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Wanderlog looks very cool, but you might want to take a look at how you’re pulling your header images. Planning a trip to Vietnam and got welcomed a B/W header image of the Vietnam War :/

Sorry about that! We just fixed it -- if you create it again, hopefully you get a non-Vietnam War picture

Wow. Fixed within 12 minutes from notification in an online forum to production. I am impressed.

SSH'ed info the production server, pico index.php, saved file, done.

Production-Driven Development is the new cool.

Pico? Not nano? Hah you're old :)

I do have a question:

How’s PHP holding up in 2020? Are you using a big framework? Are you using it because it’s what you’ve always known or did you choose it deliberately over other options?

I’m genuinely curious. Not meant to be negative. I’ve always wondered how well PHP scaled for others.

We aren't using PHP for Wanderlog (which is built with Node.js), but did use it for many of our projects before 2015.

There really was (is?) no faster environment to get started with a single dynamic page that can submit a form and display data from a database. I don't have experience with the more recent frameworks, but I'm sure they're very mature now.

What alternatives exist to Hipmunk's display of flights? I've never seen a site with a similar display of flights by time, including display of the layovers, and easy ways to drag the earliest and latest start times to eliminate flights that aren't an option.

> ITA Matrix still has time bars, if you loved that UI

ITA Matrix doesn't seem to do anything like Hipmunk's UI.

> flights are just not that profitable. In North America, you'd be lucky to get 1-2% commissions. In the rest of the world, it's a bit better, but Hipmunk was definitely North America-first.

Why is that not enough? Does 1-2% not cover the (hopefully minimal) costs of performing such searches and calculations?

1-2% is more of an upper bound. The numbers I've seen have been more like 10's of cents per conversion. And for whatever reasons, flight availability providers are not in the business of providing high throughput for clients, so the cost of performing those searches is probably considerably higher than you think. When I joined the travel industry I was shocked at what people considered reasonable latencies for availability calls, as well as the costs people pay just to get that level of performance.

If you want to make money in travel search, there's a lot more money in commissions for hotel bookings than in air.

That explains one of my pet peeves of all travel search sites that are primarily useful for air travel search defaulting to hotel search.

That’s surprising considering that there isn’t a Google Flights interface for hotels (I.e. an aggregator through which users can purchase hotel reservations through hotel providers directly)

It‘a roomkey.com , but Marriott/IHG/Hilton/Hyatt/Choice/Wyndham franchise most hotels and collect a 10% to 15% royalty of gross revenue from hotel owners, so they don’t care about commissions paid since it’s not coming out of their pocket.

https://www.google.com/travel/hotels

http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf might help you understand why it's not a trivial problem

(I'm not saying 1-2% commission should or shouldn't cover the costs, just pointing out what goes into these engines).

And yet, there are a bunch of services that offer flight search (whether or not it is profitable), none of which (that I know of) with a UI (as this is just a UI issue) as good as Hipmunk :(.

This is mostly just a marketing thing, balancing the lead returns for flights with the companies ability to rank/sell ads on Google/elsewhere.

I'm sure the margins are low but given the competition you need high volume to really win and it's a highly competitive and fragmented space.

The UI alone is only part of the business model.

Thanks for posting that link! I came across that presentation several years back and found it quite enlightening. Then I thought of it for some reason a few months ago and tried Googling for it but couldn't find it. Very glad to stumble upon it again, and this time I'll definitely bookmark it.

Google flights lets you adjust your flight takeoff and arrival times as well as min/max layover length, although the way that info is displayed when you're looking for a flight isn't quite as good as Hipmunk

Oh no kidding, you're BookWithMatrix? Shooting you an email, your website has been life-changing.

I second that! Came here specifically to see if anyone mentioned BookWithMatrix. So cool. :)

Why is it that Hipmunk had the best travel search interface I've used while SAP Concur's is absolute rubbish? What did they gain from the acquisition other than stopping a minor competitor?

> have made it into all major meta-search tools, so it's not for nothing!

Since I only use Hipmunk, which alternative would you say has the most comparable to the "agony" sort?

