16 ms·

I booked my cheapest one-month trip

239 points by fagnerbrack 6y ago

stblack 6y ago
I'd be very interested to know how patterns changed between 2012 and, say, February 2020. I bet watching such data as the pandemic eases will be vastly interesting too.
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  I don't have any insights into the post-pandemic picture, but up until early 2020 when I was working with flight tickets, the general pattern looked the same: roughly 90 days ahead is the best time to book.
  - pudmaidai 6y ago
    I think it generally depends on the market and on the route. I got some cheap flights in South East Asia in the week I flew, with prices being lower than average. This led to me postponing “what’s next” decisions to the last possible moment.
    - ricardobeat 6y ago
      Yeah, I think it applies mostly to long distance flights. You can see the effect you just mentioned in the graph in the article! The price < ten days immediately before a trip, when it's steadily creeping up, can still be below the long-term average, cheaper than almost any other period beyond the 30-60d window.
darod 6y ago
was all the work that went into this project factored into the amount of money that was saved?
- stblack 6y ago
  In the article, the author covers this, saying the technical facets of doing this were worth more than the money saved. In other words, the author tallies the work and learning that went into this as a positive benefit, not a negative, as you may be alluding.
- meepmorp 6y ago
  I think he enjoyed doing it, which is added value to one's life.
  - lozaning 6y ago
    Yeah, I have a friend that spends hours a week planning this kind of stuff out. His hobby is putting together vacations from credit card points as cheaply as possible. TBH I think he actually enjoys the scheming part more than the actual trips.
    - my_usernam3 6y ago
      My father still enjoys clipping coupons and views it as therapeutic. He also enjoys the act of saving a few dollars here and there because it gives him the same dopamine rush that it did when he those dollars were relatively important to his overall net-worth. To many of us, the act of saving money is more exciting than the money itself.
      - silicon2401 6y ago
        I can definitely relate to this. I've spent countless hours optimizing my groceries and trying to get them as low as possible. I could easily spend several times as much without much financial impact, but I enjoy it as a way to derive satisfaction and mindfulness from what's otherwise just a mundane and repetitive chore
  - okareaman 6y ago
    I think the question is, if he didn't enjoy doing it, would it still be worth it, for examples for others that might view it as work
ricardobeat 6y ago
This is what https://www.hopper.com/ https://www.hopper.com/ does. Didn't quite work out when I tried, prices only kept going up!
- rockostrich 6y ago
  Hi there, Hopper engineer here. The blog post is pretty accurate from my experience (lowest prices ~3 months out) but if you apply any of this logic to the past year then you're going to have a bad time. The pandemic caused the entire industry to lower their average flight prices and now that things are starting to return to normal, so are prices. Because of that, predicting price trends based on historic data is a bit tougher. If you use iOS (not sure if we have it on Android just yet) then I'd recommend looking for something called "auto-buy" when you search for a flight. It's basically a limit order for flights and it'll allow you to set a price that you would be comfortable buying at. If the fare dips to that price then it'll book for you. We've seen some insane deals get booked through this product. Just looking at some of them from yesterday there was a round-trip flight from NFO (Norfolk, Virgina) to MCO (Orlando, Florida) that we originally price quoted at $284 for the user and it was booked at $166.
  - rwmurrayVT 6y ago
    Norfolk's airport is ORF.
    - atdrummond 6y ago
      A shame that the flight wasn't between NFO and MCO; I would love to book a ticket between Orlando and Tonga for only $166.
    - nerdponx 6y ago
      Some cities have their own (not really official AFAIK) codes that represent "any airport in this city", such as "NYC" meaning LGA, JFK, EWR, and maybe also HPN and/or SWF. I think these are mostly created by app/site developers but I could be wrong.
petulla 6y ago
ymmv but I've found Autoslash to be by far the cheapest option for car rentals. Not sure it can be scraped though would be interesting to include it.
stevievee 6y ago
I think the environment has changed since this was project was executed. I am not familiar with the industry but it now seems like travel companies and airlines have more ad-hoc control of their online prices. Someone please correct me here. Back then (2012) I used a startup called flightfox to find the best travel deals for me (they have since pivoted to corporate travel management). I assumed they performed analysis similar to this article plus some other magic and it worked really well. Today, I find more deals through "deal spotting" - a community or algorithm scours for deals and then those deals are shared within a community or on a website.
- rockostrich 6y ago
  Not really, at least as far as I know. Historically, prices have been set in a pretty ad-hoc manner by revenue managers at the airlines. I'm pretty sure that's where the "best deals for flights are on Tuesdays" thing comes from. Revenue managers would show up to work on Monday, spend the whole day reviewing the performance of their routes and then on Tuesday morning they would set the new prices for flights based on that analysis. In some cases, they mess up and you would get a really good deal because humans aren't perfect. What has changed a bit is airlines have invested more into machine learning and trying to apply revenue optimization models to programmatically adjust their prices. You still get those weird deals since there's still some ad-hoc price adjustment and also machine learning models aren't perfect, but the pattern is less predictable.
- splonk 6y ago
  IIRC Flightfox was originally a market where you posted your desired itinerary and constraints and a price, and some travel points nerd could offer you a convoluted routing would meet those constraints for (this is why I ended up booking Star Alliance flights for years through a Colombian carrier's site). It was really helpful for me to spend ~$40 rather than try to learn the collective wisdom of FlyerTalk forums. I think they later pivoted to some more automated system where they'd try to sell the flights directly - I hadn't realized that they were in corporate travel management now.
