Comment by flavor8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flavor8 | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea, but it needs more work.

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.

I've noticed that nearly every travel website does this--you search within a budget, find something you really like, but once you go through the checkout flows, you realize it actually costs 25-50% more than what they said it did.

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 And we won't show outdated flight information (some of these sites show fares from over 24hrs ago).

[0]: https://travelalpacamybags.com

I like this a lot, especially the artwork/design. Can I make two suggestions?

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!

But.. Alpaca My Bags is such a lovely pun!

Thanks for the feedback. We, and other people too, usually refer to it as "Alpaca", so we'll see where that goes. For now, I think the name is punny, but will keep that in mind for the future. As far as load times--I'm definitely working on that; sometimes it even times out and shows a Heroku error page, which is no good at all (Heroku has a hard 30s timeout). Hopefully that will be resolved within the coming weeks, and like you said, looking at showing results as they come in via websockets instead of waiting for all searches to complete.

You may just need to upgrade your dyno?

Definitely shorten the URL. But I second the other comments - really nice UI, looks great!

It doesn't look like a memory issue--more of a latency issue with third-party APIs (some of them can take quite awhile to send back a response). But either way, I will look into upgrading the dyno and/or database to see if that helps. I think implementing websockets and rendering results as they come in would be my best bet, but it would add additional complexity, and I'm not a big fan of that at this stage.

Love this. I was going to work on something similar to this (and wander.am) but specifically for outdoorsy vacations.

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 [=

The design of your site is very pleasing, nice one. Is there a common name for this style? It looks familiar but I'm not sure from where.

Not that I know of, other than sensible design. I used Slack's original 'playful' brand as inspiration by pairing a more rounded font with a vibrant color palette. But thank you!

The url is a bit large, maybe shorten it to travalpaca.com or alpacamybags.com? I love it overall though.

Unfortunately, the owner of alpacamybags.com wants ~$2,500, which is a little too far out of this site's allotted budget at the moment. I've tried to negotiate other amounts. Will look into it in the future for sure, but right now I think it's fine. Most people that find us don't type the URL anyways.

Just snagged travelalpaca.com, though. Thanks for the tip!

If you can get in touch with the owner, I imagine they would be willing to drop that price significantly since it's a good fit for you but you clearly don't "need it."

$1,000 in the hand is way better than $2,500 that never comes.

I've actually already tried negotiations via domainagents.com--they don't seem to want to go below $2,000, which is unfortunate. But like I said, not a big deal either way. Maybe later on.

Heh, well, sucks to be that guy, then. Because uBlock blocks that domain as it stands right now.

Looks like namecheap wants $2,300 for alpacamybags.com

Hope it takes off. Such an awesome name and simple format.

In most cities, hotel taxes alone can add 10-15%. That's on top of regular sales tax.

So a "$100/night" room can easily end up costing $125 or more.

That's actually one reason why we've chosen to focus more on rental properties--they're usually in a better location, and they end up being more affordable. We still have a few hotels here and there, though, especially if the rooms are nice.

Congrats on the great site!

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...

Appreciate the suggestions. An autocomplete menu is on my list, just haven't gotten around to it yet. And the complaint about the underlined text is something I've heard many times now, so I'm going to change that soon as well. Thanks!

This site looks awesome! What did you use to build it?

Especially like the design and color palette.

Thanks! The site is built with Node and Postgres, mainly.

Feature request/idle question: is it in principle possible to build something like this:

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.

Map view on Google Flights is probably the best option for this. It's kind of slow and wonky and probably has some stale data, but I haven't seen anything better.

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.

This is amazing - I can't wait to see it work on a larger scale, for overseas travel!

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".

Filters are high on my list, and one of the reasons we're currently tagging getaways. Thanks for the suggestion!

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