Ask HN: What is broken in the online travel industry? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is broken in the online travel industry?

8 pointsc1sc012 comments

Yesterday I was trying to book a flight. It was an absolutely horrible user experience. Broken redirects from flight aggregators. Changing prices. A booking that failed mid-way but still billed me. Am I the only one who thinks the travel industry is broken? What can a startup improve in this field?

View on HN

A site that analyses flight price fluctuations would be awsome. Currently all the online travel sites work on the assumption that your days are fixed and gives you the prices around that date. A site that would tell me the cheapest time of the year to visit Paris from London would be a lot more useful.

Slightly tangential, how do you access flight price data? Is there a company providing the feeds? How much does it cost?

Sabre and Galileo are the companies I can think of off the top of my head. I don't remember the pricing.

The pricing is completely unreasonable. I looked at it a while ago, don't remember the exact figures, but they are based on a very weird system of contracts that severely limits access to this market.

There used to be EasySABRE (unrelated to cowboys easyJet) which gave you nearly direct access to SABRE data, but it's long since defunct - I think Expedia bought it.

I believe farecast did something like this. They were bought by Microsoft.

Thanks for that. I checked them on bing, the UI does not do their product justice. It look like yet another cluttered travel web site.

Another thought, how hard is it for a travel website that I use frequently to infer that I am from London. I booked lots of fligts in and out from this city. Why not make it my default location after while? Cookies and data mining anyone?

That's a good point. It shouldn't be hard for them to do that.

A lot of the big price comparision sites just use screenscraping to avoid the contractual obligations data feeds have.

A non-america centric farecast would be good too

The best site I have ever found for planning air travel is this: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/prego

I have been using them since before the web (seriously, you could telnet to their system on a vt100).

Unfortunately you can't actually buy a ticket from them! But it will spit out the gobbledygook that a travel agent can use to book exactly that fare, or once you have the specific flights you want to be on you can go through the pain of trying to get the flights on a commercial site.

Of the commercial sites, I prefer orbitz as the least sucky of the lot.

With who?

I must've been using Travelocity and Expedia for 10 years now (and easySABRE while it still existed) and I have to say this industry was notable for being ahead of the curve for high-value transactions on the Internet.

I used Kayak & Opodo. The problems I experienced were mostly due to how they connect/redirect to each airline's booking system. I was pining for the days when I could call my travel agent and have an actual human take care of my travel arrangements. Something like justbookmeabloodyflight.com: you give them your CC info & a specific travel request. They then book it for you and ONLY contact you if there is a problem.

They still exist - if I want to speak to a human travel agent I call Amex.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com