I booked my cheapest one-month trip
benbernardblog.com
benbernardblog.com
Then things escalated.
We discovered that we could book the same trip, for the same price, but with a different route, making a 500 km detour inside Germany over my parent's town. Then we discovered that bahn.de allowed us to specify a minimum time to change trains. We set it to 24 hours at my parent's town, letting us stay at my parents for a night. Then we found out that we could set an additional via option in such a way that we had to change trains in Ljubljana. We set the minimum time to change trains there to 24 hours. Then we found out that the ticket price was the same if we travelled not only to Zagreb, but to Split (at the coast), which required a change of trains in Zagreb. But we wanted to stay a few days in Zagreb, and the maximum minimum time to change trains on bahn.de was 24 hours. We then discovered that (at least 5 years ago) all foreign tickets were valid for 30 days in Croatia. Effectively, this meant that we could stay in Zagreb for 30 days, and our ticket to Split was still valid.
We got the ticket. After a week of visiting my parents (1 night stay), Ljubljana (1 night stay), and Zagreb (5 nights stay), we arrived in Split without problems. It was a 1,500 km, 7 day train trip for 39 EUR.
The only minor problem we had was the German conductor in the first train after we visited my parents. He just stared at the monstrous ticket in disbelief and had to finally conclude that it was valid.
After 10 days at the Dalmatian coast, we took the bus home.
But why would the system allow for detours like that? I know multi city is a thing for flights, but would have figured the utility less for trains, but I’m not European so for all I know it’s common to make big not-salesmen-problem paths.
Dealing with insane scenarios is out of scope for current sprint.
If you don't mind sitting in the train a bit longer, one possible trick (of many) with the German system is to book most of your trip using regional (non-long-distance) trains, and only a small bit in an IC or ICE. That way you can usually get across the entire country for 39 EUR (or less with a Bahncard) even if booked a few days in advance. Extensions into neighbouring countries often come for (almost) free.
Just for a comparison: These 20 Euro rides would set you back 150 Euros otherwise.
And for train ride information, there is always: https://www.seat61.com/
Unrelated side story about this: we also ran some experiments with bumping higher margin (usually meaning higher price) hotels into the top ranking slots to see how it affected conversion percentages. Normally the top slot has the highest conversion and it decays sharply from there. With these experiments running, for most countries you could see a clear change where the peak would move down to slot 2 or 3 or wherever the "natural" #1 hotel was (score one for our models, I guess). This effect was most pronounced with German travelers, and almost nonexistent for French ones.
And regarding flights this didn't try to take advantage of some of the common flight booking tricks which can reduce fares much deeper like stopovers, +/- days, and airline switching which are harder to search.
I went through the effort to sign up for all the loyalty programs and I travel some for work (or at least I did) - probably 6-12 weeks a year?
The loyalty programs were mostly negligible in value they provided. Some (like Amex Platinum rewards) were so hostile to get the value from it made me irritated to use it - not a direct hotel loyalty example, but a lot of them felt like this (calculated to give you the least value possible). Airline loyalty sucks and is a pain to use.
The CSV card was probably the only exception to this that I can think of.
It was amazing -- lounge access, free upgrades, free limos, free food and drinks, front of the line, expedited service everywhere, endless gifts (who doesn't need more socks?) It was a pretty good year to fly. :-)
For instance... If you travel with no checked bags ever, and you fly on an airline that requires you to pay for checked bags. You won't see the value of having free checked bags when you achieve an airline status. There's lots of little things like this.
I didn't care about checked bags. If I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get a limited (and expiring) $200 credit it mostly annoys me more than helps.
Hotel loyalty is a whole different ballgame because the margins that hotels pay to the booking sites are much higher (20-30%). For a long time hotels were contractually obligated to give the aggregators their lowest publicly available price ("most favored nation" - some recent EU regulation may have cut down on this, not sure what the current status is). One way of getting around that is direct marketing, so hotels are highly incented to get you to sign up for a loyalty program, give you 10% off, and keep the other 10% that would otherwise go to Booking/Expedia.