- todsul 6y ago
  CEO of Flightfox here. We still absolutely use both technology and humans (that will always underpin our value prop), but we moved from the previous competitive crowdsourced model to a one-on-one model. The short story is that travel search benefits more from depth rather than breadth (at least at the expert level). With multiple travel hackers working at once, they can only invest $fee/n-hackers worth of time and there is a ton of overlap. With a single hacker, they receive all of the $fee and can dig deeper and deeper to uncover better results. The crowdsourced approach was definitely more interesting to consumers, but the results were inferior, especially on the customer service side. Now, we’re actually transitioning behind the scenes from a one-on-one to a collaborative model, which is bringing us new benefits, but requires more systemization. Today, we target corporate travel, but we still work with individuals; you just need to click the Get Started button and we ask if you’re an individual after that. This pivot of sorts came from the fact we can deliver significantly more value to corporate customers (more customer value = more conversions, retention, referrals = better business & happier team). Consumer travelers typically only want the lowest price. If their “price to beat” is on a low-cost-carrier, we can rarely help. That becomes a dissatisfied customer despite us explaining “we’re here to help with your next trip”. Corporate travelers have greater requirements such as convenience, comfort, miles, hotels, perks, expertise, emergency response, off-site planning, large groups… the list goes on. With consumer travel, we were using a small subset of our tech and expertise; with corporate travel, we use everything and constantly need to expand our tech and expertise. Hope that explains everything. Happy to answer any specifics about finding travel deals, since that’s what we do every day for 1000s of customers.
nradov 6y ago
The problem lately is that airlines are still cancelling and rescheduling a lot of flights. So even if you book a particular flight there's a significant risk that the airline will bump you to a different one.
- newdude116 6y ago
  Joh man. This makes flight hacks quite dangerous. E.g. relying on a connection flight with a different airline. I lost a flight leg and the next option offered to me was 2 weeks later!
timdaub 6y ago
The annoying part about booking plane tickets these days is that most flight booking websites have very similar and limited functionality for querying and filtering. Sure, there's Matrix ITA and Google Flights is an upgrade too. But imagine what people could do if you gave them full fledged access to all flight data. The efficiencies!
- squeaky-clean 6y ago
  A lot of flight prices are calculated upon a search query and only guaranteed for that query (and for a set number of minutes). There generally isn't just some sort of table you can look into and get prices unfortunately. The company I work at provides these sorts of search interfaces to airlines, but all the pricing data we show has to be estimates based on confirmed prices in the past. If you're directly on an airline website (not Google Flights, Kayak, etc) and see a calendar or something that lets you view 60 days of prices or more at once, there's a good chance that was developed by one of our teams. Unfortunately we can't totally guarantee you those prices, and we'll do things like not render those components if our estimate confidence isn't high enough. Getting a "real" price for a flight is not a particularly fast API call, and also costs the airlines a small amount of money from the provider (almost no airline directly generates their own prices, generally another company does). Fractions of a penny per call, but that really adds up if you just give free bulk direct access to that to customers.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Is that not all totally bonkers?
    - splonk 6y ago
      People who don't work in travel would be horrified at both acceptable latencies in that space and just how old some of the formats involved are. One example I used to tell people in interviews: ever tried to book a flight more than a year out? You probably can't, because the date format in a PNR is "APR29". That's the underlying data for basically all flights.
- 6y ago
jedberg 6y ago
This was basically what Hipmunk did. Gather pricing data and make predictions on when it would be cheapest to buy. It happened to be hidden behind a beautiful interface.
- w-m 6y ago
  I sorely miss it - other sites may provide similar pricing information, but none even come close to match the lovely loading animation that was the joy of using Hipmunk.
  - pudmaidai 6y ago
    I routinely check several times before making a booking. I kept Hipmunk in my apps and bookmarks for years and never turned out a better deal. I deleted it probably only a few months before they closed up. The interface was cute but that was ‘bout it for me.
    - failwhaleshark 6y ago
      Yeah, you pretty much have to browse every major price site and then the suggested vendor directly. And check them on desktop, mobile, and someone else's mobile just to be sure the deals are the best.
      - 650REDHAIR 6y ago
        And a VPN! Our all inclusive stay in Mexico last year was significantly cheaper booking within MX vs USA.
        failwhaleshark 6y ago
        Yeap. Haha. Watch out for cookies too.
  - failwhaleshark 6y ago
    Me2. It was so useful. The chipmunk swaying with the airplane arms. :D
throwaway823882 6y ago
Google Flights does this for you. It can both show you actual prices per calendar month, and predicted price rise/fall. It even highlights the lowest price dates. And you can sign up for e-mailed price alerts.
- pudmaidai 6y ago
  Sigh downvotes on HN. This is correct. Google Flight is amazing at tracking flight prices over time and lets you see dips in the past on a readable chart. Something that they could make easier would be to forecast exact price changes based on the same flight flight on other dates.
jspaetzel 6y ago
