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Comment by usaar333 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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

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?

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