Hotels were always something I signed up for and used when I could but I never did unnatural acts to do so. May be different especially if traveling domestically primarily to $BIGCHAIN which almost always has an option.
Business travelers are much less price discriminatory and so airlines get fatter margins. They loyalty programs end up transferring value from your firm to you.
Hotel stays and checked bag fee waivers will put you way into the green.
You don't get the airline credits by default you have to register with one through their shitty website. You also have to choose a specific airline, CSR lets you just use the credits on any travel by default.
I don't like paying $550/yr fee for something where I'm supposed to be the customer and then have every feature feel like something I have to read the fine print for so I don't get screwed.
I ended up just switching to the Apple Card. While the rewards are subpar, at least the software is best in class and they make GS agree to not sell your transactions to third parties.
The best Amex feature was the Delta lounge access (only when flying on Delta) - the Delta lounges are really nice, particularly the one at SFO. The Amex lounges are great too, but there aren't many of them and they're often in terminals that are inconvenient (or United - which I try to avoid at all costs).
I think there's probably an opening here for a startup with a credit card that's actually good.
Most of the other programs you just sign up once. It's so easy, I don't understand what you're complaining about. If it's difficult for you to use the benefits, you probably aren't the target type of customer for that card.
The merchant discounts and event ticket presales/reserved seating are a massive boon. I get just shy of front row seating at many events because of AmEx. There's usually at least $50 in merchant discounts available each month that I'll use.
It should be granted up front for uber use over the year, not spread out each month to try to scam you out of it.
With CSR you get a $300 travel credit that's automatically applied to any flights or car services. When you book travel you can use credits to reduce flight cost with a slider. It's much nicer for the user.
Signing up isn't technically challenging - it's forcing me to do it that bothers me. I don't like Comcast style customer relationships. If you're giving the reward just give it to me, don't make me jump through hoops.
Basically. Pick an airline and travel with them whenever you can. Enroll in all the hotel loyalty programs but they're mostly not worth over-optimizing around. If you travel a lot, premium credit cards may make sense.
It doesn't matter much until you're travelling what most people would consider a lot. But then it can start to become significant in terms of money and/or comfort.
For the loyalty programs you don't see the value immediately, you need to travel a fair bit before those programs start having much/any return. Initially try to stick with the same couple of brands to maximize the loyalty programs. Try to apply a corporate rate code to any hotels and car rentals, makes a huge difference.
Figure out what airline local to you has the most/best routes that you want to take and stick with it. That may depend on where you want to fly too.. so spend some time figuring that out.
If you use iOS (not sure if we have it on Android just yet) then I'd recommend looking for something called "auto-buy" when you search for a flight. It's basically a limit order for flights and it'll allow you to set a price that you would be comfortable buying at. If the fare dips to that price then it'll book for you. We've seen some insane deals get booked through this product. Just looking at some of them from yesterday there was a round-trip flight from NFO (Norfolk, Virgina) to MCO (Orlando, Florida) that we originally price quoted at $284 for the user and it was booked at $166.
Edit: I should note that you should be careful when using these - at least once I accidentally booked a ticket that left from SFO and returned to SJC.
[0] https://www.hopper.com/deals/best/from/city-toronto-YTO/to/c...
It used to exist as its own separate app called "Get The Flight Out" but for some reason we removed it from the app store. We also had a feature devoted to something similar for "flexible watching" but it never got much engagement and it didn't warrant the infrastructure cost it required to keep up.
Also, it allows me to express my disdain at such a decision and if enough other people did too, said engineer has the ability to go up the flagpole and inform the decision makers that there are many people who are displeased at their decision.
So the smart thing to do (at least in our opinion) was to not even play the search engine advertising game and focus on building mobile apps that users will come back to after using. We tend to see really high retention rates with users because they like the experience and we don't have to pay for the ad impression every time they feel like searching for travel destinations.
