Google Flights
google.com
google.com
I use Skyscanner here in Europe for regional and international flights, however really the prices are only useful as an indication. For example, one flight I found the cheapest option was Ryanair, but when I actually booked it the price was €10 cheaper than listed on Skyscanner.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18718556
Also last month they were forced to remove the 'you have to pay €12 to pay with a Visa card' policy, so now the fee is 2% for all cards. However, they now make the admin fee mandatory however you pay :)
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/holidays/article-2240292/...
Add on the baggage fees, landing fees, priority boarding fees, tax, credit card fees, etc. and the price isn't so impressive.
Strangely, it did support Greece (or so it said), but it doesn't seem to handle transfers very well, giving me no way to fly from Athens to the Newark.
I'm going to rate this tool a solid 1/10.
It's 2012. A US-only service when there are TONS of international alternatives?
Second, intentional coverage just goes with the domain for a flights application. Are Americans supposed to just switch back and forth to some competitor for non domestic flights?
For folks who like hipmonk? Do you really travel? Their search engine also fails to find most good fares. Pretty but useless.
Most people who are serious use expertflyer.com and matrix.itasoftware.com to find fares. Yes you have to learn a bit about how air fares are constructed, but this is hacker news not consumer news isn't it?
Do you have an example of this? We get our data from the same place that Matrix does
I suspect in some cases it may be due to timeouts or row count limits. I tend to do very broad searches, and then narrow the results with filters. This works great in Matrix, but with Orbitz (which uses the same data source), I tend to hit invisible limits where I can see that some of the rows have just been cut off from the results. (E.g. I can book flights A or B for leg 1, and flights C or D for leg 2, but for the combination I can only book (A,C), (A,D), and (B,C). The B-D trip is in Matrix results but not Orbitz, and this kind of truncation only happens when I have lots of results.
I don't know for sure that Hipmunk follows the same pattern, because I haven't used it in quite some time, but I'm happy to send bug reports IF AND ONLY IF I can have confidence that a real human is reading them.
Yeah, just use the Olark (live chat) bar on the bottom of the page, that should get you a real human
Gets to the point where Google kicks you off to the airline's own page, and that's where the trouble starts. She is forced to pick seats but can't, because the only ones available require being a specially background checked and known passenger. Eventually she gives up.
Then she googles Expedia. A few minutes later she has her tickets. Yesterday she printed out the boarding passes complete with her seat assignment. On the same flight Google Flighs couldn't book.
Sounds to me that the airline webpage has additional (read: useless?) security features that Expedia doesn't have.
The unambiguous part is that Google Flights failed to account for the nature of the seats it had identified as "available", and went ahead with the recommendation when in fact they were not appropriate. The unclear part is whether Expedia did actually find the same flight and seats (as the author appears to be saying) but has some way around the security features (an agreement with the airline?), or whether Expedia was aware of the inappropriateness of the seats Google Flights recommended and in fact provided different ones on a different flight.
It would be nice if the parent had been clearer in the explanation but it seems that either way: Expedia 1, Google 0.
(It's typical to not get a seat assignment at booking time, BTW, especially if you're booking a few days before the flight.)
I was trying to book a flight from Chicago->Seoul, and the options showed at least $2000 for the cheapest flight, which involved a 33hr total journey through China and Japan. I then asked my Korean friends, who recommended a travel agent and they got me a $1700 ticket with only 17hrs direct flight
The best part is they can put me on a wait list for cheap tickets!
Funny, I've always had the opposite experience: every time I've used a travel agent, they always found more expensive flights with worse timings (time of day, layover, etc), and I end up requesting specific flights based on what I've found online.
Most travel agents on long-distance, well travelled routes work through consolidators. These consolidators buy tickets (or promise to buy tickets) in bulk far in advance, and then re-sell them later. This is what I've heard about segments like USA <-> India.
