Get away with Google Flights

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/get-away-with-google-flights.html?m=0

by rey12rey • 11 years ago

293 150 11 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

brotoss• 11 years ago

Google Flights has been my first search destination for months...the graph is awesome

mootothemax2• 11 years ago

This makes me feel somewhat uneasy.

On the one hand, it works really well.

On the other, are Google aiming to take over every aggregation service out there?

Something about the dominant search engine moving into this space just doesn't sit right with me.

Bedon2923• 11 years ago

Search engines are all about aggregation, it seems like a logical step for them. Bing, Yahoo, and even AOL also have their own travel sites, so it is not just the dominant search engine, it is all of them. It is also nice to not have to support some third party by buying tickets through them. Just compare the prices and go directly to the airline.

mootothemax2• 11 years ago

Bing, Yahoo, and even AOL also have their own travel sites

The difference is, if I type WAW to LHR into Google, I get flight listings with prices and availability.

You're right that Bing, Yahoo etc. have their own separate travel sites, I've yet to see similar results in their search results.

__Joker• 11 years ago

Any personal assistant app can't do away from this aggregations. These are the first and low hanging fruits when it comes to personal assistants, given that more and more the personal assistants and the search engines will morph into one.

TeMPOraL4• 11 years ago

Google's stated mission is to "organize world's information". This fits it perfectly.

tgraham• 11 years ago

Very similar to kayak.co.uk/trips

thezach• 11 years ago

I've been using this for quite some time... works very well. I only will fly one or two airlines, but I still use Google Flights to compare days, and departure airports because its so much easier!

Bedon2923• 11 years ago

Not sure why they are just posting this now, it has existed for quite a while. It also has hotel searching.

Not all companies have prices displayed on the site, but it links directly to the companies rather than paying additional fees through a third party.

what_ever4• 11 years ago

You don't always pay additional fees through a third party. If only flight ticket pricing was that easy. There have been instances when I found better deals on other sites compared Google (all of them happen to be international flights).

The interface on the other hand is amazing.

Bedon2923• 11 years ago

True, there are not always fees, but they are around. International flights have been a bit harder on all of the major US based flight searches though, right? Have not flown international in quite some time, so not as familiar with them.

smackfu3• 11 years ago

Yes, this is basically just an ad for their existing service, wrapped in a blog post.

yekim• 11 years ago

I wasn't even aware of Google Flights until I saw the article posted on HN. Go figure...

For some of us, the constant deluge of info, along with work and family life, makes it tough to stay on top of all the latest developments. Glad this service was "re-announced".

wbeckler2• 11 years ago

There's lots of travel sites popping up all the time, including accommodations sites. That's why I built http://AllTheRooms.com, which aggregates all the different accommodations sites and deals sites, like Expedia, Groupon, Hotwire, and Airbnb

ThatAdamGuy11• 11 years ago

yekim, we (working on Google Flights) hear this again and again. AAAAAAAGH! :o

I hope you're enjoying the service, and we'll see what we can do about getting out the word a bit better ;).

P.S. -- You'll be amused to know that -- seriously, just today -- I was telling a colleague about this cool thread on HN, and he said, "Wait... hackers? Wha... huh?" I guess he also has work and a family life :p

wbeckler2• 11 years ago

Their hotels searching is still pretty rough. It's not very googly, in that it's mostly pay to play. You have to look hard to find nonpaid content. It also leaves out all the lower cost options like Airbnb. I built http://AllTheRooms.com to aggregate everything, including sites that don't pay, because Google wasn't really doing its job in the accommodations space.

tarp• 11 years ago

ITA Software was acquired by Google awhile back.

https://matrix.itasoftware.com/

gringocl• 11 years ago

This is an awesome platform, if only you could purchase through this!

dsr_• 11 years ago

That's where the money comes from -- and ITA's mission was to be a backend for other people, who would deal with the expensive customer service side themselves.

Presumably as a Google service, customer service isn't a priority anymore.

simonebrunozzi• 11 years ago

Their plan is probably to enable it at some point.

giarc• 11 years ago

This site allows users to search for hidden city ticketing. There are some good instruction pages out there. I've never personally used it since I live in Canada and spoke and hub isn't really a thing up here.

smackfu3• 11 years ago

All sorts of fun games on ITA. Another good one is to set very long connection times, to get a 23 hour stopover in an interesting city for free.

bemmu• 11 years ago

I love the flexibility this has and after giving it a serious go I never went back to Kayak.

