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For those unfamiliar with ITA Matrix, it was for a long time the go-to flight search tool for the most dedicated flight hackers, points hackers, etc. It was bu

For those unfamiliar with ITA Matrix, it was for a long time the go-to flight search tool for the most dedicated flight hackers, points hackers, etc. It was built by ITA Software [1][2] in the early-mid 2000s (the earliest mention I can find of it is in 2004 [3]) to test and showcase the capabilities of their flight search platform. I once heard that ITA and other consumer-facing flight search companies had tested that kind of UI with ordinary users, but found that not enough people understood or liked it enough for them to justify making it a mainstream interface. Hipmunk, a YC-backed flight search site that launched in 2010, was heavily influenced by the ITA Matrix UI, after co-founder Adam Goldstein had found Matrix to be the best way for him to find flights when travelling around the world for college debating competitions. And while Hipmunk did a good job of being more consumer-friendly and popular than Matrix had been, sadly they didn't gain enough traction to make it as a standalone company, and after being acquired by SAP/Concur, it was shut down last year. It's an interesting, and perhaps depressing case of a product design concept being far superior to what's available in the mainstream for a certain class of user, but cannot gain enough mainstream acceptance to be a viable business or even a well-supported service for those who love it. And far more than most other product categories, flight search has huge infrastructure costs, so it's very difficult to economically sustain niche products (from grim personal experience of being part of a team trying to build a novel flight search product ourselves). In this case it's just lucky that Google owns the infrastructure and has enough enthusiasm internally to keep it going to some extent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software [2] https://xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/17/ita-software-the-travel-company-everyone-uses-and-no-one-knows-reinvents-airline-reservations-again/ https://xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/17/ita-software-the-trave... [3] https://www.fodors.com/community/europe/customs-question-seattle-amsterdam-paris-484637/ https://www.fodors.com/community/europe/customs-question-sea...

mathewsanders 5y ago
Between ~2000-2010 I worked for an international airline and I can share that we were testing a lot more innovative search interfaces for consumers. This was still pretty much the dawn of online ticket sales, and people were still either calling an airline or going though a travel agent. I remember our group for ‘online sales’ was a team of literally ten people and technology was mostly outsourced to vendors so we were initially more of a marketing group. I remember the year we joined we crossed $1M revenue for online ticket sales and that was actually a surprise to a lot of people in the company. This was my first real job after graduating, and one of my roles was industry research and putting together a weekly newsletter of interesting technology to keep an eye on and when ITA released Matrix we loved it. Long story short, we wanted to do a lot of things like this, but our airline (and most others) were not developing our own tech and instead using some technology from the major GDS companies (Amadeus, SABRE, Galileo). One project I was on was working to try and implement just a basic fuzzy date search (eg +/- 3 days of your preferred date) and our GDS was quoting us something like $3M and 12months to deliver. Luckily we had an exec who understood business, technology, and design and got resources to build out internal technology team and we started building our own technology that freed us from some of the constraints of GDS to great success!
swalsh 5y ago
Hipmunk was the absolute best, I miss it everytime I have to search for a flight.
- lars512 5y ago
  Looks like this tool also includes a "time bar" view that's in fact what Hipmunk was based off. Also looks like they're building a successor to Hipmunk called Flight Penguin: https://flightpenguin.com/ https://flightpenguin.com/
  - telesilla 5y ago
    Seems they will charge a subscription to access this - at first thought I wondered if this is the best option, and not just charge a per-leg fee like https://flightfox.com https://flightfox.com (who do concierge travel services and I love them) but I suppose, if you get the flight schedule you want, many people will instead jump and book direct with the airline. This can be good, if the flight aggregator is a behemoth and will not help you in case of problems, or bad if the airline is a behemoth.
    - maxmorlocke 5y ago
      We’re actually moving away from the subscription model - you can visit our homepage and get the extension installed for free now. The official announcement goes out Monday… [and yes… that was why we went with a sub model over pay per use]
- traceroute66 5y ago
  > Hipmunk was the absolute best Not sure I would put it as strongly as that. Hipmunk was OK, one of "the better" free tools out there. But I'm afraid it never had anything on ITA Matrix. ITA always had copious amounts of extra special sauce. I extensively tried all competitors I could find (including Hipmunk) on a variety of real-world scenarios. Nothing ever came close to ITA and I was very worried indeed for its future when Google bought it.
  - 5y ago
nefitty 5y ago
Airbnb's customer experience team used Hipmunk as a fallback for a long time. The last resort before just hanging up and promising a check was HotelTonight, until Airbnb acquired that. How did Hipmunk mess it up so bad? It was seriously one of the most pleasing web apps to use, even under time pressure.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  Did Hipmunk 'mess it up'? The comment you replied to seems to have a fair assesment of why it failed >It's an interesting, and perhaps depressing case of a product design concept being far superior to what's available in the mainstream for a certain class of user, but cannot gain enough mainstream acceptance to be a viable business or even a well-supported service for those who love it. And far more than most other product categories, flight search has huge infrastructure costs, so it's very difficult to economically sustain niche products (from grim personal experience of being part of a team trying to build a novel flight search product ourselves).
  - nefitty 5y ago
    If a business fails then that business messed it up.
    - lbotos 5y ago
      I feel like mess it up implies by default all businesses have product market fit that they "fumble" when in fact that's the hard part in the first place.
Ducki 5y ago
"flight search has huge infrastructure costs" Could you please elaborate? What makes a flight search so expensive?
- Marazan 5y ago
  Flights are a big graph reachability problem with a mass of filters (cabin class, plane type, number of passengers etc) Directs are a trivial problem. 1-stop indirects is a simplish batch processing problem to produce an easily indexable data set. 2-stop indirects is a huge quantity of computing power.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- splonk 5y ago
  The graph problem is huge (NP-complete in the full case). You can't reasonably cache things because segment availability changes a lot. Latencies on searches through the GDS may be much higher than you're used to in other domains. Due to all these factors and more, cost per query is quite high. And then on top of all that, conversions for flight searches are quite low and the reward for converting a search is on the order of single digit cents.
- tomhoward 5y ago
  Others have replied well but I’ll add my own answer... In order for your flight search product to be useful, you need a database containing effectively every flight in the world - all the airlines, all the destinations - and you need to update it every time a fare or seat availability changes. Then you need optimized routing algorithms to find routes that accommodate a vast array of consumer preferences. So, there are giant costs just to get access to all the data in the first place, then write the code and run all the servers. ITA Software offered this as a service via an API, but since a couple of years after Google acquired them they stopped offering access to outsiders. Now the GDS companies (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport) offer API products, but they are still very costly, so big transaction volumes are needed to justify it. There is now one way small/niche businesses can offer flight search and transactions fulfillment; a YC company called Duffel. They still only offer a narrow selection of airlines, but it’s growing. Some other companies like Skyscanner offer access to their API, but only if it’s in their interests (ie, if you generate sales for them; you can’t make much revenue for yourself that way).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mathewsanders 5y ago

