Where can I fly for how much?

http://www.kayak.com/explore/?airport=YYC#/YYC?a=any&d=any&fb=200,2730&l=any&ll=0.175781,-0.175781&ns=n&s=0&t=0,100&z=3

by sublemonic • 16 years ago

668 106 16 years ago

bryanh2• 16 years ago

Wow, talk about impressive. Just curious about the tech behind this. Do they just cache a bunch of average prices together between major airports and just set a max limit? Surely it can't do fully comprehensive search at the speed it runs at.

buss• 16 years ago

That's my guess.

hugh38• 16 years ago

That would also explain why it only lets you set a month, and not a day.

borism5• 16 years ago

judging from other Kayak tools I've seen they cache searches by actual users.

plus they might have robots crawling popular searches at different dates.

so it benefits to be around very large hubs like NYC, but if you're out in the country you may not be so lucky.

jojopotato2• 16 years ago

They're definitely showing you historical prices from their cache. Kayak gets such a huge volume of traffic that they can use the lowest price on that route seen in the last 24 hours and have pretty good coverage/accuracy.

Personally, this thread is eye opening because I work on a similar product. I saw this when it came out (a couple weeks ago maybe). My first impression wasn't that it was particularly impressive, but apparently I just don't know what's cool for users in a travel product =P

nooneelse3• 16 years ago

The novice sometimes has "the potential" fogging their view of reality. While for the expert, sometimes the shadow from what-is-lacking mountain covers both.

tomhoward2• 16 years ago

Their database only contains cached results from previous searches. Kayak doesn't store the entire population of flights themselves - they forward users' queries onto a 3rd party flight inventory provider (ITA Software), then cache the results to power services like these.

This means that results are likely to be current and complete on popular routes, but far less so on the long tail.

jojopotato2• 16 years ago

If I had to guess, they probably cache as aggressively as their contract with ITA allows because Kayak gets charged per search by ITA.

*edit: From the two ITA contract that I know/have heard about anyways.

martythemaniak• 16 years ago

OMG, I've been waiting for someone to build something like this forever.

I've always hated the fact that all major travel sites work based on the assumption that you already know exactly when and where you're going, rather than at least giving you the option to explore your options.

qeorge• 16 years ago

Me too! www.voyij.com is the closest I've seen. Really glad one of the bigger sites started doing this too.

noodle4• 16 years ago

so, i built something almost exactly like this for myself to use, except it doesn't display itself on a google map. instead, it cross-references itself with a database of people.

i use it when i'm hiring sports officials, to find the ones that would be the cheapest to fly in. never really considered how useful it would be for others.

i feel dumb as hell, looking at this and seeing what i could've done :*-(

_pius• 16 years ago

don't feel dumb, just put it up, add user accounts/Facebook, and make it a group travel planning tool. I could've used something like that while helping plan a bachelor's party.

madmaze2• 16 years ago

Yea but dont rely on the data that is displayed, i just checked out 5 flights and the flights listed there were not even close to what i found on the website itself.

But otherwise definitely damn cool

borism5• 16 years ago

that's because they show the cheapest round-trip someone else has found previously

borism5• 16 years ago

my problem is, I know my travel dates (mid-August) and I know my budget, but still not sure where to go. Unfortunately Kayak searches (including this very cool hack) are useless at solving that.

P.S. ITA Software Matrix is good at this if you have a list of places, but not for random destinations.

bbatsell• 16 years ago

What am I missing, why is this useless? You can specify your budget as the max price, and the "Thinking about" to August 2010. Granted, you can't specify "mid-August", but within a single month, usually airfares only change based on the days of the week of both segments.

sjones• 16 years ago

Well, here's the countries you can fly to from the US in august:

http://www.skyscanner.net/flights-from/us/august-2010/august...

smaher• 16 years ago

Another good site that does something similar is skyscanner.com

For example, here are all of the flights from SFO: http://www.skyscanner.com/flights-from/sfo/cheapest-flights-...

dagw4• 16 years ago

Thank you. I didn't know about that site, and it's exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for. Perfect for planning my next holiday.

bkrausz• 16 years ago

The problem you have is that flight data is incredibly fast-changing and computationally expensive to get. So in order to get enough data for this you need to do a lot of long queries very often. Companies that provide pricing information (like ITA, who Kayak uses) charge a lot for these resources, so it's not like the usual internet where your incremental cost per user or search is minimal: there's a real cost here. The entire architecture was build on one-off "price from X to Y on this day", building a layer of generality to that is fairly difficult.