If you know exactly when and where to fly, Kayak is great. But with any uncertainty, Google Flights is better for exploring. Maybe you know when to fly, but not when you want to come back. Or maybe you don't even know where you want to fly, in which case you can get destination suggestions. It's also a lot snappier.

Now with this flight data they have, I'd imagine being able to just use Google Maps route search to go from A to B such that it would also include flights where applicable. While it kind of does, I am still able to think better routes myself. For example if I search from Tokushima, Japan -> San Francisco, USA, it suggests I should fly from Tokushima. Where actually it's a lot cheaper with almost no time difference to go by bus to Osaka first instead.

samstave• 11 years ago

It would be interesting for a travel engine to list the alternate routes and options and let people vote ion each option to provide weighting to each one based on peoples preference for each.

Unless they already do this?

kremi• 11 years ago

Kayak's explore is pretty nice when you have uncertainty: http://www.kayak.com/explore/BER/

Although unlike Google Flights, it doesn't let you search for specific dates.

rbcgerard• 11 years ago

nor does it allow you to search for specific times i.e. if i want to go somewhere for the weekend, flights at 6am on friday are not that useful...

jasondc• 11 years ago

Google flight search seems to be really good at finding cheap routes, I'm looking at SFO -> Rome, Kayak doesn't even show the Delta flight Google shows: https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=SFO;t=FCO,CIA;d=201...

Delta flight on Google is $1293, $1840 on Kayak

what_ever4• 11 years ago

Did you actually try to book the flight by following the links on both Google and Kayak? Google is showing the flight at $1809 now and it's possible that their cache was not updated.

Also, it's possible that flight is under KLM/AF instead of Delta on Kayak since Delta/KLM/AF are partners. And I see same flight listed under KLM for $1781.

IshKebab• 11 years ago

The best thing about Google Flights is how fast it is. The +/- 3 days (or whatever) options are never really exactly what you want, and while Google Flights also doesn't let you execute really powerful searches, you can at least manually search at a rapid pace (<1 second per search rather than >10 seconds on other sites).

ThatAdamGuy11• 11 years ago

IshKebab, we really do work hard to make Flights fast (the amount of data we have to keep cached is pretty insane, IMHO!); thanks for the kind words!

re searches... it's our hope that -- for most folks and most cases -- our filters + our tips will suffice. But if there are specific power features you're looking for, let us know via the Feedback option and I'll do what I can to bribe, er, win over my teammates :p

salimmadjd• 11 years ago

The UI/UX on this product is not that great. Google is offering a similar solution as Kayak. But I'm not sure why they just didn't fully copy Kayak. It feels to me, 1 - google thinks they are smarter than Kayak, 2 - they didn't want to show they are copying Kayak.

For example, kayak does a great job of displaying all the options on the left column. Google is hiding everything in drop downs. So then they need to have a blog post to explain how their UI works where kayaks is just intuitive.

The same with bar chart pricing (which I like) why hide it behind a silly icon like that. Now they have to educate their users what that icon means. Call it "best days to fly" or even better show that at the bottom of the page.

jessegavin• 11 years ago

I disagree. I spent nearly a year as a UI designer/engineer for a flight search/booking tool and evaluated all the major interfaces. The #1 killer feature google flights has which kills all other flight search tools (I have seen) is speed. They bought a company (ITA) for something close to a billion dollars which provides near realtime search results for flights.