This type of thing stops being useful when you travel a lot, the loyalty programs wind up making a lot of things much cheaper then they would be to new customers and easier to find and book. And regarding flights this didn't try to take advantage of some of the common flight booking tricks which can reduce fares much deeper like stopovers, +/- days, and airline switching which are harder to search.
- fossuser 6y ago
  A lot must be really a lot - like large percentages of the year? I went through the effort to sign up for all the loyalty programs and I travel some for work (or at least I did) - probably 6-12 weeks a year? The loyalty programs were mostly negligible in value they provided. Some (like Amex Platinum rewards) were so hostile to get the value from it made me irritated to use it - not a direct hotel loyalty example, but a lot of them felt like this (calculated to give you the least value possible). Airline loyalty sucks and is a pain to use. The CSV card was probably the only exception to this that I can think of.
  - darkerside 6y ago
    It's not uncommon for consultants to fly weekly for long term projects.
  - zeroxfe 6y ago
    About 7 years ago, I got an invite to the highest level of two programs for a year (platinum? vibranium? i don't know.) I used travel about once a month for work, which is not nearly enough to earn those levels. It was amazing -- lounge access, free upgrades, free limos, free food and drinks, front of the line, expedited service everywhere, endless gifts (who doesn't need more socks?) It was a pretty good year to fly. :-)
  - jspaetzel 6y ago
    For me I was able to extract value with maybe... 5-6 trips a year minimum. More then that and it just gets easier. But I guess it partly depends on what you're valuing. For instance... If you travel with no checked bags ever, and you fly on an airline that requires you to pay for checked bags. You won't see the value of having free checked bags when you achieve an airline status. There's lots of little things like this.
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
What is the best time to buy rail tickets in the USA?
- eeixlk 6y ago
  Amtrak tickets are sold in buckets and don't price fluctuate much. If you are booking in advance more than 14 days and Saver tickets are available those are the best deal. I have also bought train tickets a few days out and they were cheaper than last minute flights.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  Almost uniformly earlier is better. There are some specials but you're almost always losing if you wait.
Black101 6y ago
I don't know why almost everything is more expensive Canada... It's about the same distance from Montreal-Vegas and FortLauderdale-Vegas but it only cost about 142CAD round trip when you come from FL. The food in Canada is also very expensive... I pay about 1/4th what they pay for a gallon of milk for example (and I won't talk about the gas).
- novok 6y ago
  Taxes, a bunch of which are tariffs at the border or built into the price like the gas tax, protectionism, laws and a smaller market.
  - Black101 6y ago
    Also, I guess milk is not a very good example because the government has a minimum price set on milk, at least in Quebec.
    - novok 6y ago
      It's a good one I'm thinking, because laws are literally making it more expensive. There are a bunch for other food items. The gas tax is higher so gas is more expensive, the cell phone market is an exploitative oligopoly even more than the USA and thus the prices are some of the highest in the world, and so on. The countries economy is now dependant on the RE sector, so that is even worse than the USA for many. TBH if the USA got universal healthcare, the advantages of living in Canada would be slim.
  - 52-6F-62 6y ago
    I don't think it's that simple. Even local produce is exceedingly highly priced these days. We've no shortage of produce, and there's no real protectionism going on there. And AFAIK there hasn't been any tax changes on those kinds of goods yet the prices are ever higher.
dheera 6y ago
> This is when I wondered - could I make a startup out of it? Usually the algorithms change when you do that. I used to scrape data and get a lot of cheap flight tickets, but the difference is that I didn't blog about how I did it, nor did I provide services for anyone :)
mixmastamyk 6y ago
I enjoyed this post however was hoping the result was going to be more interesting than the rather obvious "buy a few months early and keep looking at prices in the meantime."
lqet 6y ago
Ha, that reminds me of the time when we found a loophole in the European train ticket price system: Deutsche Bahn had (and still has I think) a "Europe Special" where you could buy a ticket from any town in Germany to any town in Europe for 39 EUR flat. Our idea was to travel through Croatia for a few weeks, and we wanted to book a train ticket to Zagreb, from where we would start our trip. Sure enough, bahn.de (the journey planer of Deutsche Bahn) offered us a ticket for a train ride of around 16 hours from our home town to Zagreb, through Austria and Slovenia. We would have had to change trains 2 times. Then things escalated. We discovered that we could book the same trip, for the same price, but with a different route, making a 500 km detour inside Germany over my parent's town. Then we discovered that bahn.de allowed us to specify a minimum time to change trains. We set it to 24 hours at my parent's town, letting us stay at my parents for a night. Then we found out that we could set an additional via option in such a way that we had to change trains in Ljubljana. We set the minimum time to change trains there to 24 hours. Then we found out that the ticket price was the same if we travelled not only to Zagreb, but to Split (at the coast), which required a change of trains in Zagreb. But we wanted to stay a few days in Zagreb, and the maximum minimum time to change trains on bahn.de was 24 hours. We then discovered that (at least 5 years ago) all foreign tickets were valid for 30 days in Croatia. Effectively, this meant that we could stay in Zagreb for 30 days, and our ticket to Split was still valid. We got the ticket. After a week of visiting my parents (1 night stay), Ljubljana (1 night stay), and Zagreb (5 nights stay), we arrived in Split without problems. It was a 1,500 km, 7 day train trip for 39 EUR. The only minor problem we had was the German conductor in the first train after we visited my parents. He just stared at the monstrous ticket in disbelief and had to finally conclude that it was valid. After 10 days at the Dalmatian coast, we took the bus home.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  That’s really awesome. But why would the system allow for detours like that? I know multi city is a thing for flights, but would have figured the utility less for trains, but I’m not European so for all I know it’s common to make big not-salesmen-problem paths.
