Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
blogs.computerworld.com
blogs.computerworld.com
I don't think the natural language input is a very good idea. It's very error prone and only works correctly if you actually know what language it supports. I tried it and it got confused. Also it didn't correctly recognize a three letter airport code that I used.
To be frank I've found that Kayak has the best interface for doing this and there's no need to select which sites to search, etc. The interface here does not seem like an improvement.
And maybe it's just me but when I hear 'peedo' I think paedophile and so this company sounds like its name is 'try paedo' to me.
On the other hand: not using a date picker is awesome. I've been using nl date parsing on my own sites lately and it's The Best.
Then I tried to report the airport issue to you by clicking on the feedback button on the right. After entering my feedback, upon clicking on 'Submit', the feedback window showed me something like 'there was a problem sending your message...' I tried again, to no avail - sadly, the feedback form didn't tell me what went wrong or what to do next, it only offered me to add a 'sad' emotion to my message. Which wasn't of much use, because the 'problem sending the message' prevented me from showing you my sadness (Ironically, the third party company that makes your feedback system has named itself 'getsatisfaction'). Well, I closed the feedback window and found another way to post my feedback: http://getsatisfaction.com/wundrbar/topics/i_didnt_want_to_p...
I only had to create an account, submit a fake email address, enter a new password (twice) make up a new username and enter a captcha. After that, I had to enter the password again (twice), because it has to be at least 6 characters long. And, of course, enter the captcha again. After that, I was allowed to post my comment!
:-)
we'll also fix the frankfurt issue. thanks for the tip. :)
the way to specify an airport if the top match is not right is just to keep typing. eg: london => london all airports (lon); london gatw => london, gatwick (lgw); lon hea => london, heathrow (lhr)
similarly: sa fr => san francisco; sa di => san diego
typing frankfurt/main didn't work because the slash was confusing the interpreter. i'm fixing that right now.
I am working in a startup that aggregates rental car rates, similar to Tripeedo using OpenTravel. Its all XML based, and can be a PITA--but the result are a better product and a better user experience.
OTA is gaining real traction. By my count about 1/3rd of the companies listed on Tripeedo are members of OTA, while many more unofficially support some derivative of it. Most of these companies don't have open API's--they are very private and require NDA's and partnership agreements.
There are systems in place to handle use-cases like this. API's are in place for travel agents to search available rates and creating bookings. This is essentially the same concept.
Kayak is justifiably being blocked because they're scraping sites. If they had partnership agreements in place this wouldn't happen.
It worked really well for me. I loved the natural language search, one of the things that beats me down with travel search engines is having to select my date on their little calenders and then figuring out the airport codes of the airports I want to go into.
The 2 dozen browser tabs were pretty neat, on a low memory machine that might get annoying, but for my pc it was smooth.
One recommendation I have on the natural language sort is to have it recognize times of day i want to leave like morning, afternoon, etc
(1) It can help you search discount airlines like JetBlue and Southwest.
(2) It will show you fairs that are exclusive to the airlines' websites. (I don't think I've ever run into a situation where the airline's website had a price significantly lower than what was on Kayak but I've heard rumblings that it happens.)
i recently went to hong kong and searched all of these engines and got discouraging prices. I did one search on Cathay Pacific's website and saved close to 40%. I'm almost positive you won't see this with domestic flights (for now.)
You also provided the evidence of this yourself - I too have had a lot of trouble with Kayak recently, and it seems their ability to scrape accurate fares is severely compromised, and I suspect that airlines have some hand in this.
What, if I may ask, was the vision and rationale behind this approach?
I really like the cleartrip guys when it comes to travel/ticket booking. It's mostly India only but check out the UI & usability -- really nice. http://cleartrip.com
A lot of travel agencies have systems that actually can check all airlines for their flight information. I would suggest you look into that and run off of a hybrid between server and queries instead of waiting for an API and in the meantime tell people something is easy when in fact it really isn't. Most of my queries return errors on the pop-ups.
They are adding little to no value on the flight pricing. Thumbs down.
But your site is useless with the America-Centric airlines you have there.
My suggestion would be to also add a natual language processor where I can type in the airlines I fly with, and this this info is immediately saved in a cookie for the next time I use the site. Also, when I start the search, an account should immediately be created for me.
I'm running Chrome 2 on Windows 7.