You're Invited to Test My Flight Booking Engine

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19700334

by kxter • 7 years ago

15 15 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Decided to build a new flight booking engine using some AI to weed out the garbage flights the airlines and meta-sites throw at us.

Wanna help me test it? Put your name in the Google Doc below and I'll let you know when I put it into production.

https://forms.gle/SWQbEqmpEw83ehgv7

Cheers, Thomas

throw03172019• 7 years ago

What is a garbage flight?

70122-_6• 7 years ago

Thank-you Mr Thomas Mhk.

toomuchtodo• 7 years ago

How does this compare to Hipmunk?

moftz2• 7 years ago

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.

rutledjw2• 7 years ago

If you booked via credit card, protest. you have a 90-day window. You should get your cash back. Doesn't matter what the airline says. This is part of the agreement between Merchants - Banks - Visa/MC.

You'll get that $ back, granted, you still have to buy a more expensive ticket. Still, it's something

moftz2• 7 years ago

I did do a chargeback with my venture card and thankfully got it all back. Luckily I found flights to an even better destination on Air Italy for cheaper than what Wow Air ended up being. The starting price for Wow Air was pretty cheap but after you pay for all the extras, it cost more than other flights that include all of those features.

mandeepj• 7 years ago

"Hey, this airline is going bankrupt" Ha ha. How many times have this happened so far?

gesman• 7 years ago

I wonder the magic CostcoTravel does.

10 days trip to Italy, 4 stars hotel in Florence, business class flight in Air France including business class transfers both way $7700 - for 2 people - ALL above included.

Try to book this thing via Google or any other means

metanoia3• 7 years ago

That's good old negotiation and group purchasing there. No fancy tech required, just a relatively performant CRUD app and integration into travel GDS (reservation) systems.

deepwell• 7 years ago

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

metanoia3• 7 years ago

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.

notoriousjpg• 7 years ago

Yeah i'm curious too. Seems way too good to be true.

quickthrower2• 7 years ago

"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.

metanoia3• 7 years ago

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...

You're Invited to Test My Flight Booking Engine

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