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Comment by lucaspiller | Hacker News Reader

> when I search for flights, I find that I am looking for something very specific. I know cites and dates, direct flights only

I'm pretty much the same if I'm going on holiday - I usually chose an exact city well before looking for flights rather than a country or an area.

If I'm flying back to my parents though, it's a bit different. There are a number of airports around them:

- one has flights daily but requires a 3 hour train journey

- another has flights twice a week and is a 1 hour drive

- another has flights daily, is a 1 hour drive, but is usually more than twice the price of the others

- another has flights daily, is a 2 hour drive, and the price varies

For this I usually just open SkyScanner (Adioso doesn't seem to have many low cost airlines in Europe) in 10 tabs or so and compare the results myself...

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That might be the case for you both, but I certainly have a use case for this style of searching. I often want to go on a break over a set weekend/week with no set destination in mind, and very flexible with dates. This type of things is perfect for when your not explicitly looking for a specific date range or flight path.. more just experimenting with options.

Hats off to you guys, like the semantic query style rather than the traditional mould!

Absolutely agree that there is a use case for the open-ended search- it's powerful, cool, and not yet addressed by anyone. My point is that the "traditional" search also has it's strengths, especially when the trip is not going to be open-ended: travelling to a wedding or graduation, travelling for business, travelling with a group of friends where the schedule and destination is agreed upon.

In fact, thinking about it more, I strongly suspect that personality (in a Myers-Briggs J/P way) has a lot to do with how we prefer to travel. Some people plan everything out ahead of time down to the hour, some people close their eyes and spin the globe.

I think the other factor is how often you fly. If you don't travel/vacation very often, you are more likely to be travelling for a specific reason where dates and destination is known. If you travel very often, you will probably have more opportunities to pick a random place to go for the weekend.

For this sort of search, give Rome2rio a go. It offers door-to-door search across all modes of transport http://www.rome2rio.com

(I'm the co-founder)

That seems a bit of a bold claim, but I tried it and yup it does seem to work :) It isn't particularly useful for the scenario I described above as I already know how to get there, I just want to know the cheapest price, but I'll definitely remember it if I'm going somewhere new!

It does however suggest I walk across water to start with (there is a bus stop further distance wise that doesn't involve this that I usually take): http://i.imgur.com/FxhVhxj.png

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