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Show HN: Cheaper flights when flying multiple destinations by route optimisation
- greatNespresso 9y agoJust made a quick try, and booy what such a good idea ! Question : I am french, and so filled Home with Paris, and destination with Los Angeles. I am getting fantastic prices, but only in the sense US -> FR. The service is only available for the US then ?
- danvass 9y agoThanks for trying it out and the feedback! It's available for any destination in the world. 'Home' is just the airport that you're starting out from and returning to. So for example, if you're in Paris and want to visit LA, New York and Miami it'll find the best way to go from Paris -> LA -> NY -> Miami -> Paris. Where LA, NY, Miami will be in the cheapest order. Or you could enter for destinations like, Beijing, Bangkok and Singapore.
- singingfish 9y agomy dad has been working out, and using the cheapest flight from A to B for over 50 years. And he's still very good at it. If you gave him an option to say "I want to get from A to B for the best price, I don't care much about the route, and I want it to take X days, suggest something to me" I'm sure he would be interested.
- jlebrech 9y agoI thought of an airline that just flies you past the city you want to go to and you just jump when it's your stop.
- corobo 9y agoAnd this is why idea guys get grief :P Seriously though I can't even imagine the logistics behind that one. Even if only fit and healthy people used the service there's so much that would need accounting for - air pressure within the plane even if we ignore the whole people are jumping out of a commercial jet
- tome 9y agoHow do you get back home?
- et-al 9y agoSkyhook / Fulton extract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery... Needless to say, there are extra fees for carry-on bags.
- jlebrech 9y agoeither skyhook, like the other reply mentioned. or you find you nearest airport and get parachuted home. the airline then pick the landing equipment back up via skyhook or drives to pick it up.
- Sheepsteak 9y agoReally good idea! But maybe think about replacing the 4MB background video with a static image or something. It felt a bit overpowering for me (moves too fast) and it also doesn't scale right with the viewport leaving white text on a white background.
- danvass 9y agoThank you, we'll look for alternatives on the video ha :) Our mobile view also is a bit confusing at the moment so trying to make that look a bit better too!
- soneca 9y agoI agree. For me the video didn't open at all (moto g4 chrome on Android latest version). If it werent for this comment I would think it was just a very weird design of white text with a shadow on white background.
- danvass 9y agoYeah bit confusing on mobile :/ trying to think of a better way to present the form
- FlopV 9y agoAgreed about the video. To much going on and moving to fast. Slow it down.
- pouetpouet 9y agojust fully remove the background video. I have a powerfull desktop and a good internet connection, it feels really sluggish. I just disabled autoplay (disable autoplay extension for chrome, media.autoplay in about:config for firefox). What a pain.
- 0x6c6f6c 9y agoMy work laptop with an i5, 8GB memory, and typed characters lagged 5-10 seconds behind. I did an "asdf" check and though the browser had completely frozen it took so long to appear. The video is killing this site for me.
- samdoidge 9y ago>Something went wrong! Please pick destinations from the auto-suggest by clicking on the suggestion as you type. I've entered London Heathrow, United Kingdom as my Home, and Wroclaw, Poland as a destination, Number of days: 1, Start Date: 2017/05/02. What am I doing wrong here?
- danvass 9y agoMake sure you remove the third field if you're not using it, fixing that now :)
- ColinWright 9y agoNo idea what I'm doing wrong, but I consistently get: Something went wrong! No valid route could be found for these destinations, please try another destination.
- danvass 9y agoYou need to make sure you pick a destination from the suggestion box (click on it), enter the number of days for each destination and click the '-' button if you're not using one of the destination fields. Sorry if that's a bit confusing, currently improving that so it's a little bit more lenient :) EDIT: We're pushing out a fix now that should resolve this, you can now have empty fields for destinations and it'll just include the filled out ones.
- ColinWright 9y agoI did pick destination boxes from the drop down each time, and I entered the number of days each time. As a side question, what happens if I want to start in one place, and finish somewhere else? Suppose, for example, I want Paris -> Atlanta -> Sydney -> London : is that possible? If this works properly and well I can see that I would not only use it, but would pay money for it, but at the moment, for me, it doesn't seem to be working. FWIW, I'm well-known in my companies for breaking anything that people think is ready to go and suitable for deployment to muggles, so these teething problems are to be expected.