Full disclosure: I used to work at TripAdvisor on flights.

kiwidrew• 16 years ago

Yep, that's exactly right. Every metasearch site out there uses essentially the same interface: given an origin, destination, departure date, and arrival date, return a list of itineraries in order of increasing price.

Needless to say, the number of combinations of these variables precludes doing any kind of exhaustive search (especially since you're being charged per query). And availability is constantly changing, so your results are potentially out-of-date the instant you receive them.

Given these restrictions, the only way to support such broad-ranging queries as "where can I go for less than $1000?" is to cache results from previous searches and attempt to guess at the answer. Which is why, when you start narrowing down date ranges and choosing more obscure airports, the results quickly become so sparse as to be useless.

dagw4• 16 years ago

Yea, I was actually seriously looking into the idea of starting a travel site like that a couple of years ago. But it all basically fell apart once I realized how much it would cost to get the necessary data I'd need.

mcav• 16 years ago

Cool. Couple thoughts:

- Are prices one-way or round trip? It's not obvious to me.

- I tried to type a zip code at first, before realizing that it would only work with the City name.

hugh38• 16 years ago

Based on what the prices look like I'm fairly sure it'd have to be return (or else it's doing a lousy job of finding the best available fares).

thrdOriginal• 16 years ago

Yup, they don't do a very good job of making it obvious, but clicking on "check latest air fare" confirms these are round-trip prices (other than that, this is really cool).

hugh38• 16 years ago

Now that's just plain neat. And useful, since I'm currently considering where to go on summer holidays.

I do notice that it doesn't add extra destinations as you zoom in, though. For instance I can zoom in on Colorado as much as I like and it won't tell me that I can fly to Denver (even though there's probably twenty flights a day). Nor will it give me a price for Paris, but Nadi, Chennai and Oaxaca are much higher priorities.

krschultz• 16 years ago

That depends on your starting location, from Newark it shows Denver just fine.

lftl• 16 years ago

Yeah... it also changes the destinations based on which timeframe you choose up top. I'm willing to bet that Kayak is for the most part simply caching the results that other people have recently searched for on the site and showing those when available.

run4yourlives2• 16 years ago

Neat concept, but where is the data coming from? There is no way that the cheapest flight from Vancouver to Toronto is $460.

Maybe half that.

hugh38• 16 years ago

One way or return?

run4yourlives2• 16 years ago

doh... didn't dawn on me that this could be return... too many airline websites!

jallmann• 16 years ago

Nice. You can fly from orange county (CA) to long beach for $270. Or you could drive up there for 10 bucks of gas in 25 minutes.

hugh38• 16 years ago

I checked and couldn't find any direct flights. The cheapest way I could find from SNA to LGB had a one-hour stopover in Phoenix.

Probably not a popular route.

GFischer• 16 years ago

It's still not perfect - it shows Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Montevideo, Uruguay for a meager U$ 600, while Montevideo to Buenos Aires correctly shows U$ 110 (a more reasonable average price).

But I concur that it's very cool.

travisp• 16 years ago

This is great and I've been looking for something like this for a long time.

The only thing it needs now is to allow you to better refine the time period (e.g. only weekend trips, or only two weeks in October, etc). As it is now, it's great for people with a month or more off of vacation, but doesn't quite do it for the rest of us yet.

hugh38• 16 years ago

Well, it gives a rough order of magnitude, and might encourage people to consider destinations that they would have thought were too expensive. As in "Gee, I was going to go to Salt Lake City, but it turns out I can get to Lima for the same price..."

AaronM• 16 years ago

I like it, but one thing I noticed if if you select a starting date, it doesnt automatically set the return date to the next day. So if you select a date some time in the future you have to scroll twice

ig12• 16 years ago

It's a neat tool (if you're in the UK check out the similar "I'll fly anywhere" option at http://flightchecker.moneysavingexpert.com/) but the problem with it is that for most people the cost of the flight is going to be less than the cost of the hotel.

So if you're after a cheap holiday it's much more important to fly somewhere where you can get a cheap hotel than to get a cheap flight. Hopefully they'll add hotels to the calculation in the future.

hugh38• 16 years ago

If you're travelling in a pair, and you're staying for a reasonable length of time (say, a week) then the hotel cost shouldn't dominate. 7 nights * $100 a night / 2 people is only $350 -- less than the airfare to most places.

Besides, saving money on a hotel is mostly a matter of deciding how awful a place you're willing to put up with. You don't get that option with airfares.

ig12• 16 years ago

Hmm maybe it's just a European thing, you can typically fly most places in Europe/North Africa for for a couple of hundred dollars. Getting to the US isn't much more. Hotels on the other hand tend to be more expensive + hotel tax can be pricey.