The interesting thing is the "Agony" sort has almost become standard! Skyscanner, Momondo, and others all default to a "Best" sort that takes into account flight length and prices.

Google Flights also does this for the first few results it returns, before returning a bunch of flights in price sort order.

I almost think I want a new kind of search these days, for which flights are actually cheapest, not just on ticket face price.

I want to know if I have to pay $30 each way to check a bag, or try to pack something that will fit in overhead, not trigger a TSA panic, and then struggle past everyone else's delays in security and boarding because they wanted to save $30 and are trying to carry on a bag they can barely lift over their head.

I want to know if they have created some "special class" that you have to pay $50 to be in, or wait twice as long at poorly staffed "regular" desks.

I want to know if they're skipping included meals on longer flights in favor of charging inflated prices.

I want to know if they're charging more for more desirable seats, both in location and comfort.

I want to know if they paywalled any other things that used to be standard.

You can go ahead and answer yes to all of those for any US airline and probably many non US airline, except maybe Singapore and the other top tier ones. But I assume that won’t be for long either.

It's sadly true for most. I have noticed that Southwest is a notable outlier in all this - they don't do any of that stuff. They also don't seem to register their flights on most of the search sites. It's like they know that those customers choose based on raw price alone, no room to sell any other differences. I make it a point to search their company site first before trying any other flight search.

Yeah, Southwest keeps their pricing info private for the most part. Depending on the route, you can do better on Southwest than basic economy on another airline (and you can check bags or whatever), but the lack of IFE, their route plans, and the fact that there is so assigned seating (which means you either pay for early boarding or save seats for travel companions, which the FAs refuse to do anything about), not to mention my aversion for the FA schtick are part of why I will only fly them if there is no other choice.

On southwest you have to buy priority boarding or whatever it’s called if you want to sit next to a specific person, otherwise you will end up filling individual middle seats. It’s all one and the same to me, they all have to meet their revenue targets.

This has almost never happened to me when flying maybe 20 flights with Southwest together with someone, but it has happened with traditional airlines like American or Delta when they have full flights.

With SW if you buy the tickets together, and check in first possible moment (24h before), you get assigned the same boarding position, usually a early B number. Then you board together and likely half of the plane is likely still empty when you board.

People also sometimes say they are reserving the seat for someone. Have never bought priority boarding.

Meals and bags:

Some do, some don't based on the route.

United decided to start bringing back free small snacks.

Also they brought back free wine/beer and 2 free bags in economy. *

Well they did that on my ORD-IAH-SCL-VAL/EZE-IAH-ORD route. But they don't do it for the Euro routes. It's really difficult to determine what your final cost is, and that is intentional. If I book a flight on Emirites, it's pretty easy to know what I'm getting.. but when compariing it to another airline, who knows what's the better value.

Thanks for BWM!

> I personally use a combination of ITA Matrix, Google Flights, and Skyscanner now

May I recommend http://azair.eu/ for low cost searches in EU? The UI is a bit weird when doing a one way as the label on the date pickers do not change but the meaning does, one is the earliest departure the other is the latest departure instead of return latest.

Huh, Wanderlog looks a hell of a lot like what I've been playing with for the past few weeks, after unexpectedly gaining much free time just before Christmas, and failing to find something similar for my own use!

I'd definitely be dropping you a line if a) I was anywhere near North America and b) a Javascript guy...

Just took a quick look at Wanderlog and it looks awesome - exactly what I want out of a trip planning tool.

Great job!

> flights are just not that profitable.

Trivago, Kayak, etc would say otherwise. Yes margins are slim, but this is a classic case of why no UI/UX will ever trump mass distribution. OTAs are basically the walmart of the digital world.

> Trivago, Kayak, etc would say otherwise.

Trivago is in the hotel business, which has better margins. Some sites like Expedia will actually take a loss on a flight if you book it with a hotel or rental car, which they make a profit on.

Kayak (and the rest of the Priceline/Booking.com group) takes a much more advertising driven model. You'll notice the site has lots of pushes to sign you up for their various mailing lists that yield long term reoccurring revenue on airline credit cards and travel packages.

