Get away with Google Flights
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
* Google's data seems to be not as fresh as Kayak or Hipmunk's is. There have been multiple times when I've tried to book a flight via GF only to be told that there were no seats left when I arrive on the airline's page. I suspect part of the greatly improved speed comes at the cost of aggressive caching that runs a risk of things being out of date.
* Google's data is all over the map on pricing. Very frequently the airline's price will be much cheaper than GF. And more than once (especially on United or American Airlines) I've noticed that if I book directly through an airline over a VPN, I save several hundred bucks versus if I click through from Google Flights or Kayak. Conversely, sometimes GF is less expensive and when I land on the airline's page it's more expensive.
I think the best thing to use it for is route discoverability: which kind of planes and which airlines fly to which locations, on which days at which times? It's also great for doing complex open-jaw routes or hidden-city fares -- and since those routes don't change very often, the data is more likely to be accurate.
It seems I've had the most changes in fare price or availability when identifying flights on United specifically, more so than any other airline, in my experience. That being said, it's still pretty infrequent given the volume of airfare we've booked through it for our people over the last 2 years or so.
Another thing I would add is that in connecting flight situations, it will occasionally present an itinerary that's technically possible to make, but not always entirely practical or ideal. (e.g. the window between flights is really narrow, not leaving much margin of error for flight delays, getting to another gate/terminal, etc., if not near the one you arrive at.)
All that being said, it really does work pretty great and we prefer using it to any of the other travel sites.
I would love to know why there are occasional fare discrepancies though... as far as I know google treats the click-through to the carriers' sites like an ad click, so I don't think Google is "marking it up," rather, the carriers are in some cases pricing based on the referer link or something. It can also be a demand pricing issue too, as the flight fills up, I suppose. My understanding is that Google is basically just the informational conduit between the user and the airline so it's weird that there are occasional price discrepancies.
Short answer re price discrepancies: it's complicated. It's absolutely in our interest and the airlines' interest to get pricing 100% right, and we do work really hard to eval and improve on this.
One situation that can happen is that an airline has, say, 3 seats remaining at one fare and 1 seat remaining at a cheaper fare; when you selected the flights or immediately before, that 1 seat was still available, but by the time you click through, it's not, so you get the pricing for the fare with 3 seats left.
One of the things that's amazed me in my flights education after joining the team is just how super-dynamic pricing is.
No, to my knowledge it's not based on your referrer or cookies or anything like that ;). I'm just talking -- person-independent -- pricing from hour to hour.
On a related note, I used to think that airline pricing was pretty capricious and random; now I realize that the airlines hire some of the smartest folks to develop pricing strategies, and nothing is left to chance ;).
Also, do you book on Tuesdays?
And no, don't bother trying to time your bookings. It's kinda like the stock market; trying to beat the market, er, optimize your flights purchase time is likely to lead to sorrow and regret. From the research our Google Flights team did recently, we found that if you wait a week, on average you're gonna pay more for the same flight.
And no, we didn't see any universal discount on Tuesdays, either ;)
I haven't experimented extensively with things, but usually setting my exit server to a random country on the other side of the planet (e.g. Malaysia) has yielded consistently good results.
And yes, I do tend to book on Tuesdays.
Booked all flights incorrectly :)
If you know exactly when and where to fly, Kayak is great. But with any uncertainty, Google Flights is better for exploring. Maybe you know when to fly, but not when you want to come back. Or maybe you don't even know where you want to fly, in which case you can get destination suggestions. It's also a lot snappier.
Now with this flight data they have, I'd imagine being able to just use Google Maps route search to go from A to B such that it would also include flights where applicable. While it kind of does, I am still able to think better routes myself. For example if I search from Tokushima, Japan -> San Francisco, USA, it suggests I should fly from Tokushima. Where actually it's a lot cheaper with almost no time difference to go by bus to Osaka first instead.
Although unlike Google Flights, it doesn't let you search for specific dates.
re searches... it's our hope that -- for most folks and most cases -- our filters + our tips will suffice. But if there are specific power features you're looking for, let us know via the Feedback option and I'll do what I can to bribe, er, win over my teammates :p
Delta flight on Google is $1293, $1840 on Kayak
Also, it's possible that flight is under KLM/AF instead of Delta on Kayak since Delta/KLM/AF are partners. And I see same flight listed under KLM for $1781.
Unless they already do this?
Not all companies have prices displayed on the site, but it links directly to the companies rather than paying additional fees through a third party.
For some of us, the constant deluge of info, along with work and family life, makes it tough to stay on top of all the latest developments. Glad this service was "re-announced".
I'd update your copyright footer, if only because at a glance it makes me wonder if it's unmaintained.
I've been wanting a more powerful hotel search site for many years, but I think most of the features I'd care to see are limited by the messy data available about the properties (amenities, etc.) and the margins just aren't there to support an aggregator curating their own data. Maybe not even for a reseller like Hotels.com.
I hope you're enjoying the service, and we'll see what we can do about getting out the word a bit better ;).