Kayak (and others) do a good job of streaming search results, but you still have to wait seconds before you're able to make decisions.

mcdowall• 11 years ago

I've been using Momondo recently, which has all of these tools and a much better UX. This just feels like a re skin of the ITA site and a bit of a poor effort at that.

smellf• 11 years ago

The Momondo UI is nicer, but Google Flights has the "price in the calendar" feature.

wiradikusuma• 11 years ago

Tangentially related, does anyone know of any provider where you can e.g. make your own Hipmunk?

alexhawdon• 11 years ago

https://developers.google.com/qpx-express/ is the API you can use to make your own service like Google Flights/Hipmunk.

sq1020• 11 years ago

It's super fast which certainly cannot be said about other similar services.

peterwwillis• 11 years ago

I used Google Flights back in November to plan a 10-day getaway during December. BWI->MIA, MIA->LAX, SFO->BWI. Total airfare cost: $420. It was far easier to do this with GF than with Hipmunk or any other website i'd tried.

solve2• 11 years ago

"cheaper isn’t always better"

BS. Non-business flights are the most price-sensitive type of product there could possibly be.

Near 100% of people only apply a few very basic filters, e.g. no 12-hour layovers, doesn't depart at 5am, and then choose the cheapest. It's not some sophisticated "balance" that needs some advanced machine learning or personalization to accomplish. It's a few obvious filters that are the same for practically everyone.

I'd love to see partial dependance plots for each of the obvious filtering factors, vs how often people chose that flight. That's the best way to do this type of analysis.

Not to mention that many times the cheapest flight listed on these travel sites isn't actually available when you try to book it. Wonder how that may have skewed Google's analysis.

ThatAdamGuy11• 11 years ago

Hey solve, I thought the exact same thing you did! But then -- as someone who recently joined the Google Flights team -- I helped lead some research that included this topic... and was honestly surprised to find that about 40% of the folks searching on Google Flights DON'T pick the cheapest flight.

Price, certainly, is still a huge factor in folks' decision, but convenience plays a very significant role. And, from anecdotal evidence (not part of the same research), brand loyalty is definitely a factor as well (a very price sensitive travel blogger I know still prefers to fly on American, for instance).

radiorental4• 11 years ago

Don't know where they're getting their data from.

Boston-dublin in Oct is over $1300 on google flight with Aerlingus

Same flight directly on the airline's website is $940.

Good luck with that, Google.

analyst74• 11 years ago

Last time I tried it in 2014 for international flights, Google Flight also seems to be a few hundred dollars more expensive than other travel sites.

aembleton• 11 years ago

How does SkyScannner compare for that flight: http://www.skyscanner.net/

I've always found them to be good.

radiorental4• 11 years ago

they're on the money, same as Kayak

jonknee• 11 years ago

Though I see $550 round trip tickets on Delta, so there's that.

what_ever4• 11 years ago

Pretty sure Aerlingus has a non-stop between Boston and Dublin. Besides, you don't know the exact dates.

radiorental4• 11 years ago

Delta doesn't fly direct. For this particular journey I could elect to spend 26 hours in Istanbul for $700 and change.

RogerL• 11 years ago

I just tried SFO to Mexico City. $447 on Google ($427 with a 12 hour layover), vs $352 on Kayak, and $338 on priceline.

Nicholas_C3• 11 years ago

That's very interesting to me. Either they're getting data from the same place and marking the price up differently or they're getting data from separate places that are marking the prices up differently.

NotHuckabee• 11 years ago

That's probably pre-tax/fees, while Google's result includes extra charges.

radiorental4• 11 years ago

nope, that's all in. And, you don't generally see 33% taxes on top of a ticket.

Marazan4• 11 years ago

I presume they are over-aggressively caching data.

ThatAdamGuy11• 11 years ago

Hey radiorental, if you're seeing a persistent issue with a particular city pair, please let us know via Google Feedback. On Flights, click Help, then Send Feedback. We read this stuff and while a lot of issues aren't simple quick fixes, we're hardcore about comprehensiveness and accuracy re availability and prices!

dheera6• 11 years ago

Awesome. I can never understand what antiquated database and UI the other flight reservation websites are using. Simple database queries take 10+ seconds, and then you have to click N more times to get the taxes included.

Why can't I query for

    SELECT * FROM tickets WHERE sqrt((destination_latitude-desired_latitude)^2 - (destination_longitude-desired_longitude)^2) < 5000 AND abs(unix_timestamp(departure)-unix_timestamp('somedate'))<10*86400 ORDER BY (price+taxes+fees);

with proper geoindexing and sharding this query should take no more than a fraction of a second, yet airline websites want me to use some stupidly-designed UI that can't implement above query, takes 10+ seconds to return results, and doesn't include the taxes and fees. Thus I need to often manually enter every destination within 5000km and every date combination and manually waste half a day to find the cheapest ticket to "anywhere interesting".