And you do actually get the awful trade-off with planes in Europe as well, you get budget airlines like Ryan Air which many people don't travel on because they're so bad.

drivebyacct• 16 years ago

Hhmmm, is there an option for round trips?

resdirector2• 16 years ago

Good question. I think the prices are all return.

nooneelse3• 16 years ago

For more visual intuitiveness, perhaps some isolines or a 3d, height based on price kind of thing? Probably just flashiness for no end though. But, using different colors for the labels along the price axis probably wouldn't be.

Seems to be &-ing the checkboxes, which is a bit odd for the languages.

orblivion• 16 years ago

Isolines I'm not sure, the market does weird things with pricing, something further away may end up being cheaper.

nooneelse3• 16 years ago

Yeah, it would look very much like messy islands/mountains, probably lots of extra lines for little helpful effect. That is why the height map occurred to me. But, like I said, that might be getting too close to flashy, spinning-whizzbang infographic land.

Rabidgremlin2• 16 years ago

Built this 3 years ago for Air New Zealand :) http://promos.airnz.co.nz/howfar/

borism5• 16 years ago

very cool!

ANZ rocks!

P.S. I'd buy one-way Rarotonga ticket in no time... the problem is, I'm at the other side of the Globe from AKL :)

bond• 16 years ago

I was just talking to my brother in Auckland about the price to Rarotonga! Paradise only at $270, crazy price!

Rabidgremlin2• 16 years ago

They do....

I worked for them for 4.5 years as the architect with their Innovations & Ventures team. Very cool place to work.

iamcalledrob• 16 years ago

We built a similar proof of concept just this weekend, at London Startup Weekend. http://london.startupweekend.org/

It doesn't contain any real information, and is targeted at people who want to take holidays, instead of just flights, but is the same concept.

It'll also do some analysis of your facebook profile to automatically sort results so you instantly get relevant places to go.

It's still purely a proof of concept, and a bit crashy on Heroku because of a bug in the facebooker ruby gem (don't facebook connect right now!), but that should be fixed when we have more time to work on it.

http://www.zolidays.com/ "Have Budget, Want Holiday"

rlm• 16 years ago

On a wide screen (1680x1050) the text "Zolidays - Have budget, want holiday." is still visible on the screen.

phreanix2• 16 years ago

Have airfare will travel. I love it.

aohtsab2• 16 years ago

whoa - it'll be cheaper for me to fly to Moscow (from DC) and travel to Eastern Europe by rail than actually flying directly in -- by about $420. This is dead useful; thanks for the link!

jarek• 16 years ago

Depending on how, if at all, you are getting around the region otherwise, eastern European railroad might not be something you want to add to your itinerary.

dagw4• 16 years ago

The inter-country express trains tend to be pretty good. The slower local trains on the other hand can be a bit hit or miss. I mean they'll basically always get you to where you want to be, but perhaps not always exactly on time. But really when all is said and done trains in Europe generally work just fine.

aohtsab2• 16 years ago

fortunately I'd blend in because I'm Eastern European -- and its something I'll have to deal with anyway. =)

mtr• 16 years ago

Very cool, especially as I'm busy planning a trip (BCN-ROM-STR-BCN). There are ~4 possible airports for STR but most search engines don't let you choose them (aside from 'nearby' airports, which can be a bit moot with Europe's typically awesome rail infrastructure). And Kayak doesn't track many Low Cost Carriers. I normally a huge Kayak fan, but I've had to use www.skyscanner.net and www.wegolo.com a lot for this particular trip.

Finally it's a bit odd that there are "0" flights shown from BCN to Canada with zero filters. As a beta product it's still mega-cool. :)

marquis• 16 years ago

i find skyscanner to be far superior. kayak's is a great overview but i didn't find it actually took me straight to when those cheap flights were - you still had to guess the cheap dates. when you know where you want to go and just want to find the cheapest time to fly: it shows you the flight costs over a month, and you don't have to hope that the fare is still available.

example of nyc to chicago over month of june: http://www.skyscanner.com/flights/nyca/chia/june-2010/june-2...

see smaher's comment for an even better idea!

moolave• 16 years ago

This is almost like housingmaps.com but X100.

sev• 16 years ago

Awesome! I looked under "Even More" and didn't see a hotels option. It would be great to have that option as well, on a smaller scale of course.

AndrewWarner• 16 years ago

Finally! I've been waiting for something like this.

I never care where I go. The more random the better.

