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Comment by aclimatt | Hacker News Reader

I agree that its real-time inventory and pricing availability has been a total game changer in the UX department. Presumably their acquisition of ITA gave them the ability to respond to queries in real-time which enabled all of the (quite excellent) features you pointed out above.

There's just one problem -- because a ton of the data is cached, or precomputed, or however it's done, a substantial and frustrating amount of the data is simply wrong. As in, an unbookable flight. I spend probably an unreasonable amount of time searching for flights, and anecdotally I'd say about 5-10% of the results I get (not even for complex itineraries) either have a completely incorrect price, or are wholly unbookable on any website. Calling the airline doesn't count, because if their website doesn't have it, 99% chance neither will the call center.

For example, one from a few hours ago: https://www.google.com/flights/?f=0#f=0&flt=/m/01lfy./m/02_2...

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ITA's customers before the Google acquisition were not interested in sharing large infrastructure that would make contiguous querying (as opposed to on demand when a consumer searches), presumably mostly for cost reasons.

The QPX search engine is actually the same behind Google flights and all the airlines and what Orbitz used to use. The limitation pre google/flights was the on-demand querying only.

Now the contiguous querying, obviously, gives you a load of useful historical data. After running it for a couple of years now they seem to feel confident that they can predict prices changes with enough accuracy that the payouts for misses will be an acceptable price for the publicity, or increased use of their other travel products.

(disclaimer: ex-ITA/Xoogler, opinions my own)

This is actually very difficult. The data has to be sourced from somewhere, which would be the airlines. The airlines have fragile backends that cannot handle much load. As a result, Google has to be very selective in their query volume, so they try to cache intelligently.

The result is that sometimes the information they display can be out of sync with airlines. You should notice this issue more on rarer flight routes.

> The data has to be sourced from somewhere, which would be the airlines.

Such nonsense.

Pretty much all airlines don't own/run the source of truth for their flights and haven't for decades. They outsource that to GDS[1] such as Sabre and Amadeus. Their backends are not fragile.

You just have to pay for every query thus the caching.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system

I get the same thing (not sure to what percent level) and LOTS of times the price after I click through is not what Google listed by the link.

My solution so far is to search for broad prices for my approximate dates on Google, and when I see something promising open a new tab and go straight to the airline's site where I search for an actual offer for a specific flight.

I've found Google Flights super useful this way, though I guess they make less money on me than they could.

> Presumably their acquisition of ITA gave them the ability to respond to queries in real-time which enabled all of the (quite excellent) features you pointed out above.

Perhaps, but I was never impressed with Orbitz during its heyday. I remember watching a Google tech talk* about how hard a problem it is to give the searcher a viable set of options to chose from. However, in my experience, the viable set of options always seemed to include a 23 hr layover with with multiple connections that was $200 cheaper than the nonstop option, and various single connection 1hr layover options about $150 cheaper than nonstop. At the time, both Expedia and Travelocity offered a more reasonable set of options.

* can't seem to find it right now. Will post if able to locate later.

The talk you're looking for is probably this: http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...

When this happens, go to https://matrix.itasoftware.com and find the specific itinerary you're looking for, which will give you the specific fare codes, etc. which you should use to book. I believe this ticket is available, it's just that the people you're speaking with can't find it in their system (that said, you don't say what fare you saw, so it's hard for me to be sure I see the same fare you do). Specifically, the bit under "Fare Construction".

Fare Construction (can be useful to travel agents) CPH SK X/MAN VS NYC 500.77HLHF06MN NUC 500.77 END ROE 6.637696 XT 161ZO 167UB 39YC 47XY 27XA 124US 646YQ

I wish that Google Flights would offer a way to get this info in the UI; it's not common but not greatly unusual to be in this position (where Flights can find the fare but the UIs available to consumers can't book it).

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