Furthermore often times changing the language and country of the website changes ticket prices; a well-designed, globally-consistent database should not allow this to happen.

I hope that Google will disrupt and reengineer this ancient system.

drzaiusapelord• 11 years ago

For the same reason I can't just renew a domain at Network Solutions without going through eight different pages trying to upsell me things (and often defaulting to checking on those services).

Expedia, Orbitz, etc make money via nag screens and upsells. They have no incentive to make the experience positive or easy. Google seems to.

dheera6• 11 years ago

I switched to Namecheap; they sell stuff but are not annoying about it.

Google Domains also looks promising but I'm waiting for them to not be in beta lest they decide to scrap the product. Google would win me over if they offered free SSL certificates. In fact I think they should go ahead and disrupt the SSL industry by doing that too. Nobody should have to pay for a silly cryptographic signature. That would disrupt NS and all the others who try to upsell stuff.

nadams2• 11 years ago

I've switched from 1&1 to gandi.net - and while they are a little more expensive it's been pretty smooth. Also they support TOTP which is a huge awesome in my book (I used TOTP with facebook, Microsoft account, google, source code committing etc).

I'm convinced that for every DNS related change at 1&1 - there is a guy that manually makes the change.

mobiplayer• 11 years ago

It is my understanding that they contact various providers in real-time, so they give them a time window to come back with their data.

dheera6• 11 years ago

Yeah, this is terrible engineering design IMHO. The providers should just provide some kind of firehose of updates to the booking websites which can then cache the data appropriately.

Also they should fix their cache implementations. I've had countless times on the AA website where it says a ticket is available; then when I try to book it it says it's not available; then when I go back to the home page and search again the same fare shows up again. Seriously, where do their programmers come from ...

kylec• 11 years ago

This is a good presentation about the complexities in creating and pricing itineraries:

http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...

Most companies don't want to take on this complexity, so they outsource it. The companies that provide this service, like ITA, tend to charge more money for more expensive queries, like multi-day searches, so most online search companies will only let you do the cheaper kinds of searches.

dheera6• 11 years ago

I wonder if it would be viable to start an airline whose business model is "simple pricing". Just forget ITA altogether, sell tickets directly, and have the pricing model extremely simple. Like, total price = C/(time to departure) for some constant C, and use machine learning, or just a simple PID feedback loop on revenue to set C in order to be profitable.

toyg3• 11 years ago

changing the language and country of the website changes ticket prices

That's a feature. Nothing will cost the same if you buy it in Nairobi or in London, because price is a function of demand.

dheera6• 11 years ago

So we need an API to search all the languages and countries, pay in the appropriate currency, abstract this "feature" away along with the language barrier, and give me the lowest price. I hope Google will do that. :)

teirce• 11 years ago

I stumbled across Google Flights a couple of years ago back when it wasn't as pretty, but I've always found it to be incredibly useful, at least for traveling in the continental U.S.

estefan• 11 years ago

I want to be able to search by criteria like "somewhere sunny", "the mediterranean", "somewhere to party in the summer", etc. I thought this was it, but not quite :-(...

nedwin• 11 years ago

Not quite that level but check out Adioso.com. They have a bunch of natural language search queries that work.

penetrarthur2• 11 years ago

Was it updated? I spent my whole evening yesterday planning the trip.

GotAnyMegadeth• 11 years ago

Minor complaint: the first thing I tried to do was try to find a flight from anywhere in the UK to anywhere in Slovenia. Whilst it lets me be vague about my destination, it doesn't seem to about my starting point... Skyscanner lets me do this

imjk• 11 years ago

There are sites dedicated to scouring and curating the best deals found using the ITA Software Matrix. http://Theflightdeal.com is the best that comes to mind. http://PointsBuzz.com also aggregates the various different sites focused on flight deals and maximizing frequent flyer points for the most worthwhile trips.

joelbrewer01• 11 years ago

I've used Google Flights before, but I almost always end up flying Southwest, which doesn't disclose their prices to aggregators. Does anyone know if Google has tried to strike a deal with them? If anyone could, I imagine it would be Google.

