The Lowest Fare? Ask the Crowd | Hacker News Reader

The Lowest Fare? Ask the Crowd

nytimes.com

64 pointstodsul15 comments

I tried this for booking my current business trip. I offered a $100 reward for a five city US excursion, originating in Japan, with the proviso "I use Delta. Make sure I get miles for this, either with them or an allied carrier."

The best offer I get that actually read that instruction knocked $3,000 off the $5,000 that Delta.com quoted me. I went with Delta. I have the utmost respect for the amount of searching which went into it, but the instructions I got back were 6 steps long, with each step sounding like "Book a one-way flight from X to Y using this web interface", and I was terrified of getting halfway through and then being stranded in Des Moines not able to book the rest of the flights at anything near the quote.

I'm so there if they can handle the bookings themselves, such that I'm not the one bearing the risk-of-failure-to-book.

Agree with your general point but with those kinds of savings it seems fairly irrational not to. With $2k in pocket I can't imagine being stuck in Des Moines with no options.

Congrats to Flightfox, YC S12:

http://www.startupsmart.com.au/success-stories/flightfox-acc...

From experience, it is tough for the crowd to beat skyscanner.

matrix.itasoftware.com is also where i check first.

SkyScanner has better fares most of the times. But the sites it points to have bad reviews, so I have never yet tried booking though SkyScanner.

ITA Software (by Google) — would it be reasonable to guess that this flight tracker is built into http://flights.google.com?

Flight search engines don't include budget carriers. Most flightfox contests are won by a combination of low cost carriers like airasia or airberlin.

Not entirely true - Skyscanner certainly does include budget airlines (in fact, long ago it supported only budget carriers); see below for plenty of easyJet flights between London and Berlin

http://www.skyscanner.net/flights/lond/berl/1302/1302

There are definitely challenges in gathering & displaying a combination of budget and 'traditional' carrier fares, but to say that either set isn't available via flight search isn't accurate

As a former long-time engineer there, it's nice to see them getting some praise here - thanks - there's a ton of impressive technology and data behind their engine, and that's without me knowing what they've been up to in the past year or so.

I'm sure the flight hackers are aware of skyscanner, and probably know how to use it better than the average person. There are probably many exceptions like "Oh, if you're flying here skyscanner sucks and you really want to use X instead".

You don't really have a control group to know that skyscanner consistently provides the best results. It's possible that you were happy with your skyscanner experience and believe that you got the best deal, while there was an alternative that would have been much better for you. Flightfox is a relatively cheap insurance policy against that.

Flightfox is a good idea (though I'll admit I'm unconvinced computers cannot reliably beat the crowd), but it needs work on implementation.

I tried it out and the winner quoted me an incorrect itinerary cost -- didn't notice that the airline's quoted price did not include airline fees and taxes (which are in the hundreds of $$ for international flights). In the end, the true winner beat skyscanner by less than the cost of the contest.

Honestly, I find skyscanner amazing; it is the only system I know that finds airline consolidators (well flightfox does of course too) - and has a very easy to use tweaking interface.

I had $300 shaved off of a $1100 trip. Some of the posters really must read the criteria first and one, who I ended up going with, went way above and beyond in his helpfulness for the default bounty ($30?).

The only thing I'm worried about now is somehow getting my luggage wired through all legs of my trip rather than my having to go through immigration at each stop and pick it up, only to go back through again and drop it off :P

This is definitely a "Why didn't I think of that?" moment.

Is anyone here an 'expert' for Flightfox? Can you share you thoughts about it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com