  - lqet 6y ago
cigaser 6y ago
For EU and Asia traveler, that trip seems very expensive. My cheapest trip ever included 7 flights between 3 continents for 90 euro.
- pomian 6y ago
  Because Canada! Canada is often more expensive in almost everything. If you think about the size of the country and population density, then it makes sense.
  - bbernard 6y ago
    Author here. You're absolutely right about Canada ;)
- ronyfadel 6y ago
  How?
failwhaleshark 6y ago
If you're going somewhere anyhow, housesitting is a way to get paid to live in someone's pad. Cheaper than airbnb. :) Hostels otherwise. Freighter cruising is slow-paced, DIY/BYO entertainment, interesting, and cheap, but you'll typically have to live without as much internet. Eurorail young adult pass if you're younger. Get paid as a vehicle courier to drive cars from one place to another. If you fly a lot a lot... https://www.prioritypass.com https://www.prioritypass.com for near universal airport lounge access
- cratermoon 6y ago
  Do you have any resources for someone interested in doing freighter cruising? I imagine right now with the mess that is international shipping, things aren't so good.
  - failwhaleshark 6y ago
    I came across: https://www.freightercruises.com/voyages.php https://www.freightercruises.com/voyages.php https://www.freightertrips.com https://www.freightertrips.com https://www.langsamreisen.de/en/freightertravel/ https://www.langsamreisen.de/en/freightertravel/ http://www.seaplus.com/mainmenu.php http://www.seaplus.com/mainmenu.php https://juddspittler.com/freighterbum/faq.htm https://juddspittler.com/freighterbum/faq.htm
- 8ytecoder 6y ago
  PriorityPasss is free with certain credit cards.
  - failwhaleshark 6y ago
    Which?
    - frockington1 6y ago
      I know Sapphire Reserve offers it, have to remember to renew it each year though
imwillofficial 6y ago
As somebody who is traveling out of the US for the first time on a South America trip, I found this article both helpful, and technically illuminating! A great read!
cratermoon 6y ago
His results jibe with the advice I was given by a frequent traveler: book your flight about 2 months in advance.
splonk 6y ago
I worked for a while on dynamic packaging models (user clicks on "flight+hotel", books the flight, and then is presented with a list of hotels at their destination). We used time between booking and date of travel as one of the signals, and saw that there was a pretty clear correlation between planning ahead and being more price conscious. I don't think it was a huge effect but it probably bumped down the target price of our offered hotels by a buck or two. Unrelated side story about this: we also ran some experiments with bumping higher margin (usually meaning higher price) hotels into the top ranking slots to see how it affected conversion percentages. Normally the top slot has the highest conversion and it decays sharply from there. With these experiments running, for most countries you could see a clear change where the peak would move down to slot 2 or 3 or wherever the "natural" #1 hotel was (score one for our models, I guess). This effect was most pronounced with German travelers, and almost nonexistent for French ones.
thewizardofaus 6y ago
I often find that flight prices can be influenced by what you have looked at previously (other competitor, clear cache and cookies etc). It's quite a shady practice.
maaaaattttt 6y ago
I thought ticket prices were also correlated to petrol prices. And that since airline companies buy petrol in advance, in order to predict prices you'd have to factor in petrol prices X days (months?) prior to flight date.
19h 6y ago
Reminds me that in 2019 I flew 17 times to the balearic islands from Germany and back for prices ranging from 1.99€ to 6.99€ per flight, it's about 20€ to 200€ right now. Missing the travel..
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
is this about some excursion/idea from 2011/2012? I know it's just been posted but it's about a pretty old thing can mark it (2012)
- bbernard 6y ago
  Author here. This story took place in 2011-2012, but I wrote this post in April 2021.
standardUser 6y ago
> So I booked my flight immediately. Knowing exactly when to book definitely felt like magic. This is the part I can't do. I never get the best fare, let alone those occasional $300 round trip to Europe fares, because I care too much about the specifics of the flights. A bad flight time can lose you part or all of a day, leave you with a ruined sleep schedule, force you to start/end your trip at an absurd hour of the early morning, you can end up sitting in an horrific middle seat by the bathroom, or flying on a bottom-of-the-barrel airline and so on. If you can live with all of those compromises, it's great! If not, you end up paying a more "normal" price for your ticket.
- matwood 6y ago
  Even just a little bit of flexibility can save you money. One EU vacation I was able to save $500/ticket by leaving early in the morning and flying to the hub airport, paying the $50pp for the nice airport lounge, and working all day (those lounges are built for business travelers are a lot like co-working spaces) from there. I finished working, had another 'free' snack, got on the plane to the EU, and started my vacation.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  You could put a price on those, and code your algorithm to select the best compromise for you.
Clewza313 6y ago
I believe the startup mentioned was Forecast, which was acquired by Microsoft and then nuked without (AFAICT) the tech actually landing in any MS product. Maybe it was just threatening Expedia or something...
- nostromo 6y ago
  Farecast, but yeah. I think for a brief period it was integrated with Bing's flight search tool, and then killed.
intricatedetail 6y ago
This is such a weird thinking. If he put average market rate for the time spent on it, I am sure it wasn't cheap in the end. Why so many people don't value their time?
- bbernard 6y ago
  Author here. Your thinking is equally weird to me. I value my time for sure, but isn't there a cost in not persuing what I'm genuinely curious about? What if a successful startup had come out of it? By the way, this took place in 2011-2012, when Google Flights didn't exist.