It is very rare that an app will provide more value than a website. And most of the time when it does, it's just because the website is shit, and they spent more time on the app. But if they focused on the website, it would be way better than whatever experience the app is giving you.
Here's something to think about: would you download and install a desktop application for every random website you come across? No? Then why do it on your phone? People must just make better websites.
Maybe I am old (possible), weird (probable), and out touch (definitely). But I couldn't imagine the case where I am planning on doing research for travel and I would go to an app over a website. For looking at data, typing things in, comparing prices, etc. A phone app really is the worst form factor for that.
I am not sure how big your company is, or how its done. But your product owners are dropping the ball in my opinion. I backed out of the website as soon as I found I couldn't do anything from the website.
Phones just aren't good at this use-case.
Being (very) cynical, the only reason they're providing a mobile app is because of all the data they harvest (https://www.hopper.com/legal/privacy-policy/).
I would hand in my resignation if we started serving ads in the app.
I feel your pain around filling in forms and managing context on mobile devices which is why we've tried to make the process simpler and deliver to customers what's actually important. This article was written by our head of design back in 2018 about why we chose the search parameters we chose for flight search: https://medium.com/life-at-hopper/users-dont-want-filters-th...
He's now leading design at a start-up called Fast trying to apply similar principles to paying for things online.
How do you know? It's not like you gave them the option. Anyway, like you said, I'm not your demographic and I realise you are helping a lot of people travel more cheaply so I do wish Hopper all the best :)
Every time I've (tried to) use the RyanAir app to book (or browse prices for) a flight, for example, I've given up and used a 'real' computer to go to the website. That's not (just) because the app's bad.
Having app-only features and limited functionality website is just infuriating. Things go wrong with phones, websites are sort of a 'lowest common denominator'; you're not locked out because your phone broke and you had to borrow someone's old one but it's $OS and you're used to $OTHEROS, etc.
But it's also possible that it's like someone else mentioned: "if the product is free, then you're the product". Maybe they just don't care to get more customers/solve their problems, because they are harvesting enough data about iOS visitors to make a profit. If they don't want any more customers, then nothing is wrong.
If I didn't need a WhatsApp app on a phone in order to use WhatsApp on a computer, I probably wouldn't have a phone, (maybe an emergency use classic Nokia brick) or at least use it extremely infrequently.
The only time I remember the predictions failing badly was booking a flight for the 2017 full eclipse. Hopper kept advising that prices would fall, and no surprise, they never did. Obviously historic data was little help for a rare social event like an eclipse.
The interface was cute but that was ‘bout it for me.
Our all inclusive stay in Mexico last year was significantly cheaper booking within MX vs USA.
But imagine what people could do if you gave them full fledged access to all flight data. The efficiencies!
The company I work at provides these sorts of search interfaces to airlines, but all the pricing data we show has to be estimates based on confirmed prices in the past. If you're directly on an airline website (not Google Flights, Kayak, etc) and see a calendar or something that lets you view 60 days of prices or more at once, there's a good chance that was developed by one of our teams. Unfortunately we can't totally guarantee you those prices, and we'll do things like not render those components if our estimate confidence isn't high enough.
Getting a "real" price for a flight is not a particularly fast API call, and also costs the airlines a small amount of money from the provider (almost no airline directly generates their own prices, generally another company does). Fractions of a penny per call, but that really adds up if you just give free bulk direct access to that to customers.
One example I used to tell people in interviews: ever tried to book a flight more than a year out? You probably can't, because the date format in a PNR is "APR29". That's the underlying data for basically all flights.
http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf
"One interesting result not written up here is that even completely fixing the flights and fares of a ticket, so that the only remaining question is how to partition the fares into priceable units, is NP-complete. This is interesting because only flight and fare information makes its way onto printed tickets, not the grouping of fares into PUs. Therefore the problem of just validating a printed ticket is worst-case NP-complete, though it is rarely difficult in practice."