MicroBerto• 11 years ago

Came in to search for a comment on this.

Until one of these sites includes all airlines, I'll remain relatively unimpressed with anything new that comes out.

Avitas• 11 years ago

I suppose someone could get bold and attempt to do some scraping. Of course, my money would be on SouthWest stopping this behavior as a violation of their terms of service.

Here is their terms of service:

https://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/terms-and-con...

They explicitly take ownership of the content, mention that the information is only for non-commercial use, exclude use of the information on their site for commercial use and additionally use for any other purpose. In case their message is not clear, they go even further and list a variety of prohibited activities.

The language of their Terms & Conditions is rather broad. It looks like virtually any activity on their website as a violation. Perhaps that is now the norm.

chinathrow• 11 years ago

Right into the heart of meta engines. Ouch.

jxf2• 11 years ago

I've been using Google Flights since the middle of last year and love it. However, as a frequent traveler for business/conferences, I think there are some things people should be aware of:

* Google's data seems to be not as fresh as Kayak or Hipmunk's is. There have been multiple times when I've tried to book a flight via GF only to be told that there were no seats left when I arrive on the airline's page. I suspect part of the greatly improved speed comes at the cost of aggressive caching that runs a risk of things being out of date.

* Google's data is all over the map on pricing. Very frequently the airline's price will be much cheaper than GF. And more than once (especially on United or American Airlines) I've noticed that if I book directly through an airline over a VPN, I save several hundred bucks versus if I click through from Google Flights or Kayak. Conversely, sometimes GF is less expensive and when I land on the airline's page it's more expensive.

I think the best thing to use it for is route discoverability: which kind of planes and which airlines fly to which locations, on which days at which times? It's also great for doing complex open-jaw routes or hidden-city fares -- and since those routes don't change very often, the data is more likely to be accurate.

zatkin• 11 years ago

Which VPN gets you the best deals?

Also, do you book on Tuesdays?

esMazer• 11 years ago

I would be interested on this as well!

jxf2• 11 years ago

I only have one VPN, GoldenFrog's VyprVPN service. Sorry, I didn't intend to suggest that I was running multiple VPNs.

I haven't experimented extensively with things, but usually setting my exit server to a random country on the other side of the planet (e.g. Malaysia) has yielded consistently good results.

And yes, I do tend to book on Tuesdays.

ThatAdamGuy11• 11 years ago

Assuming you're on google.com/flights, I'm fairly sure that using a VPN, changing your IP, flushing your cookies... none of that should change the availability and pricing you see on Flights.

And no, don't bother trying to time your bookings. It's kinda like the stock market; trying to beat the market, er, optimize your flights purchase time is likely to lead to sorrow and regret. From the research our Google Flights team did recently, we found that if you wait a week, on average you're gonna pay more for the same flight.

And no, we didn't see any universal discount on Tuesdays, either ;)

lpgauth• 11 years ago

I'm surprised about your data issues since Google owns most of it (from their acquisition of ITA software).

https://www.itasoftware.com/

what_ever4• 11 years ago

AFAIK, ITA is the major provider for this data but not the only provider.

spinchange• 11 years ago

I've had nearly the identical experience with it on all counts. By and large, I am a huge and loyal user of it as well.

It seems I've had the most changes in fare price or availability when identifying flights on United specifically, more so than any other airline, in my experience. That being said, it's still pretty infrequent given the volume of airfare we've booked through it for our people over the last 2 years or so.

Another thing I would add is that in connecting flight situations, it will occasionally present an itinerary that's technically possible to make, but not always entirely practical or ideal. (e.g. the window between flights is really narrow, not leaving much margin of error for flight delays, getting to another gate/terminal, etc., if not near the one you arrive at.)

All that being said, it really does work pretty great and we prefer using it to any of the other travel sites.

I would love to know why there are occasional fare discrepancies though... as far as I know google treats the click-through to the carriers' sites like an ad click, so I don't think Google is "marking it up," rather, the carriers are in some cases pricing based on the referer link or something. It can also be a demand pricing issue too, as the flight fills up, I suppose. My understanding is that Google is basically just the informational conduit between the user and the airline so it's weird that there are occasional price discrepancies.

