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Adioso (YC W09), Flight Search For People Keeping Their Options Open
- robryan 16y agoCongratulations to the guys. It may be true that the flight search market is saturated but I'm not so sure if that is the case in Australia, anecdotally when it comes to people booking flights here the first impulse seems to be to go to the carriers websites or webjet which is more big business and less useful.
- hartror 16y agoIt isn't just AU based flights (though I think that was their first revision given they're from AU themselves).
- robryan 16y agoYeah I know, just pointing out their may be more of a market gap in Australia.
- weaksauce 16y agoThis might be a great opportunity to advertise regionally for travel. They can target google adwords on say "webjet.com" which will allow them to get some traffic off a mistaken url vs. address bar. edit: or whatever the webjet website actually is seing how it is Australian.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hartror 16y agoAs the author points out it is great when you have no firm dates in mind, perfect for planning holidays etc.
- weaksauce 16y agoThis is exactly the type of flight search that I was looking for! The competition is terrible in this regard.
- JangoSteve 16y agoI clicked over to the site thinking, this could be cool, I wonder what I'll search for. The default search option was "Detroit to domestic for under USD200". DTW is 20 minutes away, and $200 is little enough I could just book something for the hell of it (and I just may). I just wanted to say, that was a killer default search.
- jlees 16y agoI'm in SF and my default was San Francisco to Cologne. Nice subtle use of geoloc - it's the details that matter.
- herdrick 16y agoI used this as my primary travel site in Australia and really liked it.
- keyle 16y agoDid Tom move from Australia to the US to be accepted by YC? Crunchbase has him as a cofounder, who is the other one? US based founder? cheers.
- keyle 16y agoActually I found him http://twitter.com/fennb http://twitter.com/fennb from Melbourne as well. Glad to see some ozzies kicking!! Any word on their experience in the US?
- tomhoward 16y agoIt's a shame I was the only one credited, merely for being the one that arranged the interview and received the call. Fenn's role in conceiving and engineering Adioso has been far more substantial than mine, as has that of our more recent addition Andrew Tipton - http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kiwidrew http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kiwidrew), who is now an equal co-founder.
- tyng 16y agoI think the "natural language search" championed by Adioso is really cool, but the question I want to raise is whether the "natural" in our everyday speech is also "natural" in human-machine communication? i.e. could it be the case that people are so used to searching specific things online that a "natural language search" creates uncertainty about what to expect thus turning people away from the website?
- tyng 16y agoAdd to the point above - when I first checked out Adioso uncertainty was the first thing I felt. If I didn't read about Adioso in the first place I wouldn't know what to do with the website. Perhaps get a few people who have never heard about Adioso to come in one day and observe how they interact with the website. There might be things you need to tweak to make it more intuitive
- ansonparker 16y agoI think it's a tough one. If it works it's flippin' awesome, if it doesn't it can be a despairing experience. I guess the safe bet is to have a fall back option for those that want it. Personally, with travel bookings I'd happily never look at a 3-part date drop-down again, even if the price is the odd clarification/re-phrasing.
- Locke1689 16y agoWell, I guess it's good to know Alexia Tsotsis has no idea what the travelling salesman problem is. Almost like she didn't read her own link.
- tomhoward 16y agoIn her defence, we did mention TSP, though in the context of a feature that is not mentioned in the article. She just got mixed up.
- bwaldorf 16y agoTrue story.
- Locke1689 16y agoWell, that's better, but she still could have read her link. It's pretty clear the feature she's describing doesn't have anything to do with TSP. What feature does, btw? Did you solve P?=NP? ;)
- tomhoward 16y agoWe've built a shortest-path routing engine. Do a few searches from US cities to Europe or Australia/NZ. In many cases the prices won't be that great due to the limited inventory we currently have, but you'll be able to see the routing functionality in action. It's explained with examples about half way into this post: http://blog.adioso.com/adioso-a-new-beginning http://blog.adioso.com/adioso-a-new-beginning
- peng 16y agoI've been using http://matrix2.itasoftware.com http://matrix2.itasoftware.com for flexible flight searching. From the few minutes I have been playing with Adioso, it seems even better.
- drtse4 16y agoThought the same thing here. Usually the process needed to find the cheapest flight is rather convoluted when you have few date constraints: 1-choose a date/2-[wait a lot]/3-check price/back to 1. But with this... easily accessible data via graph/table, 4-5 clicks and you are done.
- tjmc 16y agoAwesome site and fantastic to see another Aussie startup! Being in Perth, I'll definitely use it and I love that the founders have focussed on the low cost carriers first. Hope that they add a few of the high capacity international majors too though (the 2 UAE carriers come to mind) because reducing flight time and connections is usually at least as important to me than price.
- joshd 16y agoIt would be nicer to see dates further in the future. The error message for exceeding the 4 month window is rubbish too: http://adioso.com/au/bne-to-dps-april-2011 http://adioso.com/au/bne-to-dps-april-2011. By putting scare quotes around "April" in the underlined text it look like the natural language processing engine doesn't know what "April" means. Also, that error message shouldn't be a "Tip", as it's completely failed for that search. It would be nice to have an optional advanced search form so I could see exactly what a parameters I can search for. Free form search just lets me try permutations of text until I find one that works. Also, the related searches bar is really confusing. It looks like crumb trails. Turning the arrow into a magnifying glass could be a good way to fix that.