P.S. -- You'll be amused to know that -- seriously, just today -- I was telling a colleague about this cool thread on HN, and he said, "Wait... hackers? Wha... huh?" I guess he also has work and a family life :p
The interface on the other hand is amazing.
Why can't I query for
SELECT * FROM tickets WHERE sqrt((destination_latitude-desired_latitude)^2 - (destination_longitude-desired_longitude)^2) < 5000 AND abs(unix_timestamp(departure)-unix_timestamp('somedate'))<10*86400 ORDER BY (price+taxes+fees);
Furthermore often times changing the language and country of the website changes ticket prices; a well-designed, globally-consistent database should not allow this to happen.
I hope that Google will disrupt and reengineer this ancient system.
http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
Most companies don't want to take on this complexity, so they outsource it. The companies that provide this service, like ITA, tend to charge more money for more expensive queries, like multi-day searches, so most online search companies will only let you do the cheaper kinds of searches.
Expedia, Orbitz, etc make money via nag screens and upsells. They have no incentive to make the experience positive or easy. Google seems to.
I'm convinced that for every DNS related change at 1&1 - there is a guy that manually makes the change.
Google Domains also looks promising but I'm waiting for them to not be in beta lest they decide to scrap the product. Google would win me over if they offered free SSL certificates. In fact I think they should go ahead and disrupt the SSL industry by doing that too. Nobody should have to pay for a silly cryptographic signature. That would disrupt NS and all the others who try to upsell stuff.
Mozilla is doing this very soon: see https://letsencrypt.org/
StartSSL already offers free SSL certificates - and they haven't disrupted the industry. Even if Google started offering free SSL certificates - it's only a band-aid to the problem not a solution.
After uploading your documents 30 times, them claiming they didn't get them, you would too.
Oh, and uploading them each time was pretty painful.
Also they should fix their cache implementations. I've had countless times on the AA website where it says a ticket is available; then when I try to book it it says it's not available; then when I go back to the home page and search again the same fare shows up again. Seriously, where do their programmers come from ...
There are basically an unlimited number of world wide routes - a mind blowingly dizzying number of permutations to get from A to B.
Before you try to say "well travellers won't want routes with feature X" to cut down on the volume of data travellers want all sorts of contradictory things. Some a vastly price sensitive, some hate a particular airline, some love that same airline, some are time sensitive, some change those preferences depending on whether they are flying domestic or international, with or without kids.
Yes, but I don't think that's what most people desire to enumerate (or what the parent of your post had in mind). A simple enumeration of the flights available and their one-way prices would be a start. My understanding (from a link in another post) is that this would be ~(1 flight) * (average number of changes to a flight's data between birth and flight) updates per second, which I think is within reason.
My understanding is that airlines frustrate this by not pricing just individual flights, but giving odd discounts on round-trips and other odd combinations (such as A→B C→A) of flights, meaning you need more than just one-way prices. (There's also the fact that some airlines have like 5 or 6 different prices for a seat all on the same flight, depending on where in the plane the seat is.)
That's a feature. Nothing will cost the same if you buy it in Nairobi or in London, because price is a function of demand.
There are industries where profits are huge and disruption is badly needed. Airlines are not one of them, afaik; ever since low-cost became a thing, they've been under constant economic pressure and usually operate on razor-thin margins, at least in Europe. Mid-size companies have all but disappeared, even giants like British Airways and KLM have been permanently de-structured.
Flying is an expensive and risky business, piling up the pressure is likely to generate even more safety issues than we already have today. If you're all about price, just fly with RyanAir and be sure that nobody can ask you for less money than they do.
Oh the big consolidated IATA airlines are raking it in, don't worry about them
"On a per passenger basis, [IATA] airlines will make a net profit of $7.08 in 2015. That is up on the $6.02 earned in 2014 and more than double the $3.38 earnings per passenger achieved in 2013."
http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2014-12-10-01.aspx
Incidentally, Ryanair are frequently not the cheapest. They rely on people assuming that; sometimes IATA behemoths are actually cheaper.
In general I live by (0) anything that can be scripted and automated should be automated and (1) humans and machines are no different and the boundary between human and machine will blur in the future, so we might as well stop differentiating the two now, assume the customer is infinitely smart, and define all policies and business models using only initial state and final state of the customer rather than the process the customer went through to reach that state.
For example, my library books can be renewed online (or else one pays a fine). This can be automated. Thus, I write a script to abstract this problem out of my life. The library need only care when the loan out and when they get back, everything else about the system including whether it's a collection of silicon components or a collection of sodium-potassium-pump components that causes the state transitions at book renewals is none of their business. If I invented something that used germanium to cause a renewal (and biologists can't figure out whether to define it as living or nonliving, intelligent or nonintelligent), the library shouldn't care.
Similarly, it's none of the airline's business whether it's sodium-potassium, silicon, or germanium that transfers entropy about tickets; the initial and final states are the same. if I can gain information about airline tickets by manually querying 1000 times from different parameters, that process should be scripted and automated.
I'm a machine just like my computer, just a much slower one.
And that (from what I heard) if anything goes wrong you're fucked, because RyanAir flights tend to take as little reserve fuel as legally possible.
