply for a visa (which can take several weeks). This includes a fee, photographs and fingerprints, and an interview. Not to mention the airline tickets and hotel bookings. When I talk with American friends they complain that their visa-on-arrival is only for 60 days instead of 90 and "it's so unfair". /rant
And even once you clear the visa problems, you then get into yellow fever documentation. Do you need to take a yellow fever certificate if you transit via Addis Abiba on the way to South Africa?
I've seen this kind of service before. It's not new. Flight search engines are common. Don't many already have something like this integrated?
That said: an actual "Travel spontaneously on a budget" site would be great, but it'd be much larger in scope.
You might want to team up with some travel site like TripAdvisor or Lonely Planet and integrate local budget (we're on a budget) offers like the DB Sparpreisfinder.
Indeed incredibly annoying.
Travel does not necessarily mean taking a flight somewhere (especially in Europe).
Alas, I still haven't found any that let me do the same for trains and buses. GoEuro already lets you search, but you have to choose a specific destination.
Finding cheap train fairs is indeed a puzzle sometimes! It helps a lot to have some familiarity with the major European train companies, the major high-speed connections, and how to book the discounted tickets in advance (incidentally, Amsterdam → Berlin starts at €39,90 when booked two months in advance). Of course seat61.com is useful too as a general source of information.
What I really miss is a tool that shows me destinations that can be comfortably reached by a combination of day-time and sleeper trains on dates that still have discount tickets available. Nothing beats waking up early in the morning in Vienna or Munich in a sleeper train; it's like getting a free day of travel, and you arrive fairly well-rested instead of weary from travel. I'm not doing anything useful in my sleep (besides sleeping), so I might as well spend that time travelling.
However SkyScanner just updated their capabilities to include Train travel on their booking similar to GoEuro. I still believe SkyScanner to be the best travel website for finding cheap flights and also includes the option to just search a country name like "Spain" or even "Everywhere".
I'm excited to see SkyScanner merge the technology of including buses/trains with the ability to explore non-specific destinations.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/skyscanner-adds-train-trav...
That said, it's not really designed as a "travel inspiration" site - it's for people who have figured out where they're going and want to plan out the details of how to get there.
"Anachronistic"?
As if plane travel travel got out of style?
In other words, is this a non-trend, that only affects a tiny self-congratulating minority?
It might be a good thing, but until it is an actual thing, with mass impact and all, it's hardly an obvious critique on a new travel website that it lacks it.
The Eurostar conveniently terminates at King's Cross St. Pancras. This year the direct London → Amsterdam Eurostar service is being introduced, with the reverse following soon after, cutting down travel time even further.
Also, legroom, comfort, and very few luggage restrictions (especially weight, and no restrictions on fluids either, so bring along that bottle of wine and make it a picnic!).
For people traveling from Amsterdam to London. Want to go to Reading or anywhere west of London? Flight, no brainer. Want to go to Birmingham? Fly to Birmingham.
St Pancras is still a tube ride from most places you want to go to even in central London. If you're aiming at Docklands it's a long way. Crossrail will help a fair bit with Heathrow too.
That's not to say that eurostar isn't often the right option -- the wifi and mobile coverage isn't that bad, and most of the trip can be productive - especially if you want to get your head down in some coding, security is marginally less annoying than airports.
Also, when I click the picture (it's for Bratislava), I see mismatched cities:
Flights to Bratislava
(Flights from Prague (PRG) to Vienna (VIE))
When including other travel options such as Trains, Buses (Flixbus), GoEuro shows these methods, but without the "Explore" capability.
SkyScanner just announced the ability to include train travel which hopefully will be a marriage of these technologies.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/skyscanner-adds-train-trav...
Hilarious costs too for a "budget", and a default of 10 days away isn't spontaneous. My shortest short-distance flight booking was 82 minutes, my shorted long haul was 18 hours (for work), and 3 days (for leisure)
If you need google, facebook and pinterest just to display a landing page, I'm never gonna use your site.
Ditto the annoying Intercom popup that takes up way too much screen real estate. If I want to ask a question, I'll come to you.
It may be just me, but I suspect a lot of HN is has similar grumpiness levels about this sort of thing.
I know a lot of travel sites do it, but I don’t see how it adds any value for me to know that (if it is even true)
So, the site is just posting inaccurate information in an attempt to increase sales. I don't understand how a person or a business can think this is acceptable behavior, and they lost all my trust in a matter of minutes.
