Where Flight Search Engines Fail | Hacker News Reader

Where Flight Search Engines Fail

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27 pointsflystein13 comments

Each flight search engine optimize for something slightly different so it is important to know what that is to help you get what you're looking for.

My personal favorite flight search is Kayak's Explore map [1] which simply shows all of the possible destinations and the best prices to each. The itineraries it comes up with are of varying lengths and for various times of years, but there are some pretty incredible deals you'd never find by searching random dates.

I recently found a $38 ticket round trip SFO to Chicago and there are routinely sub $400 tickets LAX to various airports around Scandinavia. The best deal I've ever seen was $354 RT LAX to Tel Aviv.

[1] http://www.kayak.com/explore/

Kayak explore tool is great. There have been numerous startups trying to build the same, but to make it useful one needs to have a lot of data. Kayak has arguably more data than any other metasearch engine.

Map is definitely useful and for an opportunistic traveller is a great tool. Flystein is not trying to compete with it. Where it is good though is a constrained trip, with fixed dates and requirements, or a complex trip. Map like this would not show a multi city trip.

The problem with Explorer is that it is showing lowest prices which somebody found some hours or even days ago, and most of these cached prices are gone when you are trying to validate them but sometimes you could get lucky ;)

It is like a multiplied problem of metasearch stale/cached prices, also some OTAs seems to show stale prices on purpose to play the bait and switch game...

Yeah, I've noticed the caching problem a few times, though all of the prices I listed were actual prices I sent friends who purchased or I validated by following the process to the actual fare page. Though sometimes the really cheap fares are with budget airlines who upsell for carry-on and checked baggage lifting the price.

There were a few too good to be true Air Canada prices (sub $400 to India) I saw a few weeks ago, but those didn't exist once checked.

I've been able to convince friends to purchase tickets who would otherwise not have traveled by posting the fare to Facebook. Chicago seems to be a popular one my friends want to go, and they end up being convinced when they see a sub $100 RT ticket from California.

Sounds exactly the same as FlightFox

Yeah, I didn't realize until I tried it that it is going to people rather than an algorithm.

I tried FlightFox twice, and both times the CEO Lauren (who is fantastic at customer service) refunded my fee because I was able to find better flights cheaper than the 'experts'.

I just don't see how any of this works as a real business model, but something must be working because FlightFox is still at it years later.

Almost exactly but not as good. FlightFox doesn't make you link to the ceiling price, so you can pick a price you don't want to go over and then you don't pay if they can't help you. While Flystein makes you prove your price with a link, which isn't all that easy considering that many rates can't be deeplinked.

At Flystein we ask a link OR a screenshot in case of Beat My Price so there is no problem here. Also you could just specify some realistic budget in the text description with Build My Trip option and you are very welcome to try our services :) Cheers!

Combining competing airlines' flights is rarely done, but is actually not as impossible to do programmatically as the article suggests. This is exactly what we do at https://skypicker.com and it really works wonders — we are regularly seeing combinations that are 90% cheaper than alternatives on other sites.

Skypicker looks like a promising tool. At Flystein we use multiple internal and 3d party tools as there is no silver bullet which covers everything, plus there is nothing so far which could completely replace a human brain and common sense :)

Very interesting and very promising. The stress and anxiety that accompanies flight ticket search, if price is a big factor, is usually so high, that I often wish I could pay a small fee to somebody reliable online who I could trust to get me the cheapest ticket that fits the combination of my parameters, and spend that time and stress on more important things.

upboat

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