from Hacker News

You're Invited to Test My Flight Booking Engine

by kxter on 4/19/19, 3:25 PM with 15 comments

• by moftz on 4/19/19, 6:04 PM

  What would your application offer that Google Flights can't do? I have a pretty good experience using Google for researching and either booking or being linked to a booking site. I can bypass Priceline (and it's child companies) and get linked directly to the airline I need. Only times I have a bad experience is when the price on Google Flights doesn't match the actual price that the airline shows on their site but this is rare.

  Not seeing Southwest flights is a downside but everyone is at this disadvantage from what I can tell. It's not a huge deal; if Southwest doesn't fly directly between the two cities, you are better off finding another airline.

  Something I do want to see is something that combines Google Flights results and tools (flexible airports and dates) along with Skiplag's results. Google has a nice interface and great tools but Skiplag has that extra intelligence that helps you with one-way tickets.

  I recently booked some flights to Europe to meet up with friends. I didn't want to fly their itinerary since it had gone up in price by a lot so I used Google Flights to find other European cities I could fly to and then fly from to meet up with my friends. My dates were flexible and both my origin and destination were flexible. I just needed to get to Europe as cheap as possible (getting around Europe is relatively cheap) and be in the right city on a certain day. One feature that would be good to have is a way to create a larger itinerary that involves round-trip tickets. Google Flights does all one-way tickets when you try to do a multi-city trip.

  One interesting thing to have would be some sort of metric on how well the airline is performing. I originally booked a flight to Brussels on Wow Airlines. Imagine my surprise when they went out of business a week later and weren't offering refunds to Americans. Being able to see a small red flag that says "Hey, this airline is going bankrupt" would be pretty handy.

• by metanoia on 4/20/19, 6:15 PM

  The distribution problem has been solved for many years - travel agents were disrupted in the first wave of the web. Hipmunk tried to create a friendlier UX than what Kayak, Expedia, et. al were trying to provide, but it wasn't a step change.

  I think RouteHappy was the last travel startup that caught my attention. In fact, I was thinking of doing the same thing, but they beat me to it :) They brought visibility to data about the flights such as seat width, pitch, inflight entertainment/connectivity, inflight power, etc. that had been hiding in other places (SeatGuru, various travel review and business travel interest sites such as TPG).

  But, they were acquired, which meant that they were more a feature than an independent distribution channel.

  I'd love to see what this person is doing but as a viable business, based on current travel-agency-commission business models, I can't imagine anything that couldn't be copied by the big travel companies in an instant.

  We need new business models here, or at least a strong incentive to go back to fee-for-service travel agents...

• by metanoia on 4/19/19, 7:44 PM

  Out of interest: What's your data source for this? The GDSs have most things locked down unless you are a huge customer, and Google/ITA seems super expensive.

• by throw03172019 on 4/19/19, 3:47 PM

  What is a garbage flight?

• by quickthrower2 on 4/20/19, 3:00 AM

  "I can sell a rock on a Palo Alto street corner for $5,000". ...yeah maybe I could but I'm not a drug dealer.

• by deepwell on 4/19/19, 6:12 PM

  Why is AI needed to weed out "garbage flights"?

• by toomuchtodo on 4/19/19, 6:01 PM

  How does this compare to Hipmunk?

• by 70122-_6 on 4/19/19, 4:04 PM

  Thank-you Mr Thomas Mhk.