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Comment by casca | Hacker News Reader

Kayak and Hipmunk get a lot of praise for their UI but if you want to use a hacker interface for finding flights, http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ is the way to go.

It's not as pretty, but is incredibly feature-rich, not limited to the US and regularly finds me prices that are significantly cheaper than anyone else.

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FYI - you can access most of ITA's routing language on Hipmunk, if you type :: after an airport code. The advantage of using us is we can make you a booking link to actually purchase the itinerary.

Thanks, that's interesting. The issue for me is that Hipmunk only serves the US market and won't let me enter multiple airports as source or destination. My best results have started with a list of 20 possible sources and destinations which is unfeasible to search with any other publicly available service.

You can enter multiple airports (as long as they're in the same time zone). Just separate them with commas.

Have you considered watching to see if a user searches for, e.g., flights out of JFK immediately after an identical search for flights out of LGA, and then gently highlighting the feature?

There're a slew of new flight booking startups like http://wuhutravel.com and http://sillk.co that I believe are trying to entice younger travellers by apparently launching features like you just mentioned raldi (based on screenshots I've seen on dribbble from their designers)...

i'd like to reiterate that hipmunk should make it clearer that multiple airports is supported now. It used to not work, and therefore I used Kayak.

Nice. I wasn't aware that Hipmunk supported that. I just tried it and it even provides some helpful hints. sfo::ua+ atl::ua+

Good stuff. Saves me the time from matrix.itasoftware.com to go to the airline or booking site.

What about limiting it to fare basis? for example: sfo::/f bc=y atl::/f bc=y doesn't work. There another way?

Love what you guys do and will have to check on working there at some point.

It was a sad, sad day when they shut down the old http://matrix1.itasoftware.com/ interface. It was much more keyboard accessible with faster navigation between inputs, and the forward and back buttons always did exactly what I expected. Also really miss the "weekend search". It was a really great service, but I guess it wasn't exactly making them money.

Kayak, Hipmunk, Google Flights, Orbitz, and almost every other aggregator licenses ITA Software's system, actually. And most major airlines use it internally. It's good enough that it's pretty much the de facto standard and framework.

Maybe not Google anymore, since Google acquired ITA :-). But obviously they still use it

Have you tried out Google Flights? I've been told it's based on this same technology, and has a much better UI.

And be sure to click around. It has some interesting tools, like prices for flights to your destination flown out of nearby airports.

I believe that ITA software is owned by Google. They license it to others as well.

wow google flights is super fast!

My guess is that they predict the most common searches and constantly query and cash results for these searches, something I don't think Kayak or hipmunk does. I don't think you can launch a search product on google if it takes more than .xx seconds to return the result...

It could have something to do with the fact that Google owns ITA.

I think that owning ITA allows them to have more data to mine/predict and better access but it doesn't explain how fast the searches are. Most airfare searches still hit GDSs which are relatively slow to respond. The only way I can think of Google can deliver such a performance is by intelligently pre-caching airfare searches. Google?

I'm not so sure, I looked for a few random flights. However, having built my own very rudimentary internal flight search tool from the global flight list, I can tell you there are roughly 7 million flights per month, a small data set by google standards.

It's not the size of the dataset that is relevant but more that this dataset changes in realtime : price + availability. These requests go through GDSs that are relatively slow, that's why so called real-time search engines like kayak are fairly slow. What do you exactly mean by 7M flights? Keep in mind that most search requests involve a combination of flights (leg), outbound, inbound and sometime multiple stops...

not working in Europe. God damn!

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