239 points by fagnerbrack 6y ago

I'd be very interested to know how patterns changed between 2012 and, say, February 2020. I bet watching such data as the pandemic eases will be vastly interesting too.

ricardobeat 6y ago
I don't have any insights into the post-pandemic picture, but up until early 2020 when I was working with flight tickets, the general pattern looked the same: roughly 90 days ahead is the best time to book.
- pudmaidai 6y ago
  I think it generally depends on the market and on the route. I got some cheap flights in South East Asia in the week I flew, with prices being lower than average. This led to me postponing “what’s next” decisions to the last possible moment.
  - ricardobeat 6y ago
    Yeah, I think it applies mostly to long distance flights. You can see the effect you just mentioned in the graph in the article! The price < ten days immediately before a trip, when it's steadily creeping up, can still be below the long-term average, cheaper than almost any other period beyond the 30-60d window.

darod 6y ago

was all the work that went into this project factored into the amount of money that was saved?

stblack 6y ago
In the article, the author covers this, saying the technical facets of doing this were worth more than the money saved. In other words, the author tallies the work and learning that went into this as a positive benefit, not a negative, as you may be alluding.
meepmorp 6y ago
I think he enjoyed doing it, which is added value to one's life.
- lozaning 6y ago
  Yeah, I have a friend that spends hours a week planning this kind of stuff out. His hobby is putting together vacations from credit card points as cheaply as possible. TBH I think he actually enjoys the scheming part more than the actual trips.
  - my_usernam3 6y ago
    My father still enjoys clipping coupons and views it as therapeutic. He also enjoys the act of saving a few dollars here and there because it gives him the same dopamine rush that it did when he those dollars were relatively important to his overall net-worth. To many of us, the act of saving money is more exciting than the money itself.
    - silicon2401 6y ago
      I can definitely relate to this. I've spent countless hours optimizing my groceries and trying to get them as low as possible. I could easily spend several times as much without much financial impact, but I enjoy it as a way to derive satisfaction and mindfulness from what's otherwise just a mundane and repetitive chore
- okareaman 6y ago
  I think the question is, if he didn't enjoy doing it, would it still be worth it, for examples for others that might view it as work

ricardobeat 6y ago

This is what https://www.hopper.com/ https://www.hopper.com/ does. Didn't quite work out when I tried, prices only kept going up!

rockostrich 6y ago
Hi there, Hopper engineer here. The blog post is pretty accurate from my experience (lowest prices ~3 months out) but if you apply any of this logic to the past year then you're going to have a bad time. The pandemic caused the entire industry to lower their average flight prices and now that things are starting to return to normal, so are prices. Because of that, predicting price trends based on historic data is a bit tougher. If you use iOS (not sure if we have it on Android just yet) then I'd recommend looking for something called "auto-buy" when you search for a flight. It's basically a limit order for flights and it'll allow you to set a price that you would be comfortable buying at. If the fare dips to that price then it'll book for you. We've seen some insane deals get booked through this product. Just looking at some of them from yesterday there was a round-trip flight from NFO (Norfolk, Virgina) to MCO (Orlando, Florida) that we originally price quoted at $284 for the user and it was booked at $166.
- rwmurrayVT 6y ago
  Norfolk's airport is ORF.
  - atdrummond 6y ago
    A shame that the flight wasn't between NFO and MCO; I would love to book a ticket between Orlando and Tonga for only $166.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    Some cities have their own (not really official AFAIK) codes that represent "any airport in this city", such as "NYC" meaning LGA, JFK, EWR, and maybe also HPN and/or SWF. I think these are mostly created by app/site developers but I could be wrong.

petulla 6y ago

ymmv but I've found Autoslash to be by far the cheapest option for car rentals. Not sure it can be scraped though would be interesting to include it.

stevievee 6y ago

I think the environment has changed since this was project was executed. I am not familiar with the industry but it now seems like travel companies and airlines have more ad-hoc control of their online prices. Someone please correct me here. Back then (2012) I used a startup called flightfox to find the best travel deals for me (they have since pivoted to corporate travel management). I assumed they performed analysis similar to this article plus some other magic and it worked really well. Today, I find more deals through "deal spotting" - a community or algorithm scours for deals and then those deals are shared within a community or on a website.