I ran a contest on Flightfox (http://flightfox.com) and offered a $49 finders fee. Someone found me a fare for $1000 with only one stop (vs two on the fare I found).
Thanks. I didn't know about Hipmunk. I have been using mostly Kayak and, more recently, Google.
I still think the hipmunk interface is more humane.
Kayak doesn't even come close to this. At best, you can set the month of travel; useless for most busy people.
Google, on the other hand, gave me exactly what I needed at prices competitive to Orbitz. It was a bit disappointing that when I was done, I had to buy the tickets through the carrier's site, but it still found me a flight at a good time for a good price.
Oh, and getting tired of Himpunk's promoted ads on the site that shall not be named.
That being said, it is rare that I can find a better rate than what I see on Hipmunk, and their agony ui is still frickin' amazing.
I find that Google's innovation for almost every one of their products is in saying "we have oodles of data, how can we display it effectively"? They have done well at collecting and quickly accessing large amounts of data, linking loosely coupled sets, and in some cases, adding meaning (image searches understand the concept of "bright" or "dim", for example).
But I rarely see them taking the data they have and merging it in a way to create new meaning or value. Hipmunk, beyond co-opting a gantt chart, did this with their "agony" score. Google not only didn't try here, they didn't try for local search either, and just acquired Zagat for their score (and brand name and loyal following, etc.). And many startups offer meaning above and beyond that combined in the data: through their experience, their ability to merge context from being subject matter experts, or just their flexibility to experiment without a spotlight on them. Google tends to stop short of any of these.
So, yes, it's no Hipmunk: it's a typically well done Google product taking hairy data, merging it up, and displaying it well. Doing more than that, however, is left to the rest of the world.
(Though, one wonders why ITA didn't do some of these things before when they first created this better way of looking at flights a few years ago...)
Now, if the metric is useless or synonymous with some of it's underlying drivers, then you are right, nothing there. I find the agony score to be more useful than any small combo of filters, but perhaps that's just me.
BTW, ITA released their "matrix" front end to the world (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) around a year or so after Orbitz and others licensed it. The clicks still took you to externals to complete the purchases, but new filters and capabilities were often tested on the live ITA site before 3rd parties took advantage of them. The problem I always felt was that they were just new filters: fast, live-response, rapid return filters on very large and nasty data, to be fair, but still just filters. I enjoyed sites that added additional context to the flight experience, few though they have been.
Again, thanks to both Google for organizing hairy data, and startups for doing more with the data. Glad both have room to play.
And rather than an endless stream of newsletters or FB posts with random destinations, we are actually taking readers on a single, realistic holiday with input from locals.
That's the focus so far. We launched less than 2 weeks ago, so we expect there to be evolution and change.
[Edit: Feel free to drop me an email if you want to shoot the breeze about what you're up to as well.]
(I'm from Brisbane)
Annoyances are inability to sort by flight length, search non-economy; or blacklist a certain airline.
I also found cheapest or next to cheapest flights on bing for some reason.
Hipmunk has a great interface & iPad app if you want to compare on flight "agony" and their hotels interface is very good.
But the speed and data quality is where they will win out. The faster the interface allows people to do what they want to do: many searches until an ideal candidate is found. Other sites appear slow and most of the information they bring back is useless (to the user) so speed is the name of the game.
Turns out Google is pretty good at that game. Just my thoughts.
Lesson learned: always read HN before doing actual work.
Imagine...
Benefit: saved $80 on a flight, once!
Cost: OMG, did I just spend 2 hours reading about people doing interesting things, instead of doing interesting things? Again?
was pleasantly surprised seeing "my flights", "my hotel reservations" etc ..
Kayak allows you to search for flights that are +- a few days around your desired dates, and shows you fares on a calendar. Indispensable when you're just exploring prices.
Choose Multi-city, and specify specific airport codes at the originating / terminating metro area. E.g., American 1017 ORD to DEN on 7 Jan and Frontier 534 DEN to MDW on 14 Jan for $211.