It's odd to see so many commenters insist that there's money to be made in flight search, despite not having industry experience.

This comment nail it dead-on. Flights are a loss leader. It's the gateway to more profitable travel services like booking hotels, which ironically have shrinking margins over the last few years.

There's no need for an OTA middleman when a hotel can build a direct relationship with the customer (via loyalty programs).

Wow, wanderlog seems very cool! Way more intuitive than my custom google map / sheets that I've set up for a two week honeymoon around the corner. Will give it a whirl!

Can someone explain to me what Concur does? I'm guessing it handles a bunch of the travel stuff for bigcos with lots of travelling sales people?

Concur's a business travel platform. These differ from consumer platforms in a few ways:

1. Private negotiated rates - medium-large companies have bulk rate discounts individually negotiated with various chains that can be integrated into the search flow. 2. Policy management - rules like C-level staff can fly business class, or regular employees may fly premium economy for flights over X hours, etc. 3. Expense report integration.

These things are important enough that most large companies are willing to subject their employees to a subpar travel search experience to get this. (I work for a Concur competitor but freely admit that our search experience is also subpar compared to consumer sites).

We used it once at one of my previous employers. It was used for creating and approving expense reports for travel, with various elaborate options for approval flow and documentation.

Book travel and accommodations and track expense reports, with a focus on approval and compliance.

Everything Concur does, it does extremely poorly.

Because they don’t have real competition and what it does do (corporate travel management) it actually does well (in the backend). It’s front end and mobile app are pretty shit, however.

It does have some competition when it comes to expenses: Expensify, Netsuite, Salesforce and homegrown stuff come into mind.

It's perfect enterprise software. It meets the legal requirements and integrates with things like nesuite or peoplesoft. Whether it's easy to use or not is inconsequential.

Question if anybody knows: did Concur used to be good, and then became trash after it was acquired by SAP? Or was it always clunky and hostile?

In my experience, it was always trash. I’ve had to use it at every company I’ve ever worked at and it has never been good. At one company, the rule restrictions were so onerous that that and the UX made booking travel so appalling, I paid my own way more than once and then fought for a reimbursement rather than using it.

I travel pretty frequently so I often just call American Express (who acts as a Concur reseller for my company) directly to do the corporate bookings rather than futzing with Concur. I usually find the route I want ahead and then call Amex to price it out/book it. American Express is great — tho my company is big enough to have dedicated CSRs for our account, which helps. Concur is just frustrating.

That said, I will say that the worst parts of Concur are usually employer-made decisions. If your employer has really restrictive travel policies, that makes the Concur experience even worse. For instance, I’ve had the system insist I book an indirect flight that costs more than a direct because of how something is coded, with no way to override. My current employer has very decent travel policies so that’s not an issue, but if it is, it makes the terrible UX and bad search even worse.

I think it's gotten better actually. The jurassic version we had to use at megacorp back in 2014/15 was the only reason I had a windows VM installed. Whatever newer version was deployed a few years later was actually almost usable.

And, yeah, if I did more traveling I'd probably just call up our travel agent. But I'd still be on the hook for cash expenses.

The perennial enterprise software question.

Definitely focused on the business customer, mostly around travel planning and expense mgmt.

https://www.concur.com/en-us/all-products-page

My company uses it for booking of flights, hotels, rental cars -- as well as for processing of the expense reports afterward.

Booking travel, getting group discounts, and expense management. Oh, the expense management... - royal pain in the butt.

Yep, corporate flight/travel booking for entire orgs. The Department of Defense uses it for its travel system, too.

I used it for trip planning and expenses when I worked at a BigCo. It reminded me a lot of Amex travel.

Yeah, Amex Travel is a reseller. I’m not sure if the backend the Amex Travel people see is the same as what we see as end users or if they have a different interface, but at my company, I call a number for Amex travel and speak to someone there, even for bookings made using Concur.

Hey I'd love to use your thing if you gave a way to export it as a Google Doc so I know I'd still have it if your service shutdown :)

Keep your eye on duffel.com. ;)