I wish they could just plan the full trip for me. Flight + hotel + (maybe) car.

bryanh2• 16 years ago

That might be a pretty cool app idea: random trip planning. As in: "I don't really care, I have $1200 to blow on a 5 day trip June 4th-9th. When do I show up for my flight?"

pbhjpbhj• 16 years ago

This is the sort of thing I'd expect a good old-school human travel agent to do pretty well.

I bet too they'd do it better (within a given locus) than the computer, knowing things like that there was a carnival at such-a-place and that the vistas at t-time of year are magnificent, etc..

jlangenauer• 16 years ago

Adioso (YC W'09) does this too - See, for example:

http://adioso.com/au/syd-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html http://adioso.com/us/jfk-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html

timcederman• 16 years ago

COMMAND-F "adioso", happy to see it's you :)

henrikschroder• 16 years ago

That is absolutely fucking awesome!

http://adioso.com/se/stockholm-to-beach.html

One thing I would love to see is adding larger/fuzzier destination areas such as "the tropics", "the carribean", "the mediterranean", "Africa", "South America", or "Mexico".

tomhoward2• 16 years ago

It's coming :)

thefool• 16 years ago

I just wish it had the option to find all available flights under a certain price. I'm a college student and wouldn't mind just randomly going to a random local for a little while if it was cheap enough.

whatwhatwhat• 16 years ago

Its not showing any flights to Buenos Aires???

I am going there in a few months and I have a ticket for $800 out of LAX but the system doesn't want to show anything..

csmeder• 16 years ago

This is cool. Does Air BnB have something like this?

resdirector2• 16 years ago

Small issue: seems like the seasons are not hemisphere dependent. E.g., if you travel from Melbourne, Australia, then it shows Spring 2010 rather than Autumn 2010, etc.

arnorhs• 16 years ago

It even works for Iceland. That's neat. That's not the default with these kinds of services.

However, it doesn't work for India.. which kind of sucks, but I hope that will be improved over time.

It would be nice to know which reservation service this is using...

albertsun• 16 years ago

This is just like Travelocity Dream Maps, which went away a while ago and I've been missing it ever since, but even better!

kingnothing• 16 years ago

I don't know if the devs read this, but the money sliders don't work on the iPad and, presumably, other touch based devices.

trin_2• 16 years ago

do they list the airlines somewhere? they dont seem to be listing ryanair for example.

gaius• 16 years ago

That's a good thing :-)

More seriously, I would expect RyanAir charges a hefty fee to third parties who want access to their API, just like they change much higher fees to passengers who use a credit card than other airlines.

EDIT: Atually RyanAir is there (London -> Knock)

trin_2• 16 years ago

well the ryanair flights seem to be there partially.

for example: LBC is only listed with two possible destinations but there are at least 6.

tinblink• 16 years ago

Hi,

Something similar, from big guys in the online travel business: Amadeus Affinity - http://www.amadeus.com/amadeus/x163551.html - accurate prices - choice per price range, comparison of prices on date range - destination per type of activity (beach, golf, whatever) - etc.

The URL for a major air travel company using it is - wait for it - ...

http://www.lufthansa.com/online/portal/lh/de/booking/affinit...

(Lufthansa Germany home page > Trip Finder)

sambe• 16 years ago

Is there a contact link? This is neat but some obvious non-US improvements:

Colour-coding the prices would make it a lot more intuitive to read/scan for deals.

Detects me as being in New York (I'm in Switzerland) if I go to the base URL.

Only offers Fahrenheit... and dollars I think.

PidGin128• 16 years ago

http://www.kayak.com/feedback/form

I'm sure you've found that on your own already, but it answers the question.

I am curious why the submitted link wasn't truncated to /explore/, as it currently links a calgary based search.

david_p• 16 years ago

I have unknowingly been waiting for this for my whole life ... thank you so much ! It would be event better if there where some details added, like the possibility to choose one-way/two-ways flights.

hardik• 16 years ago

Is the site not working for non-US visitors? (tried about thrice since morning)

joris• 16 years ago

Copycats! We already had this feature on http://qfly.com/ (on http://qfly.nl to be precise) 10 months ago.

phreanix2• 16 years ago

No offense but their UI seems a bit more intuitive and simple to use than yours.

stuaxo• 16 years ago

Can you allow currency and default to local currency?

(from UK)

xsmasher• 16 years ago

The UI is nice - but the slider doesn't need two ends, just the max end. It's also hard to dial in numbers <$1000 because of the range of the slider. Some +/- buttons would fix that up, or an old-fashioned text field.

Where can I fly for how much?

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