Comment by kshacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kshacker | Hacker News Reader

I know google search is probably not the same as google flights, but I spent a few hours recently (over a few days) using google flights and it was a delight to use compared to the Expedia children.

We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple independent tickets because we could not travel together. This was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through the roof. Exact number of days was not that important as compared to the price and the duration and using google flights UI to slice and dice the data was such a joy. Want to freeze the airline and look at the alternatives - which include from and to dates, number of days of trips, or freeze any other parameter and analyze others, the response was sub-second. Did not eventually book through them since I did not want to get into the google payment system (they offer booking through others that I did not explore).

On the opposite side was Expedia children where they would show a price of 2800 and when you click the price invariably it has gone up to 3600. Again. And again. And again. Not sure if that problem existed with google although I paid the exact same price as the airline as shown by google, it could just be a coincidence.

Google flight's true genius is being able to search multiple city-pairs.

Let's say you want to get from the West Coast to Europe on a business class flight, but want to save some money.

Realistically, it's cheap and easy to get from West Coast airport to another, and similarly cheap and easy to get form one European airport to another.

Google flights will let you search for the best combination of flights that depart from any combination of up to 6 airports, and arrive at up to 6 airports. The technology they purchased (ITA) will let you do this as well, but limits you to a single country. Google flights? No problem with destination airports in multiple countries.

So, you could search for a flight that originates in some combination of, say Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver BC, and lands in some combination of London, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Milan or Frankfurt. (Or any other 6 large European airports).

Google Flights will also show fares for a specific trip length (say, 14-days) over an entire month.

Want to filter by a maximum flight duration? No problem. Number of connections? Done. Specific airline or alliance? Easy.

In a traditional search engine, I'd have to run close to 400 individual searches to get the data that Google Flights gives me in a single screen.

It works well for domestic flights as well. I recently helped someone who had to attend a wedding across the country find a flight that was less than $180/person, when they thought they were going to have to pay over $800/person. Just by using Google Flight's tools for about 10 minutes.

There's plenty to complain about in the Google ecosystem, but Google Flights is amazing.

I find https://www.kiwi.com/en/ works well for doing all of this too.

You can do the same thing in momondo. Being in Europe, what I like about momondo is that they include the cheap carriers - like ryanair

The product was called ITA Matrix, Google bought them a while back

Google bought the main provider of flight information in 2010 (ITA). ITA had such a monopoly that Google was required to continue licensing their software out for years afterwards, though I think it expired in ~2016.

Minor note: they announced it in 2010, but the acquisition closed on April 12, 2011. [1]

[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/ita-software-acquisi...

ITA Matrix is still available and is my preferred flight search tool. Still find the old interface much better than the new:

https://oldmatrix.itasoftware.com/

I wonder how much of the old Lisp codebase is left.

Also, it looks like the Matrix might go extinct soon:

> This interface runs on a deprecated web platform. At some point in the near future, we will be forced to shut it down. We unfortunately do not have a timeline on when this will happen. We welcome feedback about features missing from the new interface, we read all feedback and open bugs accordingly.

it's pretty horrible, I just search my vacation destination and it doesn't have LCC Wizzair I'm flying with in Europe = useless search tool

That's on the LCC, not the aggregator. They don't want to pay commission, and that's fine. If you want to fly on them you have to actually go on their website.

I don't really care who pays who, but search engine which can't find me cheapest flights it's useless

Well, you're getting it free: if you don't get any use from it, don't use it. Try doing an iterated search of every possible route on every possible airline website and let us know how you get on!

1. just because something is free it's not excuse to provide poor service

2. I don't use it, I point out for others facts about service OP recommends so they don't waste their time or you prefer everyone wasting their time?

At least on my searches with Google Flights, Wizzair shows up as a carrier for EU flights. Good search engine for low cost EU carriers is https://www.azair.eu/

Azair doesn't really work either anymore, they will show you non-existent flights or wrong prices, for rough idea is OK, but data is wrong

ITA wasn’t in any way to e main provider of flight information in 2010. It’s a relatively minor player, but with great features

ITA powered the backend flight search functionality for virtually every OTA, even if the ITA Matrix website wasn’t popular among end users.

Here is the latest version of ITA Matrix as a google hack https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/search

I personally like to use Momondo. Have had pretty good experience with Momondo over the years so far. I haven’t tried Expedia, so I can’t directly compare it. But I recommend giving Momondo a try anyways.

I will also plug Kayak as being the only other decent flight search site.

The difference between Kayak/Google and the others is that Expedia and friends are online travel agencies. Kayak and Google are really just search engines. It makes a world of difference.

Can you explain what is the difference? I suppose the flight search engines don't book the flights.

The travel agent wants to sell you a flight and pick up a commission. The search engine just tells you what's out there.

On top of querying the travel agency APIs, Kayak will also query each airline directly. So you also get fares and airlines that aren’t published to agencies

I miss Hipmunk, and curse the day Concur bought them.

Same! Their “agony” sorting (basically sorted flights by a combination of # of stops, total hours, and price) was a breakthrough at the time. It seems to be factored into most flight searches today, even though it’s not labeled as such.

Google flights is delightfully easy to use

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