rockostrich 6y ago
Not really, at least as far as I know. Historically, prices have been set in a pretty ad-hoc manner by revenue managers at the airlines. I'm pretty sure that's where the "best deals for flights are on Tuesdays" thing comes from. Revenue managers would show up to work on Monday, spend the whole day reviewing the performance of their routes and then on Tuesday morning they would set the new prices for flights based on that analysis. In some cases, they mess up and you would get a really good deal because humans aren't perfect. What has changed a bit is airlines have invested more into machine learning and trying to apply revenue optimization models to programmatically adjust their prices. You still get those weird deals since there's still some ad-hoc price adjustment and also machine learning models aren't perfect, but the pattern is less predictable.
splonk 6y ago
IIRC Flightfox was originally a market where you posted your desired itinerary and constraints and a price, and some travel points nerd could offer you a convoluted routing would meet those constraints for (this is why I ended up booking Star Alliance flights for years through a Colombian carrier's site). It was really helpful for me to spend ~$40 rather than try to learn the collective wisdom of FlyerTalk forums. I think they later pivoted to some more automated system where they'd try to sell the flights directly - I hadn't realized that they were in corporate travel management now.
todsul 6y ago
CEO of Flightfox here. We still absolutely use both technology and humans (that will always underpin our value prop), but we moved from the previous competitive crowdsourced model to a one-on-one model. The short story is that travel search benefits more from depth rather than breadth (at least at the expert level). With multiple travel hackers working at once, they can only invest $fee/n-hackers worth of time and there is a ton of overlap. With a single hacker, they receive all of the $fee and can dig deeper and deeper to uncover better results. The crowdsourced approach was definitely more interesting to consumers, but the results were inferior, especially on the customer service side. Now, we’re actually transitioning behind the scenes from a one-on-one to a collaborative model, which is bringing us new benefits, but requires more systemization. Today, we target corporate travel, but we still work with individuals; you just need to click the Get Started button and we ask if you’re an individual after that. This pivot of sorts came from the fact we can deliver significantly more value to corporate customers (more customer value = more conversions, retention, referrals = better business & happier team). Consumer travelers typically only want the lowest price. If their “price to beat” is on a low-cost-carrier, we can rarely help. That becomes a dissatisfied customer despite us explaining “we’re here to help with your next trip”. Corporate travelers have greater requirements such as convenience, comfort, miles, hotels, perks, expertise, emergency response, off-site planning, large groups… the list goes on. With consumer travel, we were using a small subset of our tech and expertise; with corporate travel, we use everything and constantly need to expand our tech and expertise. Hope that explains everything. Happy to answer any specifics about finding travel deals, since that’s what we do every day for 1000s of customers.

nradov 6y ago

The problem lately is that airlines are still cancelling and rescheduling a lot of flights. So even if you book a particular flight there's a significant risk that the airline will bump you to a different one.

newdude116 6y ago
Joh man. This makes flight hacks quite dangerous. E.g. relying on a connection flight with a different airline. I lost a flight leg and the next option offered to me was 2 weeks later!

timdaub 6y ago

The annoying part about booking plane tickets these days is that most flight booking websites have very similar and limited functionality for querying and filtering. Sure, there's Matrix ITA and Google Flights is an upgrade too. But imagine what people could do if you gave them full fledged access to all flight data. The efficiencies!

squeaky-clean 6y ago
A lot of flight prices are calculated upon a search query and only guaranteed for that query (and for a set number of minutes). There generally isn't just some sort of table you can look into and get prices unfortunately. The company I work at provides these sorts of search interfaces to airlines, but all the pricing data we show has to be estimates based on confirmed prices in the past. If you're directly on an airline website (not Google Flights, Kayak, etc) and see a calendar or something that lets you view 60 days of prices or more at once, there's a good chance that was developed by one of our teams. Unfortunately we can't totally guarantee you those prices, and we'll do things like not render those components if our estimate confidence isn't high enough. Getting a "real" price for a flight is not a particularly fast API call, and also costs the airlines a small amount of money from the provider (almost no airline directly generates their own prices, generally another company does). Fractions of a penny per call, but that really adds up if you just give free bulk direct access to that to customers.
- OJFord 6y ago
  Is that not all totally bonkers?
  - splonk 6y ago
    People who don't work in travel would be horrified at both acceptable latencies in that space and just how old some of the formats involved are. One example I used to tell people in interviews: ever tried to book a flight more than a year out? You probably can't, because the date format in a PNR is "APR29". That's the underlying data for basically all flights.
6y ago

jedberg 6y ago

This was basically what Hipmunk did. Gather pricing data and make predictions on when it would be cheapest to buy. It happened to be hidden behind a beautiful interface.

w-m 6y ago
I sorely miss it - other sites may provide similar pricing information, but none even come close to match the lovely loading animation that was the joy of using Hipmunk.
- pudmaidai 6y ago
  I routinely check several times before making a booking. I kept Hipmunk in my apps and bookmarks for years and never turned out a better deal. I deleted it probably only a few months before they closed up. The interface was cute but that was ‘bout it for me.
  - failwhaleshark 6y ago
    Yeah, you pretty much have to browse every major price site and then the suggested vendor directly. And check them on desktop, mobile, and someone else's mobile just to be sure the deals are the best.
    - 650REDHAIR 6y ago
      And a VPN! Our all inclusive stay in Mexico last year was significantly cheaper booking within MX vs USA.
      - failwhaleshark 6y ago
        Yeap. Haha. Watch out for cookies too.
- failwhaleshark 6y ago
  Me2. It was so useful. The chipmunk swaying with the airplane arms. :D

throwaway823882 6y ago

Google Flights does this for you. It can both show you actual prices per calendar month, and predicted price rise/fall. It even highlights the lowest price dates. And you can sign up for e-mailed price alerts.

pudmaidai 6y ago
Sigh downvotes on HN. This is correct. Google Flight is amazing at tracking flight prices over time and lets you see dips in the past on a readable chart. Something that they could make easier would be to forecast exact price changes based on the same flight flight on other dates.

jspaetzel 6y ago

This type of thing stops being useful when you travel a lot, the loyalty programs wind up making a lot of things much cheaper then they would be to new customers and easier to find and book. And regarding flights this didn't try to take advantage of some of the common flight booking tricks which can reduce fares much deeper like stopovers, +/- days, and airline switching which are harder to search.

