Comment by Ricapar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ricapar | Hacker News Reader

This is what I want when I'm looking to plan a trip. Notice I said "trip", not flight. Usually I don't care about my method of travel, I just want to get from A to B to C in an efficient and affordable manner.

I live in Central NJ. Nearby me are several Amtrak and NJ Transit stations and three major airports (EWR, JFK, and LGA). I have a car that can take me to any of those places. I also have friedns that could drop me off at any of those places as well. Plenty of options to depart from.

Let's say I want to visit some family in Florida. My final destination is also abundant in transportation options. For Florida, I can land in Miami (MIA) or Ft. Lauderdale (FLL) and be picked up in either one.

I usually end up fiddling around in Excel, planning out time and costs for many different ways to get from A to B..

   EWR -> MIA
   EWR -> FLL
   JFK -> MIA
   FJK -> FLL
   ... etc ..

And to throw another wrench in the plan: dates. I could be planning a trip a few months in advance (in hope that tickets are cheaper). Some sites really struggle with the concept of having flexible travel dates. I want to be able to say:

    "I want to leave from the general $HomeArea,
    go to $FinalDestination, +/- $x days of $date1,
    and come back +/- $y days of $date2."

I shouldn't be building my own OLAP cubes in Excel to not get screwed over on rates.

But I've grown enough despise towards the travel industry that I'll happily spend a few hours to make sure that I'm not paying them a penny more than I have to.

Have you tried ITA Matrix[1], now owned by Google? It's very powerful, especially compared to the standard travel sites. A good intro can be found at http://www.50by25.com/2013/05/travel-tip-how-to-use-ita-matr....

[1] http://matrix.itasoftware.com/

ITA Matrix is awesome; sad thing it doesn't seem to have data on cheap airlines that operate in Europe (Ryanair, Easyjet, WizzAir, et al.), as they tend to be used here most frequently.

  I usually end up fiddling around in Excel, planning out time and costs for many different ways to get from A to B..
    EWR -> MIA
    EWR -> FLL
    JFK -> MIA
    FJK -> FLL
   ... etc ..

What are you talking about? Every major travel website has an option along the lines of 'New York City - All airports', which includes JFK, LGA, EWR

Flexible dates are a nice thing to have but I wonder how much they would actually be used? I cannot think of a time where I was booking a flight for business and not only were the departure and return dates non-optional but I was looking for pretty specific times as well (i.e. within a few hours time range).

Even when traveling for pleasure I generally want specific dates so as to maximize my time at my destination.

The problem is that each person has different needs and it's difficult to make a site that is usable for most of them - that's why so many 'niche' sites exist.

For example I used to fly a lot and most of the time I did not care about exact dates at all. I guess that scenarios like 'I live in Spain now and I want to visit my parents in the Czech Republic some time in June' or 'I want to spend some weekend in Paris' are pretty common.

Sometimes I don't even care about destination that much - I want to travel somewhere in south of Europe to take a couple of days off - all I care about is the price. Date-of-flight-centric sites are really difficult to use for me. Only recently I discovered http://skypicker.com (I'm not affiliated wit them) that does what I want - I want to fly to Spain some time in August - here are cheapest flights.

Skyscanner and Momondo offer that to some extent. You can choose departure/comeback time as "whole month" and airports as sth like "London (all)". But you can't select say two different outbound airports from different cities.

NYC works for most sites. I wish there was an SF equivalent. I usually don't care SFO/OAK/SJC and have to do what you do, although I just keep it in my head.

"QSF" works for the SF area on Hipmunk.

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