Flightfox + AirBnb + Vayable
flightfox.com
flightfox.com
My main issue with these promo stories (the last one was for a round-the-world trip if I remember correctly): They give you the idea that on Flightfox you can post complex travel plans that are difficult to search for otherwise and get good results. That's actually not true. The form you fill out to create a "contest" is basically the same as the search form on any travel search engine, in fact simpler. I tried finding an itinerary for me and my girlfriend where the outgoing flights are to different destinations (Zurich and Berlin) but we return together (from Berlin). Luckily, there is a comment field for more complex specifications. Unluckily, the "experts" seem to ignore the comments. Out of three suggested itineraries I ended up with, one didn't get us to the places we asked for (and was more expensive than our own best result), and one added flights I explicitly didn't ask for (and was more expensive than our own best result).
In case you are wondering what the third result was: An amazingly cheap price and a useful travel itinerary. You need to pay the finder's fee to see the booking instructions by the "expert", so I did just that. The excitement didn't last long: The expert must have misunderstood the Brussels Airlines website because the price he quoted was for a different travel date. He kept insisting that the deal exists even after I alerted Flightfox to the situation. Ironically, Flightfox claimed to see the same cheap deal until I sent in an annotated screenshot. Travel experts who don't understand the standard pricing grid on travel websites don't have much expert cred in my book...
In the end, I emailed Flightfox about the poor outcome that I paid $50 for. After some back and forth they gave me a link through which I was supposed to request a refund. That link didn't work. After writing them again, the link worked and I got my money back. The time I spent replying to incorrect replies from "experts" and annotating screenshots, however, is lost forever. The only good thing I can say about Flightfox is that their support always replied very quickly and professionally.
One final point on those promo stories: On their example contests, Flightfox offers rewards of $500 and naturally get tens of results. I don't book my travels on a PR budget and therefore don't have that much cash to spare for finder's fees, which probably explains why I only received three results, all of which were useless in one way or another. So be warned: If you want to get as many and as good results as they do, you should be ready to put some cash on the table.
I hope this helps a few other people here put the amazing Flightfox promo stories into perspective. If you have cash and little time to research flights yourself, Flightfox will probably work for you. Me cash-strapped grad student is back to playing with Kayak, Orbitz & Co myself while waiting for the next installment of travel porn to get voted up on HN.
So the contest ended and I awarded someone as winner. A few weeks later I decided to take a second look so that I could book my tickets. This is where flightfox seems to have changed something.
At the time that the contest got over and I chose a winner - I could see booking instructions for all 4-5 itineraries that I had received. However, a few weeks later, I can only see the one that I awarded.
That set of tickets is no longer available. I can't see the booking instructions for the other itineraries.
I don't know why they changed this. It makes no sense. I mean, if one set of tickets goes out - it's only reasonable that I should be able to purchase the next best set.
Anyhow, for what it's worth, the ticket prices they found were indeed better than the ones I could find - mainly because they came up with some creative routing.
I spoke to the guys here and your contest was indeed a special case. It's true we're not flexible enough to put two people traveling from different locations on a single ticket/contest. But as you rightly pointed out, your comments should have sufficed.
The second mistake on our end was misreading the issue and the third was our new refund process, which unfortunately had issues during your refund. This isn't an excuse, but your case really was a series of unfortunate events that ended up affecting the same person, you.
In addition to the refund, I believe we also offered a free contest to win you back.
All of that aside, we're trying our best to deliver the highest quality results. It's not easy on a 2-sided platform, but our efforts are paying off. Every day we save people $1000s; that's not a soundbite, we really do. We hold these 'showcase' contests as a bit of fun for our experts and also to prove out business hypotheses. Every now and then, a couple of contests like yours slip through the cracks, but we do everything we can to re-gain your trust.
The last thing I want to clear up is your suggestion that we don't do complex flights. That's simply not true. Your case was unfortunate, but it wasn't really a complex flight. We do much much more complex itineraries involving frequent flyer miles, pets, unusual luggage, etc.
Again, apologies for the poor experience and we'd be more than happy to pay for future contests to regain your trust.
In terms of the business, we're at a crossroads in this respect. We can either A) go much deeper into flights, or B) venture sideways to do entire trips. We're running a battery of these tests to provide the necessary data.
We thought the results would be interesting to anyone looking to take some time off. We would never have come up with such thoughtful itineraries, so at least for the FF team we'll plan full trips like this in future.
I'm not into tour groups. I'm much more into going somewhere and having the freedom to explore. At the same time, due to limited time available, I would like to maximize my experiences once I do get somewhere.
I also would love some sort of service that is somehow able to look at my past browsing behavior and remember/suggest places to go.
To elaborate, I see lot of places online that I think: "Man, that would be cool to see someday". But when it comes time that I actually have an opportunity to go somewhere, sometimes I forget about something I wanted to see previously. Being able to solve that disconnect problem would be fantastic.
To me it is interesting to see whether the NP hard routing and the incomplete data of online flight search tools create a big enough gap for it to be economical to pay someone to do it,
The most obvious example is using frequent flyer miles. It's one thing to find an award flight on your favorite airline, but much more difficult to search all available partner awards.
Once we get into FF territory, there are also mileage runs and segment runs. In most of these cases you have to spend many hours yourself, which is why we built flightfox.
In short, Flightfox works best for more complex requests. We've seen amazing results with short flights, but it's not the focus and isn't a given.
What impressed me though is that they found a flight that I could not find on the airline's website. I don't know if it was a code share flight with some other airline but I looked all over USair's site for the flight I bought from some random discount site and could not find it.
My first competition didn't get any takers ending with no flights, but I contacted support and they re-ran it and I got about 8 different itineraries - all cheaper than expected.
Funnily, there was $1000 to be saved by flying from Melbourne to St Lucia (Carribean) via London (~15,000 miles) rather than via LA (~11,000 miles). That made no sense to me at all!
What about their posts make you feel like it's spam?