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I tried to start a travel company once. It didn't even get started at all because it I begin to plan the first week of Sept, 2001. Sometimes bad timing is as bad as a bad economy. In retrospect what I was wanting to do was impossible anyway; building a search engine for vacations using raw airfare/hotels/cars data + geographical info (I had experience with reservation tech and high volume search). Oh well, I never tried again.

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I don't understand, aren't there many successful travel search engines doing something quite similar to that?

Why impossible?

I think it was close to impossible at the time for a start up. Not today, but a crazy amount has changed in 20 years. Access to this kind of data has really opened up.

I remember how expensive a lot of this stuff was back then too. Access to an API for fairly trivial data could have a meaningful cost to a business back then. Tying all of this together, especially with useful geographical data, would probably have been very expensive.

Yes the data was not really there, I knew how enough to build the search part, but without sufficient raw data (i.e. not scraped or just via API without being able to search it directly) it would not have been possible. But that was a long time ago now. Oh well it was only a week...

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