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Comment by geuis | Hacker News Reader

General question here. Almost all flight search sites default the search dates to about 3 weeks out. Now, I find this annoying but I'm wondering if its done because there is statistical evidence that most customers search in that range of time, or rather if it's just what someone thought would be a good idea by "following their intuition".

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Well this is some interesting research. Out of my off-hand and roughly scientific research, my statement of "almost all" was quite off.

I found that all of the major carrier websites I could remember off the top of my head did not employ the date-ahead practice.

Delta - no US Airways - no Southwest - no Virgin America - no Continental - no

I followed that by a Google search for "flight search" and checked the sites that came up in roughly the 1st and 2nd pages. Where I put "yes" and the date range, this date range was pre-populated.

Based on Google for "flight search" Priceline - no Travelocity - no Kayak - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11 Expedia - no Cheapflights - no Flightsearch.com - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11 Tripadvisor - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11 Farebuzz.com - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11 http://www.skyscanner.com/ - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11

Finally, I checked YC's own Hipmunk, and they do not do it either.

Hipmunk - no

So my original statement was at least partly false. It doesn't seem like "almost all" after all. And the ones that I could find doing the date-ahead practice all had identical dates. I suspect all of them use the same backend search product.

I don't care enough at this point anymore to follow up on this anymore, so I'll leave it at that.

I cannot vouch for the other sites, but at Skyscanner we looked at the aggregated search history (12 million users a month) to make a best guess at the default dates to set.Interestingly the defaults we use are different for the mobile platforms. (We use our own backend technology)

Can you provide a little more detail on this? What percentage of users actually use the defaults (for both start and end date), and how many change it anyways?

Have you thought about doing some A/B testing on providing a default and not?

The rule of thumb that I've heard was that anything about a month out represented the 'normal' price.

If you're buying a ticket for a flight less than a month away, the prices start to rise dramatically as the flight date draws nearer. But if you're buying a ticket for a flight more than a month away, it's more-or-less the same price as a flight that's a month away. [1]

So absent any other information, the 'normal' price can help people ballpark costs more quickly, something I'd expect to be statistically more common than actually searching to book a specific flight on specific dates.

[1] With exceptions for destinations with very defined/popular seasons, holidays and things like that.

It seems like the default search is just for people who want to see "about how much is a ticket between X and Y?" Anyone doing a real search has real dates. By placing the time frame a few weeks out, you avoid including very expensive last minute tickets, and do a better job getting general flight prices.

It depends on the kind of traveler (business travelers have shorter lead-time, leisure travelers have longer), but 3 weeks is a reasonable guess—probably on the shorter end—for what Google customers will be looking for.

I guess Google will be able to fill this automatically by checking your Google calendar for recently added events in other cities. :)

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