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Comment by eduardordm | Hacker News Reader

My mother owned a travel agency, my father a pilot. I was an airline pilot too. We learned how to use various reservations systems that the author seems to just ignore existence.

Amadeus and Sabre pretty much offer all those functionalities and much more than that. I can do that exact search Dustin wanted on Amadeus with 2 lines on a terminal.

All those websites building frontends to Amadeus and Sabre really should stop stating they are doing something different from what already exists. Just because expedia is an awful website it doesn't mean there is something magical or impossible behind what you did.

I hope you guys are not just an Amadeus/Sabre/ITA wrapper, because if you are, you are not profitable.

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Ah a GDS romantic. GDS systems suck at search. Tell me? Why can't you even do these type of searches on the Amadeus flight search page? http://www.amadeus.net Maybe you would be kind enough to do a search from somewhere to 'anywhere' or 'Europe' from 'any date' to 'any date' on sabre and post the video. Bet you can't. Great flight search only happened when ITA liberated search from the GDS dinosaurs.

ITA is even more expensive than those 'dinosaurs' and offer pretty much the same functionality.

You missed my point (on purpose, but anyway...), which is profitability. As I commented before most airlines are not even offering incentives to those travel websites anymore. In fact, some companies are CHARGING websites to make automated reservations into their systems.

Yep, so every decision we've made about how we go about building this product has factored in profitability, and aligning consumer incentives with supplier incentives.

I tried Amadeus.net's search, and adioso was better. It lets me search flights to a country instead of max. 4 airports, and it's a lot easier and simpler to use on the whole.

They offer systems to 3rd parties, they are not an actual travel company, that's probably why their website is so bad. In an 'API' level, all those system are somewhat similar.

My point is that those websites are just wrappers to ITA/Amadeus/Sabre and that is inherently unprofitable. Companies like Qatar Airlines are offering ZERO incentives to those kind of websites.

Rubbish! ITA's matrix site is probably the best air search site there is and is just a demo of their api. Yes ITA is expensive but you are paying for search, they don't do booking. But the search is awesome because unlike the collective GDS, they are purely a search company. Whereas GDS are reservation systems and they make their money via fees paid to the GDS by the airlines. Search as an api business is a secondary concern/revenue stream to them.

And why are they inherently unprofitable?Sites like Kayak, Skyscanner, Adioso are meta search sites only that make money by sending the user to another site to make a booking. They then make a small affiliate commission if the user then books their flight. Airlines actually really like good meta search sites because they acquire customers cheaply and avoid GDS fees altogether so are more likely to pay commission including your example of Qatar Airlines who pay 2% per booked flight to affiliates see http://www.qatarairways.com/ae/en/affiliates.page and not ZERO as you say. So they have zero need for the GDS unless an airline has no direct connect api in which case the GDS is that api source usually for availability (if you have implemented the schedules and fares locally) if not then a dumb search to the GDS is possible but a crap, slow, expensive way to include an airline in your site and no use to Adioso who need fast local graphed, cached data for expansive NLP searches.

Incentives and affiliation are not the same thing.

An affiliate is an incentivised partner but I guess you are talking about how airlines pay travel agents online or offline. However, Adioso are not an online travel agent.

What would you suggest instead? Integrating with airlines directly?

I think the issue is that ITA, Skyscanner et al who built their own tech freed themselves from slow old GDS platforms (which were ancient mainframes and designed for travel agents). They consume the schedules, the fare rules and then they will use 'direct connect' XML or JSON feeds directly from the airlines (if they are available, not all airlines do them), then a GDS, and sometimes they will have to scrape a website where a LCC doesn't use GDS or give a metasearch site api access to a) regularly check fares for a given flight, time & date and b) to do a 'live' search e.g on skyscanner, it will often say 'price was checked 30 mins ago' (which is the cached and stored in the db price) and then when you select it and a modal popups up it does an ajax call to check if that price is still live. But to more simply answer your question - many airlines love 'direct connect' as it bypassed the GDS who, remember, they pay fees to and have had them over a barrel for decades. And metasearch sites prefer it to. It's a direct relationship. It is a really complicated industry and I often read gross over-simplifications of x site versus y site.

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