- danvass 9y agoThat's very bizarre that you got an error then! Could you try it again please, oh and make sure to set a date a bit into the future as otherwise might not have as many flights available. Wonderful suggestion :) I'll make it so you can input a different final stop to you're starting point. We want to keep it free and potentially monetise via affiliate sales and show people how much we've saved them, perhaps some would be generous to donate 1% of the amount they saved? Who knows! We'll definitely be fixing it up though, still a bit rough around the edges haha.
- mbrookes 9y agoThe "something went wrong" if you don't delete the empty fields is confusing...
- danvass 9y agoI've fixed it now, shouldn't happen anymore!
- yedpodtrzitko 9y agoI was curious how does it compare with results from kiwi.com. I tried to fill in a few destinations (London -> Bangkok -> Seoul) and... it gave me no result. So I guess the need to fill in a precise date/number of days is a bit killer here. Having an interval ranges (or a tolerance +-one day) would make a difference.
- danvass 9y agoSkySave finds you the cheapest route when visiting multiple destinations. So if you want to visit LA, New York and Miami and you're in London it'll tell you the cheapest route (ie. go from London to LA then NY then Miami and then back to London) and if you tried going first to NY and then LA etc. it could be a lot more expensive. You need to pick a result from the auto-suggestion dropdown and you just need to say how many days you want to stay at each place. We will be adding in tolerance though! Nice suggestion
- iamiam 9y agoskiplagged.com is really cool too.
- whazor 9y agoI also built this! I'm using a crawler that searches prices on Google flights. They provide a month overview for all flights prices. Link: https://github.com/Whazor/Roundtrip https://github.com/Whazor/Roundtrip
- Markoff 9y agosite is unusable on mobile (Brave browser) i see white text with shadows on white background and there are three identical fields for Days, no idea what is their meaning, i guess duration of trip, but not sure why there are three of them
- danvass 9y agoUnfortunately it's displaying very strange in browsers and not preservring the two columns. It's supposed to go destination, duration, destination, duration etc. Will be releasing a fix for this shortly.
- danvass 9y agoTry it now! We put out an update that makes it A LOT better.
- Markoff 9y agoit's displayed properly now, though still don't understand purpose of that horrible quality top background image also does my home take into consideration nearby airports, because i was not offered options about it, being too strict about it it's not good choice if i can just take train 2-3 hours away and have much more or cheaper options and i can enter multiple home airports it should be filled in home filed before entering any text there in background as example
- malikNF 9y agoGreat idea, but that background video is just really annoying, a simple background color would have made the site feel so much more cleaner.
- danvass 9y agoWe're making some changes on this, thank you for the feedback!
- tyingq 9y ago"Flying short" or "Hidden City" is another tactic. Airlines don't like it, but it's not illegal. Can't check bags, and you may not want to associate your frequent flyer account. That is, sometimes it's cheaper to book a flight with a connection, say LAX->ATL->MIA, and get off in ATL, than it is to pay for LAX->ATL. I think skiplagged.com does this. Are you trying these as well?
- bespoke_engnr 9y agoIs it safe to have that apiKey parameter in your 'book' links? That just jumped out at me. It looks like a cool project; good luck!
- danvass 9y agoThat's a 'short' API key, it's not the full one. It's their public variant. Thank you though!
- whazor 9y agoCouple of hints: - consider the flight times (you don't want to arrive at your next location on 23:00) - only search continental destinations, this does not work that well for many destinations. - consider the distance from airport to city (airport of paris is 2 hours traveling) - have a backup plan (rental car)
- brianbreslin 9y agoIs this using skyscanner API? I got a $false result when putting Miami origin and Osaka, tokyo, lax (no direct flights).
- danvass 9y agoIt is using Skyscanner. As for $false, that's some strange bug. I'll debug it now and push out a fix soon.
- threeio 9y agoYou should let me specify only airport codes and you do the translation in the background... I went in and did SFO, IAD, LHR, DBX and assumed any travel site would understand where I wanted to go without clicking the dropdown entries
- danvass 9y agoUsed to handle that, not sure why not anymore. I'll definitely fix it up. I'm planning on making it so that it tries to guess what you mean (essentially first auto-suggestion) if you don't click on it.
- woodson 9y agoIt also makes it hard to disambiguate cities/airports. Entering "Portland" brings up two entries named "Portland, United States" (presumably Oregon and Maine) along with "Portland, Australia", but no way of telling which Portland in the U.S. is which.