fossuser 6y ago
A lot must be really a lot - like large percentages of the year? I went through the effort to sign up for all the loyalty programs and I travel some for work (or at least I did) - probably 6-12 weeks a year? The loyalty programs were mostly negligible in value they provided. Some (like Amex Platinum rewards) were so hostile to get the value from it made me irritated to use it - not a direct hotel loyalty example, but a lot of them felt like this (calculated to give you the least value possible). Airline loyalty sucks and is a pain to use. The CSV card was probably the only exception to this that I can think of.
- darkerside 6y ago
  It's not uncommon for consultants to fly weekly for long term projects.
- zeroxfe 6y ago
  About 7 years ago, I got an invite to the highest level of two programs for a year (platinum? vibranium? i don't know.) I used travel about once a month for work, which is not nearly enough to earn those levels. It was amazing -- lounge access, free upgrades, free limos, free food and drinks, front of the line, expedited service everywhere, endless gifts (who doesn't need more socks?) It was a pretty good year to fly. :-)
- jspaetzel 6y ago
  For me I was able to extract value with maybe... 5-6 trips a year minimum. More then that and it just gets easier. But I guess it partly depends on what you're valuing. For instance... If you travel with no checked bags ever, and you fly on an airline that requires you to pay for checked bags. You won't see the value of having free checked bags when you achieve an airline status. There's lots of little things like this.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago

What is the best time to buy rail tickets in the USA?

eeixlk 6y ago
Amtrak tickets are sold in buckets and don't price fluctuate much. If you are booking in advance more than 14 days and Saver tickets are available those are the best deal. I have also bought train tickets a few days out and they were cheaper than last minute flights.
thehappypm 6y ago
Almost uniformly earlier is better. There are some specials but you're almost always losing if you wait.

Black101 6y ago

I don't know why almost everything is more expensive Canada... It's about the same distance from Montreal-Vegas and FortLauderdale-Vegas but it only cost about 142CAD round trip when you come from FL. The food in Canada is also very expensive... I pay about 1/4th what they pay for a gallon of milk for example (and I won't talk about the gas).

novok 6y ago
Taxes, a bunch of which are tariffs at the border or built into the price like the gas tax, protectionism, laws and a smaller market.
- Black101 6y ago
  Also, I guess milk is not a very good example because the government has a minimum price set on milk, at least in Quebec.
  - novok 6y ago
    It's a good one I'm thinking, because laws are literally making it more expensive. There are a bunch for other food items. The gas tax is higher so gas is more expensive, the cell phone market is an exploitative oligopoly even more than the USA and thus the prices are some of the highest in the world, and so on. The countries economy is now dependant on the RE sector, so that is even worse than the USA for many. TBH if the USA got universal healthcare, the advantages of living in Canada would be slim.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  I don't think it's that simple. Even local produce is exceedingly highly priced these days. We've no shortage of produce, and there's no real protectionism going on there. And AFAIK there hasn't been any tax changes on those kinds of goods yet the prices are ever higher.

dheera 6y ago

> This is when I wondered - could I make a startup out of it? Usually the algorithms change when you do that. I used to scrape data and get a lot of cheap flight tickets, but the difference is that I didn't blog about how I did it, nor did I provide services for anyone :)

mixmastamyk 6y ago

I enjoyed this post however was hoping the result was going to be more interesting than the rather obvious "buy a few months early and keep looking at prices in the meantime."

lqet 6y ago

Ha, that reminds me of the time when we found a loophole in the European train ticket price system: Deutsche Bahn had (and still has I think) a "Europe Special" where you could buy a ticket from any town in Germany to any town in Europe for 39 EUR flat. Our idea was to travel through Croatia for a few weeks, and we wanted to book a train ticket to Zagreb, from where we would start our trip. Sure enough, bahn.de (the journey planer of Deutsche Bahn) offered us a ticket for a train ride of around 16 hours from our home town to Zagreb, through Austria and Slovenia. We would have had to change trains 2 times. Then things escalated. We discovered that we could book the same trip, for the same price, but with a different route, making a 500 km detour inside Germany over my parent's town. Then we discovered that bahn.de allowed us to specify a minimum time to change trains. We set it to 24 hours at my parent's town, letting us stay at my parents for a night. Then we found out that we could set an additional via option in such a way that we had to change trains in Ljubljana. We set the minimum time to change trains there to 24 hours. Then we found out that the ticket price was the same if we travelled not only to Zagreb, but to Split (at the coast), which required a change of trains in Zagreb. But we wanted to stay a few days in Zagreb, and the maximum minimum time to change trains on bahn.de was 24 hours. We then discovered that (at least 5 years ago) all foreign tickets were valid for 30 days in Croatia. Effectively, this meant that we could stay in Zagreb for 30 days, and our ticket to Split was still valid. We got the ticket. After a week of visiting my parents (1 night stay), Ljubljana (1 night stay), and Zagreb (5 nights stay), we arrived in Split without problems. It was a 1,500 km, 7 day train trip for 39 EUR. The only minor problem we had was the German conductor in the first train after we visited my parents. He just stared at the monstrous ticket in disbelief and had to finally conclude that it was valid. After 10 days at the Dalmatian coast, we took the bus home.

SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
That’s really awesome. But why would the system allow for detours like that? I know multi city is a thing for flights, but would have figured the utility less for trains, but I’m not European so for all I know it’s common to make big not-salesmen-problem paths.
- lqet 6y ago

cigaser 6y ago

For EU and Asia traveler, that trip seems very expensive. My cheapest trip ever included 7 flights between 3 continents for 90 euro.

pomian 6y ago
Because Canada! Canada is often more expensive in almost everything. If you think about the size of the country and population density, then it makes sense.
- bbernard 6y ago
  Author here. You're absolutely right about Canada ;)
ronyfadel 6y ago
How?

failwhaleshark 6y ago

If you're going somewhere anyhow, housesitting is a way to get paid to live in someone's pad. Cheaper than airbnb. :) Hostels otherwise. Freighter cruising is slow-paced, DIY/BYO entertainment, interesting, and cheap, but you'll typically have to live without as much internet. Eurorail young adult pass if you're younger. Get paid as a vehicle courier to drive cars from one place to another. If you fly a lot a lot... https://www.prioritypass.com https://www.prioritypass.com for near universal airport lounge access

cratermoon 6y ago
Do you have any resources for someone interested in doing freighter cruising? I imagine right now with the mess that is international shipping, things aren't so good.
- failwhaleshark 6y ago
  I came across: https://www.freightercruises.com/voyages.php https://www.freightercruises.com/voyages.php https://www.freightertrips.com https://www.freightertrips.com https://www.langsamreisen.de/en/freightertravel/ https://www.langsamreisen.de/en/freightertravel/ http://www.seaplus.com/mainmenu.php http://www.seaplus.com/mainmenu.php https://juddspittler.com/freighterbum/faq.htm https://juddspittler.com/freighterbum/faq.htm
8ytecoder 6y ago
PriorityPasss is free with certain credit cards.
- failwhaleshark 6y ago
  Which?
  - frockington1 6y ago
    I know Sapphire Reserve offers it, have to remember to renew it each year though

imwillofficial 6y ago

As somebody who is traveling out of the US for the first time on a South America trip, I found this article both helpful, and technically illuminating! A great read!

cratermoon 6y ago

His results jibe with the advice I was given by a frequent traveler: book your flight about 2 months in advance.

splonk 6y ago

I worked for a while on dynamic packaging models (user clicks on "flight+hotel", books the flight, and then is presented with a list of hotels at their destination). We used time between booking and date of travel as one of the signals, and saw that there was a pretty clear correlation between planning ahead and being more price conscious. I don't think it was a huge effect but it probably bumped down the target price of our offered hotels by a buck or two. Unrelated side story about this: we also ran some experiments with bumping higher margin (usually meaning higher price) hotels into the top ranking slots to see how it affected conversion percentages. Normally the top slot has the highest conversion and it decays sharply from there. With these experiments running, for most countries you could see a clear change where the peak would move down to slot 2 or 3 or wherever the "natural" #1 hotel was (score one for our models, I guess). This effect was most pronounced with German travelers, and almost nonexistent for French ones.

thewizardofaus 6y ago

I often find that flight prices can be influenced by what you have looked at previously (other competitor, clear cache and cookies etc). It's quite a shady practice.

maaaaattttt 6y ago

I thought ticket prices were also correlated to petrol prices. And that since airline companies buy petrol in advance, in order to predict prices you'd have to factor in petrol prices X days (months?) prior to flight date.

19h 6y ago

Reminds me that in 2019 I flew 17 times to the balearic islands from Germany and back for prices ranging from 1.99€ to 6.99€ per flight, it's about 20€ to 200€ right now. Missing the travel..

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

is this about some excursion/idea from 2011/2012? I know it's just been posted but it's about a pretty old thing can mark it (2012)

bbernard 6y ago
Author here. This story took place in 2011-2012, but I wrote this post in April 2021.

standardUser 6y ago

> So I booked my flight immediately. Knowing exactly when to book definitely felt like magic. This is the part I can't do. I never get the best fare, let alone those occasional $300 round trip to Europe fares, because I care too much about the specifics of the flights. A bad flight time can lose you part or all of a day, leave you with a ruined sleep schedule, force you to start/end your trip at an absurd hour of the early morning, you can end up sitting in an horrific middle seat by the bathroom, or flying on a bottom-of-the-barrel airline and so on. If you can live with all of those compromises, it's great! If not, you end up paying a more "normal" price for your ticket.

matwood 6y ago
Even just a little bit of flexibility can save you money. One EU vacation I was able to save $500/ticket by leaving early in the morning and flying to the hub airport, paying the $50pp for the nice airport lounge, and working all day (those lounges are built for business travelers are a lot like co-working spaces) from there. I finished working, had another 'free' snack, got on the plane to the EU, and started my vacation.
benhurmarcel 6y ago
You could put a price on those, and code your algorithm to select the best compromise for you.

Clewza313 6y ago

I believe the startup mentioned was Forecast, which was acquired by Microsoft and then nuked without (AFAICT) the tech actually landing in any MS product. Maybe it was just threatening Expedia or something...

nostromo 6y ago
Farecast, but yeah. I think for a brief period it was integrated with Bing's flight search tool, and then killed.

intricatedetail 6y ago

This is such a weird thinking. If he put average market rate for the time spent on it, I am sure it wasn't cheap in the end. Why so many people don't value their time?

bbernard 6y ago
Author here. Your thinking is equally weird to me. I value my time for sure, but isn't there a cost in not persuing what I'm genuinely curious about? What if a successful startup had come out of it? By the way, this took place in 2011-2012, when Google Flights didn't exist.