Back then (2012) I used a startup called flightfox to find the best travel deals for me (they have since pivoted to corporate travel management). I assumed they performed analysis similar to this article plus some other magic and it worked really well.
Today, I find more deals through "deal spotting" - a community or algorithm scours for deals and then those deals are shared within a community or on a website.
What has changed a bit is airlines have invested more into machine learning and trying to apply revenue optimization models to programmatically adjust their prices. You still get those weird deals since there's still some ad-hoc price adjustment and also machine learning models aren't perfect, but the pattern is less predictable.
Today, we target corporate travel, but we still work with individuals; you just need to click the Get Started button and we ask if you’re an individual after that. This pivot of sorts came from the fact we can deliver significantly more value to corporate customers (more customer value = more conversions, retention, referrals = better business & happier team). Consumer travelers typically only want the lowest price. If their “price to beat” is on a low-cost-carrier, we can rarely help. That becomes a dissatisfied customer despite us explaining “we’re here to help with your next trip”. Corporate travelers have greater requirements such as convenience, comfort, miles, hotels, perks, expertise, emergency response, off-site planning, large groups… the list goes on. With consumer travel, we were using a small subset of our tech and expertise; with corporate travel, we use everything and constantly need to expand our tech and expertise.
Hope that explains everything. Happy to answer any specifics about finding travel deals, since that’s what we do every day for 1000s of customers.
This is correct. Google Flight is amazing at tracking flight prices over time and lets you see dips in the past on a readable chart.
Something that they could make easier would be to forecast exact price changes based on the same flight flight on other dates.
Usually the algorithms change when you do that. I used to scrape data and get a lot of cheap flight tickets, but the difference is that I didn't blog about how I did it, nor did I provide services for anyone :)
This is the part I can't do. I never get the best fare, let alone those occasional $300 round trip to Europe fares, because I care too much about the specifics of the flights.
A bad flight time can lose you part or all of a day, leave you with a ruined sleep schedule, force you to start/end your trip at an absurd hour of the early morning, you can end up sitting in an horrific middle seat by the bathroom, or flying on a bottom-of-the-barrel airline and so on. If you can live with all of those compromises, it's great! If not, you end up paying a more "normal" price for your ticket.
I think for a brief period it was integrated with Bing's flight search tool, and then killed.
By the way, this took place in 2011-2012, when Google Flights didn't exist.
can mark it (2012)
Freighter cruising is slow-paced, DIY/BYO entertainment, interesting, and cheap, but you'll typically have to live without as much internet.
Eurorail young adult pass if you're younger.
Get paid as a vehicle courier to drive cars from one place to another.
If you fly a lot a lot... https://www.prioritypass.com for near universal airport lounge access
- Pre check fees
- No foreign currency tx fees (like my uni's ATM card)
- Lyft pink & bonuses
Other cards:
https://thepointsguy.com/guide/all-about-priority-pass-progr...
The Select version is pretty sweet, almost like Prestige.
https://www.loungebuddy.com/blog/priority-pass-the-ultimate-...
Their lounges in other aiports seemed to be closed whenever I was in need of them.
Based on that, when we switched to a different corp card, I did not try to get a personal card w/Priority pass access (nor did I buy my own membership).
And using Delta's lounge would mean having to fly Delta. Ew.
Dining is very hit or miss. For example, there is (was?--who knows) a specific breakfast option at my usual home airport/terminal that's a great deal but I've not really found a use for it otherwise.
Freighter cruising is much more expensive than flying for the same distance, but cheaper than an actual cruise. You could probably simulate the experience by living in a motel 6 with a stranger (since you won't get your own bunk) and getting food from Denny's 3x a day.
TBH if the USA got universal healthcare, the advantages of living in Canada would be slim.
In other words, the author tallies the work and learning that went into this as a positive benefit, not a negative, as you may be alluding.