Trying to give them the benefit of the doubt as to that number being an accurate count of something, though agree it’s a high-pressure sales tactic that turns me off.
As far as I can see, the OP is just pulling numbers out of thin air in an attempt to line his pockets with our money, and I think it's disgusting.
If the latter were true, then sometimes it should say "You are the only one looking at this hotel. Take your time!"
But no. Travelling to the most obscure places across Asia I have NEVER seen anything but hordes people looking at my hotel in Kampong Cham. Probably different dates too.
I am willing to bet it is derived from /dev/urandom adjusted to the size of the establishment.
Haha, this is so relatable. Not a long time ago I arrived at my "high in demand, better book RIGHT NOW" guesthouse somewhere in Mondul Kiri Province and had to wake up personnel in their hammocks. Turns out they had no bookings for some days …
It's only a dark pattern if the number is bullshit. If the number was accurate then it would be a helpful feature, especially if they also took into account conversion ratios on that route and gave the user a real time table for how long they could realistically wait before booking the flight/hotel.
Since there are 3 search results above the fold, that's an issue.
Maybe move it to the left, or add space to the right for it to live. Or keep it minimized. Or give it some way for the user to minimize it on their own.
Also, it beeps at me. That's the signal for me to find and close whatever tab had the discourtesy of doing that.
* – by adding this to uBlock filters, if you want it too:
||widget.intercom.ioEDIT: I just looked at what Ghostery, TrackMeNot and uBlock Origin blocked - it's a pretty big percentage of the non-image content.
Give me a service that makes me want to opt in, something I need, and then you won't have to ask me to show notifications, I'll be asking you.
I don't miss it at all.
1. You seem to be missing SXF, Berlin's Schönefeld Airport.
2. Once that's in, It would be nice to just enter the city, in case I don't mind which airport I'm flying from.
3. The top result was traveling from Berlin to Berlin...
4. I'd like to be able to specify 'fuzzy' departure and arrival times. For when I want a trip that fits within my budget, but am flexible with regards to when I travel.
Disclaimer: I work for Hopper
* Ramon Air Base (no civilian flights)
* Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport (Israeli/Lebanese border is closed)
* Damascus International Airport (Israeli/Syrian border is closed)
Simply asking "what's within X radius" is not a sufficiently robust algorithm for this problem.
I would add that rather than a city, I would like to be able to specify a general area, or a list of airports. From my place, I don't care much if I must depart from Amsterdam, Paris or Brussels, and London is fine as well if it's cheaper. Every time I look for flights, it gets tedious to try every of these departure locations to check the flights I can take.
Is this something which applies to my whole user account, or just this particular comment got flagged up?
Maybe questions I should send to the mods really.
I think I'd send an email to the mods, as I have no idea what got you flagged.
I think budget filter is not enough to create enough value as most people set a budget for entire trip and not just travel. If you could crowd source data of avg expense for taxi, and stuff then this could get really interesting.
In our case we could map project budget for travel to trips using historical data(not so accurate but good for ballpark)
Also no results when clicking through a listing.
What are you prioritizing for your next release? I would recommend including the most often repeated UX complaints from this "Show HN". Iterate quickly and get another round of feedback. Keep up the momentum.
In Europe, I can go from cold to the beach with EUR15 with Ryan Air, and AirBnB for as low as EUR20/night in a decent apartment in many towns.
That's on a budget European style! :-)
How am I supposed to know if I am interested in "Monteg.."?
Curiously, first recommended city to visit is the one I set as the home base.
Also, when going for eg two weeks, it might be interesting to suggest to spend the first and second weeks in different places.
On the one hand, since I do live in San Francisco, taking a "staycation" is not a terrible idea. It might be fun to live like a tourist. But the first 5 options for me are 1) San Francisco, 2) Oakland, 3) Sacramento, 4) San Jose, and 5) Reno. For a site that is promising me exotic adventure, leading things that are so quotidian is a disappointment. Sure, put in the staycation options, but rank them lower.
I eventually just switched off the hotels and looked at flights only, as I wasn't confident that the algorithm would do as good a job of picking a hotel as I would.
If I may make a comparison, kinda like a half-baked Expedia without the $£€ limit filter.
No affiliation.