Thanks for this series Tom, you guys are trying to succeed in a really challenging technical sector (Travel) and I, for one, really appreciate your honesty. I think that some of the confusion & criticisms I see in other comments are that after reading your pieces we all rush off to try adioso and some observations predominate:

# The ui is quirky on different screen sizes # The calls to Expedia are SLOW # The natural language search is perhaps only one search interface and not necessarily the best # The core bit you guys have worked on 'wingtip' is sort of lost in this version of Adioso because of trying to increase coverage # You could have utilised existing api's like ITA's QPX, Everbread's Haystack, Amadeus, even Skyscanner's api and increased coverage whilst being much faster. # The example link at the end that presumably is the answer to the question "For the first time, we’re seeing signs that the flight data we need is becoming available, in the right format" is totally misleading. Vayant are an ITA competitor not a raw data provider. They have managed to achieve in their price cacheing tech what you have only achieved for lots of low cost carriers. # And this last point is my biggest confusion about Adioso and what I think is your internal confusion. Are you a tech platform for flight data or a consumer facing flight website. Because Kayak, Hipmunk (and previously Orbitz erc) are B2C consumer sites that get data from ITA, Amadeus etc. Vayant, ITA etc are B2B data platforms - tech companies. Only skyscanner truly is both I think. They are a B2C site that last year enabled the selling of over £2 Billion worth of tickets but which is powered by its own 'Graphite' Graph and price cacheing databases.

The embarrassment I feel for you is when you say that you are making a travel site 'even when it's impossible'. I cringe for you! You haven't built a site even as good as Skyscanner's and you're saying pretentious statements like that? I know startups are hard and this is for a book so poetic license is to be expected.

I say ditch the BS and get back to reality. You could attach your natural language interface to someone else's api (like Vayant's) and have a better B2C product or keep improving 'wingtip' but this all seems like a confused desperate fudge.

Incidentally, when are you going to talk in detail about 'Wingtip' it's the bit that most interests me. It IS Adioso. I really do wish you guys every success though. What you are doing is needed but ditch the slow ass Expedia api.