ThatAdamGuy11• 11 years ago

spinchange, thanks for the love!

Short answer re price discrepancies: it's complicated. It's absolutely in our interest and the airlines' interest to get pricing 100% right, and we do work really hard to eval and improve on this.

One situation that can happen is that an airline has, say, 3 seats remaining at one fare and 1 seat remaining at a cheaper fare; when you selected the flights or immediately before, that 1 seat was still available, but by the time you click through, it's not, so you get the pricing for the fare with 3 seats left.

One of the things that's amazed me in my flights education after joining the team is just how super-dynamic pricing is.

No, to my knowledge it's not based on your referrer or cookies or anything like that ;). I'm just talking -- person-independent -- pricing from hour to hour.

On a related note, I used to think that airline pricing was pretty capricious and random; now I realize that the airlines hire some of the smartest folks to develop pricing strategies, and nothing is left to chance ;).

fireworks10• 11 years ago

I use http://www.optifly.com/ for airline route discovery.

salemh• 11 years ago

My own very small data point is booking a few flights for our Executive (2013, former company), and my own (recent 2015) flights, which had the correct flight time/date on Google Flights, but when "ordering" from the sight, were munged into different dates.

Booked all flights incorrectly :)

rivo• 11 years ago

The big trend in the airline industry is to customize prices and availabilities to each individual request. Your location (IP address), your frequent flyer status (if logged in), the competitor's current prices, the distribution channel (e.g. web or travel agent, GDS) will all have an influence on what is presented to you. Meta search engines have had a difficult time reporting accurate fares even in the past when it was much simpler. In the future, it'll be almost impossible.

jkaljundi• 11 years ago

Tried and most flights between US and Europe were at least $1-300 more expensive than on the usual travel sites.

corwinstephen• 11 years ago

I've been using Google Flights for over 2 years. Why is it just now getting announced?

chm• 11 years ago

Incidentally I reserved two tickets yesterday after finding the best prices with Google Flights. It linked me directly to the airline's reservation system a couple of clicks away from confirmation.

BTW, I used their map to find the most suitable flight. I could change dates on the fly and see the prices change instantly. It's a great service.

Now if they could do the same for railways, I'd gladly pay for the convenience.

ThatAdamGuy11• 11 years ago

chm, thanks much! Appreciate the kudos!

GBond• 11 years ago

A lot of the features seem highly inspired by Hipmunk.

unrulyOddish• 11 years ago

Hmmmm. I'm searching New York to Europe (March 25th to April 23rd) and it's giving me a $303 round trip to Madrid. Thats absolutely incredible, but when I click through the fair jumps to over $800. Anyone else experiencing things of that ilk?

solve2• 11 years ago

Exactly what I was saying. Google here is claiming that people don't often buy the cheapest listed flight... and the reason is because they can't.

peter303• 11 years ago

I like daily price bargraph. Gives a sense of overall prices.

gsmethells• 11 years ago

I just used this to book my flight to PyCon 2015 oddly enough. It was pretty damn easy to use and let me jump from its search results to directly booking with Air Canada. Pretty smooth...

bruceb• 11 years ago

I find Momondo to have one of the better layouts of prices when trying to find cheaper days. http://www.momondo.com/

otar• 11 years ago

I think SkyPicker is worth mentioning here: https://skypicker.com

If you are flexible where you want to go, when, how much you can stay, etc... then you get really good suggestions.

abawany• 11 years ago

Minor: got a certificate error when I clicked on this url. However that disappeared when I manually typed in www.skypicker.com in the browser. Most likely cause it seems is because their site certificate is *.skypicker.com

davidf18• 11 years ago

How is it that we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago and we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates? I find this really baffling. It is a service all customers want yet even the great Google can't seem to provide this. Meanwhile Google puts out so many "experimental products" that they later dispose.

There is talk of Google getting into cell-phone service and the are already getting into Google fiber. I wish Google would use its pricing power and buy entire flights between major cities domestic and international (eg, NYC to Chicago, LA, SF, Miami, Atlanta, and London). Moreover, an airline can really make its profits on airline fuel speculation since this is the most volatile component of airline costs.

danellis• 11 years ago

we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates?

