Hacker News Reader

Comment by beatpanda | Hacker News Reader

This is great — SkyScanner (which I almost never hear about, even though it's fantastic) has similar functionality, but definitely not the ability to search for "somewhere warm". I like that.

But what's up with travel startups not allowing remote workers? I'm looking for work right now, including at a travel startup, and that's just baffling to me.

Some of them offer an enhanced vacation "perk", but that sort of misses the point — I (and probably a lot of people who are passionate about travel) am more put off by having to be in the same place 48-52 weeks out of the year than I would be having to carry a laptop to wheverer it is I feel like being in the world.

View on HN

Half of our team members work remotely from home, in other parts of the world from our main base in Melbourne.

And we encourage our team members to travel as much as possible, working remotely from anywhere in the world.

Very cool! Your jobs page made me think otherwise:

"You're interested in travel (and have ideally done a lot of it) but you're also adventurous enough to pack your bags and join us in San Francisco or Melbourne, Australia. (We'll be happy with a remote working arrangement initially, but we're after people with a willingness to relocate eventually if things work out.)" (emphasis mine)

But in that case you'll be hearing from me shortly :)

A feature I miss with Skyscanner is to search for flights leaving say in the evening (e.g. Wednesday after work), and returning in the afternoon (e.g. Sunday afternoon). I normally have to search for the days I want (Wednesday to Sunday) and then use the sliders to get flights for the time of day that I want. However, this really throws off the part where they sort destination by price, since the time of day I want to depart seriously affects the price.

Very cool, could definitely use something like this! Has always bothered me that travel sites always want to know things in such absolute terms, when most people are searching speculatively before they know anything about specific dates etc.

Another feature from skyscanner that I'd love to see: being able to set "from" as any airport in the country. For example, the UK is small enough that traveling to any airport is completely feasible. So I don't really care where I'm flying from (though it's advantageous if it's close to me), I just want the best price/distance ratio.

This is super cool, Tom! Good luck :)

Very impressive indeed... one point to consider though - a perfectly reasonable follow up query to "somewhere warm" is a query like "somewhere warm in the usa".. this doesn't quite seem to be in place yet with the result redirecting to "somewhere warm"

I often hear about skyscanner in threads like this (about flights).

ITA Matrix is pretty good too. http://matrix.itasoftware.com/

Plus, if you know your way around fare codes (http://www.farecompare.com/products/fare-display/index.html) you can find dates with Matrix where these "cheap, special" fares are available, using the advanced options.

Any chance you could explain this further? I would love to hear some tricks finding the best prices.

It's also very like a travel site we built a few years ago

"I want a cozy family hotel in chicago for three days in march over a weekend, flying from london"

Users just typed in "chicago". We nixed the natural language stuff after a few months.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com