(I'm also both an oldtimer and newtimer to HN; long time lurker, and I opened an account ages ago, but sorry I've not been active here before!)
I'm joining the flights team this summer. Could I maybe talk to you a bit to get some perspective?
Feel free to email me: cardenbag@gmail.com
And I didn't mean it was a scam, more like a cool hack.
Presumably as a Google service, customer service isn't a priority anymore.
Boston-dublin in Oct is over $1300 on google flight with Aerlingus
Same flight directly on the airline's website is $940.
Good luck with that, Google.
I've always found them to be good.
Here's a ticket breakdown I got a few years ago for Austin to Budapest (British Airways found through Vayama):
1 Adult(s) $ 457.00
Taxes and Fees $ 769.33
Trip Insurance $ 67.45
Total $ 1,293.78 (USD)
Here is their terms of service:
https://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/terms-and-con...
They explicitly take ownership of the content, mention that the information is only for non-commercial use, exclude use of the information on their site for commercial use and additionally use for any other purpose. In case their message is not clear, they go even further and list a variety of prohibited activities.
The language of their Terms & Conditions is rather broad. It looks like virtually any activity on their website as a violation. Perhaps that is now the norm.
Until one of these sites includes all airlines, I'll remain relatively unimpressed with anything new that comes out.
BTW, I used their map to find the most suitable flight. I could change dates on the fly and see the prices change instantly. It's a great service.
Now if they could do the same for railways, I'd gladly pay for the convenience.
There is talk of Google getting into cell-phone service and the are already getting into Google fiber. I wish Google would use its pricing power and buy entire flights between major cities domestic and international (eg, NYC to Chicago, LA, SF, Miami, Atlanta, and London). Moreover, an airline can really make its profits on airline fuel speculation since this is the most volatile component of airline costs.
Because the airlines have their own army of geniuses working very hard to make sure that this is difficult to do:
http://www.cheapair.com/blog/travel-tips/air-fares-101-why-d...
Who are you? How much money do you have? How badly do you want these tickets? How often are you checking the price, what else have you bought? How are your buying habits compared to everyone else's? These are the questions the airlines are trying to answer in order to maximise how much money they can get off each individual.
It may well be that elite members get lower prices, as this may be the way for the airline to maximise their profit off you. Their algorithms are quite inscrutable, intentionally so.
Unsurprisingly, we're somewhere between the two. Most determined people can find flights that are at least close to being the cheapest.
What makes you say we can't? Isn't that exactly what this is?
1) When I go to the front page (https://www.google.com/flights/), everything from and including the 'return/one way/multi stop' row down is fixed-width at about 650px even when my window is far larger. This sort of fixes itself once I start selecting cities, but is randomly narrower than the auto-sizing search bar + other stuff above it. I'm on Win7 x64 / FF 36.0.
2) Please localise currencies. You auto-detect me in Brisbane, Australia. If I pick a flight to Sydney on AU carriers, I don't care about prices in USD. You either convert it to USD in the first place (or just assume 1AUD=1USD) but don't when you display it to me.
If you are flexible where you want to go, when, how much you can stay, etc... then you get really good suggestions.
I've worked around it by manually checking nearby routes, or getting a feel for options with open-ended reverse flights and then searching the reverse again.
BS. Non-business flights are the most price-sensitive type of product there could possibly be.
Near 100% of people only apply a few very basic filters, e.g. no 12-hour layovers, doesn't depart at 5am, and then choose the cheapest. It's not some sophisticated "balance" that needs some advanced machine learning or personalization to accomplish. It's a few obvious filters that are the same for practically everyone.
I'd love to see partial dependance plots for each of the obvious filtering factors, vs how often people chose that flight. That's the best way to do this type of analysis.
Not to mention that many times the cheapest flight listed on these travel sites isn't actually available when you try to book it. Wonder how that may have skewed Google's analysis.
Price, certainly, is still a huge factor in folks' decision, but convenience plays a very significant role. And, from anecdotal evidence (not part of the same research), brand loyalty is definitely a factor as well (a very price sensitive travel blogger I know still prefers to fly on American, for instance).
On the one hand, it works really well.
On the other, are Google aiming to take over every aggregation service out there?
Something about the dominant search engine moving into this space just doesn't sit right with me.
The difference is, if I type WAW to LHR into Google, I get flight listings with prices and availability.
You're right that Bing, Yahoo etc. have their own separate travel sites, I've yet to see similar results in their search results.
Yes, and I think that's a Good Thing. Google rightly knows that when I type "WAW to LHR", I want to know about the flight, not about where to find out about that flight.
"Flights with Google? Get Away!"
For example, kayak does a great job of displaying all the options on the left column. Google is hiding everything in drop downs. So then they need to have a blog post to explain how their UI works where kayaks is just intuitive.
The same with bar chart pricing (which I like) why hide it behind a silly icon like that. Now they have to educate their users what that icon means. Call it "best days to fly" or even better show that at the bottom of the page.
Kayak (and others) do a good job of streaming search results, but you still have to wait seconds before you're able to make decisions.