What makes you say we can't? Isn't that exactly what this is?

jordigh2• 11 years ago

How is it that we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago and we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates?

Because the airlines have their own army of geniuses working very hard to make sure that this is difficult to do:

http://www.cheapair.com/blog/travel-tips/air-fares-101-why-d...

Who are you? How much money do you have? How badly do you want these tickets? How often are you checking the price, what else have you bought? How are your buying habits compared to everyone else's? These are the questions the airlines are trying to answer in order to maximise how much money they can get off each individual.

MichaelGG• 11 years ago

Wow. So as a United "elite" member, just doing searches on their app or site but with my account, is gonna cost me? Because I've never seen this happen. I seem to get the lowest fare they have. I've not done serious tests, just seen when other people look up my flights, on say, Kayak, they get the same prices.

jfoster• 11 years ago

Landing a man on the moon was not an adversarial problem, whereas flight bookings are. If flight bookings were like you want them to be, airlines might find themselves asking how we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago, but can't create a booking system that makes it sufficiently difficult for consumers to find our cheapest flights?

Unsurprisingly, we're somewhere between the two. Most determined people can find flights that are at least close to being the cheapest.

Yhippa• 11 years ago

I used to be a hardcore Hipmunk user and I still think I prefer it to Google Flights. I had some trouble recently with Hipmunk linking to flights that don't exist on the airline's websites. I've been using Google Flights ever since. Hopefully Hipmunk will get things back in order again.

nso• 11 years ago

That notification about avg. delays is an absolute killer feature.

http://i.imgur.com/Nb0EYDh.png

jrockway2• 11 years ago

As someone who is always running late, I pick the flights that are most often delayed.

penetrarthur2• 11 years ago

I would love GF to have a feature where you select a departure airport and arrival airport and dates, and make GF find me where to go in between. Like a search with multiple cities but so that you decide the departure city of the first flight and the arrival city of the second flight.

scintill76• 11 years ago

Open-ended destination is great, but I've sometimes wished for open-ended source. My usecase is something like a casual multi-stop trip, where you have an eventual destination in mind, but would like to save money, or see where else you can go along the way for a similar amount of money.

I've worked around it by manually checking nearby routes, or getting a feel for options with open-ended reverse flights and then searching the reverse again.

diltonm• 11 years ago

I just ran a comparison with Expedia (which seems to no longer be ASP.NET based as an aside); not too surprised, Expedia found the cheaper flights. Read, cheaper, not necessarily better.

ThatAdamGuy11• 11 years ago

Hey everyone, just spotted this thread and was really happy to see all the comments about Google Flights. Though I've been at Google for nearly 9 years, I'm pretty new to the Flights team, so there's still a lot I'm learning... but I'll try to tackle at least few questions below :)

(I'm also both an oldtimer and newtimer to HN; long time lurker, and I opened an account ages ago, but sorry I've not been active here before!)

CardenB• 11 years ago

Hey Adam,

I'm joining the flights team this summer. Could I maybe talk to you a bit to get some perspective?

Feel free to email me: cardenbag@gmail.com

ThatAdamGuy11• 11 years ago

Congrats... and done! Looking forward to having you onboard!

michaelrbock• 11 years ago

I'm a fan of https://www.vamo.com/ for multi-city trips. You put in your point of origin and all the cities you want to visit (and for how long), and it routes you between the cities on the best type of transportation and offers accommodation suggestions as well.

_puk• 11 years ago

Is this a purposeful reference to the late Lunn Poly [0]

"Flights with Google? Get Away!"

0 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunn_Poly

NamTaf• 11 years ago

Two complaints:

1) When I go to the front page (https://www.google.com/flights/), everything from and including the 'return/one way/multi stop' row down is fixed-width at about 650px even when my window is far larger. This sort of fixes itself once I start selecting cities, but is randomly narrower than the auto-sizing search bar + other stuff above it. I'm on Win7 x64 / FF 36.0.

2) Please localise currencies. You auto-detect me in Brisbane, Australia. If I pick a flight to Sydney on AU carriers, I don't care about prices in USD. You either convert it to USD in the first place (or just assume 1AUD=1USD) but don't when you display it to me.

Get away with Google Flights

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