- ft5 16y agoCongrats Tom and Fenn!
- CoreDumpling 16y agoThis is an excellent resource, especially for bargain-hunters like myself. One question I have: how are you going about adding new flight information? Do you do them in an automated manner, using a web service, or perhaps by scraping? I'm primarily interested in flights between USA and East Asia, which as of now is still rather difficult to find with your site, but I'd be interested in hearing if that would be available before the end of the year. BTW, I was a bit confused by the TechCrunch headline. To me, "keeping options open" means something like being allowed to change my mind at the last minute, for cancellations or rescheduling. I hope you don't adopt that as your byline, unless you plan to address that aspect of the flight search problem as well.
- mistermann 16y agoI'd also love to know how you do it, have airlines opened up useful webservices to third parties finally?
- christonog 16y agoAside from RSS feeds, I personally haven't found an affordable (ie free) option. Looks like screen scraping has been the MO of many travel sites (mine included).
- kiwidrew 16y agoGlad you're enjoying Adioso! We love traveling to Asia, and we're hoping to include flights from the USA in the next month or so. Stay tuned, there's plenty of good stuff coming up. :)
- Huppie 16y agoThe last time I checked (mid-june) it didn't get very far from the netherlands (we wanted to go to north africa or the middle east), but it only showed up with some trips to the UK and Italy. Bummer. Still, the idea of Adioso is really attractive.
- KateKendall 16y agoCongratulations to Tom, Fenn and Andrew on AV3. Great to see an offering like this coming out of Melbourne's startup ecosystem!
- eterps 16y agoIt would be nice if it understands continents. For example from Amsterdam to South America late december.
- Fenn 16y agoWe've actually just recently added that exact feature (though we're short on South American inventory at the moment): http://adioso.com/nl/amsterdam-to-north-america http://adioso.com/nl/amsterdam-to-north-america Looks like we need to tighten up our geo-constraints a little, not quite sure how Istanbul snuck in there :)
- jasonkester 16y agoAmazing they made it this far with that terrible name. I googled my best attempt to spell it from memory (5 seconds after reading a whole article that mentioned the name a dozen times), and their site didn't show up anywhere in the results. - Memorable - Spellable - Readable over a phone It's really not rocket science.
- tomhoward 16y agoYou'd reject the names of many very successful companies on those grounds. I didn't think it was a winner when it was first suggested. We used it as a working title, and it stuck. It taught me that a company can grow into its name and make it feel very right. Had someone told me 4 years ago we'd still be using it, and frequently being complimented on it by investors and users, I'd have been amazed too.
- jasonkester 16y agoWhen you say that name out loud to somebody who doesn't speak Spanish, it sounds like it should be spelled "audioso". Try Googling that (noticing that you don't show up at all) and then estimate how many potential users you're losing each day. The standard way around this issue is to register every possible misspelling of your name and repoint it to the site. As an example, try typing tiddla.com or twidla.com into a browser and see where you end up. When I do that for your most obvious misspelling, I see a godaddy parking page. The clear course of action from here is to simply buy the domain and turn all those lost users into customers.
- jasonkester 16y agoI think I understand now why every other flight search engine has little "to" and "from" boxes. I got the "couldn't parse this" screen four times in a row trying to get from my house in Northern England to Kalymnos, Greece. It finally gave me results when I tried "manchester to kos", with the minor problem that all the results started in Boston, 3000 miles from my house. I like the idea. At the moment though the execution is simply not there.
- mcdowall 16y agoI wish the guys good luck, but personally I find Kayak Explore a more than efficient and accurate tool for this type of search. I found it returned rather erroneous results, "London to Asia next month" returned flights for mainly Eastern European destinations, I started to try different variables... "southampton to edinburgh next month" and it returned results for London Gatwick to Edinburgh. Flight search is a very competitive online service, accuracy of results is key. The everyday user who receives poor results just simply wont bother returning.
- davidw 16y agoI tried to find something from Venice to Portland, Oregon. It doesn't seem to do PDX, so I tried with SFO instead. It gives me VCE to Gatwick, England, then to Basel, Switzerland, then Dusseldorf, Germany, and then on to San Francisco. Yeah it's cheap, but that sounds like an awful, awful day of traveling.
- tomhoward 16y agoSure, we understand it might not be to your taste; a route like that won't be appealing to many people. But the main point is that some people want to be able to use low-cost airlines to take long-haul trips like this, and in fact are doing so already but doing the planning manually (very slowly and sub-optimally) as there is nothing to automate the process. When we cover more airlines we'll be able to return more palatable options to the average traveller, but we think just offering travellers the ability to take trips like these if they choose to is a step in the right direction.
- davidw 16y agoI really love the idea of being able to say "I want to go sometime in October, give me a list of options", so I think you're on the right track, and I'll be checking back from time to time. Good luck!
- ecoffey 16y agoThe site definitely feels snappier than earlier versions! I'm excited to be able to this for more US domestic flights. Keep up the good work!
- carnevalem 16y agoYou should add the feature of search for multiple cities at once. For example depending on the price I have flown out of the Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Indianapolis airports. Believe it or not, it takes me about the same amount of time to get to each. EDIT: It appears you include nearby airports as well in your search, but I would still like to be able to chose which are included. Dayton is included in Cincinnati searches and Indianapolis is included in Columbus searches, but I can't search for all four.