- hisem 9y agoHi, I tried : Lyon, France as Home (2017/05/02 as start date) Tokyo Narita, Japan (7 days) Osaka Kansai International, Japan (14 days) Noumea Tontouta, New Caledonia (14 days) This told me that "Something went wrong! No valid route could be found for these destinations, please try another destination" I added Paris, France with "0 days" as it's a typical stop when flying international from Lyon. This gave me a result, but the first stop is Noumea and it says "$false - BOOK". The other destinations have a real price. My route is weird though, does not seem very optimized (I fly around the world once, from France to New Caledonia and back, before going to Japan, which is on the way), but I guess that's another problem!
- kochb 9y agoAlso received a $false - BOOK. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/SGSQu http://imgur.com/a/SGSQu
- danvass 9y agoThank you for that! I'll debug it now to see what's gone wrong, very strange.
- drenvuk 9y agojust another, not sure if it will help. san jose international - home start, date 2017/05/02 berlin,3 days boston, 3 days shanghai, 3 days http://imgur.com/dcLXmlr http://imgur.com/dcLXmlr I've booked marked it. Cool site.
- JimDabell 9y agoI had this as well. The home airport was London Gatwick, and the other entries were Bangkok, Khon Kaen, and Singapore. It seemed to me that it couldn't find a route from London to Khon Kaen (Khon Kaen isn't an international airport), but interpreted that as a zero cost flight. The route it gave me was Gatwick -> Khon Kaen -> Bangkok -> Singapore and the cost for the whole thing was a fraction of what it should have been. The way to make that route work, by the way, is to go Gatwick -> Bangkok -> Khon Kaen -> Bangkok -> Singapore (or throw Chiang Mai or Hat Yai into the mix). You can only reach Khon Kaen by air through internal flights in Thailand.
- c0achmcguirk 9y agoI wonder if this is using Dijkstra's Algorithm [1] as it seems a great application for it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm
- kk_cz 9y agolooks like a nice project. If I can have one suggestion: offer the option to enter a fixed date for one of the destinations (instead of the start date ). Use case: If I am flying for a business trip to a given destination, the dates are pretty much set there. There is another place close by that I would like to visit and I don't care too much if it will be before or after the business trip, but the business trip needs to happen on selected dates.
- danvass 9y agoThanks, I'll put it on the feature list.
- devgutt 9y agoI don't understand why all this types of applications assume that a have a destination and dates. I'm very flexible and I can work remotely. Surprise me with the cheapest flight anywhere. Does this kind of app exist?
- bencoder 9y agohttps://jetlookup.com https://jetlookup.com This is a co-worker's project that seems to match what you want
- kvee 9y agohttps://www.wherefor.com/ https://www.wherefor.com/
- ColinWright 9y agoWhen asking that site for suggestions I say that I'm travelling from Birming... and it suggests: Birmingham, Alabama, GB (BHX) That doesn't fill me with confidence.
- danvass 9y agoAs others mentioned stuff like that already exists, we wanted to make something we hadn't seen anywhere else.
- jonwachob91 9y agohttps://www.google.com/flights/ https://www.google.com/flights/ Discover Destinations does that. You input what kind of destinations your looking for (food, hiking, museums, etc.), and it'll show you the cheapest flights.
- IanCal 9y agoOne option is something like https://www.jacksflightclub.co.uk/ https://www.jacksflightclub.co.uk/ where they'll send you notifications of surprisingly cheap flights to a variety of destinations.
- SamBam 9y ago
- penetrarthur 9y agoI had this other idea that if you want to get somewhere(B) and you don't mind visiting other places if the flights are really cheap, you can get from A to B spending couple of days in C and maybe even in D so that A -> C -> D -> B. It is easy to pair these flights in Europe, so that every flight will be <2hours and will cost 10-25$. I think I even started coding this, but ended up having not enough time, and brute-forcing this problem is sort of hard. Maybe there already is a ready app for that.
- wheelerwj 9y agoAnyone want the over over/under on how long it takes for United Airlines to sue this guy?
- anorphirith 9y agothe video background is making me nervous, I'd increase the frame rate to 20fps at least
- amirhirsch 9y agoThis system needs to take in more scheduling constraints like if I need to be somewhere for specific dates, but am free to travel before and after. I just booked a multi-city international trip like this a couple days ago and did quite a bit of searching to get a conveniently timed, low cost, direct flights. I was somewhat flexible about which cities I visited also.
- Nicholas_C 9y agoHow is this different than selecting multiple destinations on Expedia?