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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

tbf, you'd need a lot of time on your hands to do what the OP did with a paper guide. If you just want to know 'can I go to Paris and Brussels and back to Venice again in three flights' you can do that with three queries on Ryanair's website, which is actually less painful than battling through the upsell screens you'll be greeted with when you come to buy the tickets, never mind booking with their callcentre in the nineties...

And if you wanted to analyse large numbers of routes for business purposes then back in the nineties, you'd have probably found it easier to buy OAG's analyser tool or an airline spreadsheet file than digitise thousands of route pairs from a paper timetable, which you can still do if you don't want to write a scraper.

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Do the paper timetables even exist anymore?

I never tried to "analyse large numbers of routes for business purposes" using those free printed guides, but I did use them sometimes when planning trips, real or imaginary.

Rather than "can I go to Paris and Brussels and back to Venice again in three flights" what I wanted to know was "what airlines fly between cities 1, 2, 3, etc. and what are all of departure and arrival times for the flights they have on those routes."

Today I might use that information when deciding what to price information I want to scrape.

I wonder if today there is a digital source of that information, free for public access. Probably not.

There's no shortage of flight search engines that will let you know what airlines fly between cities [including nearby cities and connecting flights] and what flight arrival and departure times they have over a given week, completely for free, with up to date price info. Can't think of any normal trip planning scenario where I'd rather browse a chunky book to obtain a flights longlist and then phone a reservations agent to ask for quotes for each flight on it instead of hitting the query tool on Kayak/Skyscanner once per city pair and seven day window and getting all that information with availability and price.

Though timetable enthusiasts can still buy paper guides from OAG for a lot less than their data in usable-for-analysis form, apparently.

Based on my experience in Italy, Lufthansa offices still offer free copies at the ticketing counter. I’m not too sure how many people buy tickets at the airport nowadays, let alone do so with a paper timetable, but they are still there! :-)

I’m not too sure how many people buy tickets at the airport nowadays

Many people. Mostly business people who need to be somewhere on short notice. Until very recently, my wife was in this group.

If you need to travel on short notice, isn't it faster to book online rather than lining up at the airport?

Or does the airport ticketing desk have a later cutoff time?

If you need to travel on short notice, isn't it faster to book online rather than lining up at the airport?

In her situation, no. The phone would ring at 5am, she'd get dressed and grab her "go" bag and walk down to the subway, then buys her ticket (usually one-way) at the airport counter.

In theory she could try to book tickets on her phone on the train, but connectivity can be iffy on the train, and buying an expensive airline ticket is not the sort of thing you want to take unnecessary chances with. (Think double-purchases, false purchases, etc...)

Sometimes not and yes. Online ticket purchases are routed through a protocol which has an earlier cut off time after which the ticket is in “airport control” and purchased or changes happen in-person. https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/111197/what-does-...

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