Between ~2000-2010 I worked for an international airline and I can share that we were testing a lot more innovative search interfaces for consumers. This was still pretty much the dawn of online ticket sales, and people were still either calling an airline or going though a travel agent. I remember our group for ‘online sales’ was a team of literally ten people and technology was mostly outsourced to vendors so we were initially more of a marketing group. I remember the year we joined we crossed $1M revenue for online ticket sales and that was actually a surprise to a lot of people in the company. This was my first real job after graduating, and one of my roles was industry research and putting together a weekly newsletter of interesting technology to keep an eye on and when ITA released Matrix we loved it. Long story short, we wanted to do a lot of things like this, but our airline (and most others) were not developing our own tech and instead using some technology from the major GDS companies (Amadeus, SABRE, Galileo). One project I was on was working to try and implement just a basic fuzzy date search (eg +/- 3 days of your preferred date) and our GDS was quoting us something like $3M and 12months to deliver. Luckily we had an exec who understood business, technology, and design and got resources to build out internal technology team and we started building our own technology that freed us from some of the constraints of GDS to great success!

swalsh 5y ago

Hipmunk was the absolute best, I miss it everytime I have to search for a flight.

lars512 5y ago
Looks like this tool also includes a "time bar" view that's in fact what Hipmunk was based off. Also looks like they're building a successor to Hipmunk called Flight Penguin: https://flightpenguin.com/ https://flightpenguin.com/
- telesilla 5y ago
  Seems they will charge a subscription to access this - at first thought I wondered if this is the best option, and not just charge a per-leg fee like https://flightfox.com https://flightfox.com (who do concierge travel services and I love them) but I suppose, if you get the flight schedule you want, many people will instead jump and book direct with the airline. This can be good, if the flight aggregator is a behemoth and will not help you in case of problems, or bad if the airline is a behemoth.
  - maxmorlocke 5y ago
    We’re actually moving away from the subscription model - you can visit our homepage and get the extension installed for free now. The official announcement goes out Monday… [and yes… that was why we went with a sub model over pay per use]
traceroute66 5y ago
> Hipmunk was the absolute best Not sure I would put it as strongly as that. Hipmunk was OK, one of "the better" free tools out there. But I'm afraid it never had anything on ITA Matrix. ITA always had copious amounts of extra special sauce. I extensively tried all competitors I could find (including Hipmunk) on a variety of real-world scenarios. Nothing ever came close to ITA and I was very worried indeed for its future when Google bought it.
- 5y ago

nefitty 5y ago

Airbnb's customer experience team used Hipmunk as a fallback for a long time. The last resort before just hanging up and promising a check was HotelTonight, until Airbnb acquired that. How did Hipmunk mess it up so bad? It was seriously one of the most pleasing web apps to use, even under time pressure.

breakfastduck 5y ago
Did Hipmunk 'mess it up'? The comment you replied to seems to have a fair assesment of why it failed >It's an interesting, and perhaps depressing case of a product design concept being far superior to what's available in the mainstream for a certain class of user, but cannot gain enough mainstream acceptance to be a viable business or even a well-supported service for those who love it. And far more than most other product categories, flight search has huge infrastructure costs, so it's very difficult to economically sustain niche products (from grim personal experience of being part of a team trying to build a novel flight search product ourselves).
- nefitty 5y ago
  If a business fails then that business messed it up.
  - lbotos 5y ago
    I feel like mess it up implies by default all businesses have product market fit that they "fumble" when in fact that's the hard part in the first place.

Ducki 5y ago

"flight search has huge infrastructure costs" Could you please elaborate? What makes a flight search so expensive?

Marazan 5y ago
Flights are a big graph reachability problem with a mass of filters (cabin class, plane type, number of passengers etc) Directs are a trivial problem. 1-stop indirects is a simplish batch processing problem to produce an easily indexable data set. 2-stop indirects is a huge quantity of computing power.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
splonk 5y ago
The graph problem is huge (NP-complete in the full case). You can't reasonably cache things because segment availability changes a lot. Latencies on searches through the GDS may be much higher than you're used to in other domains. Due to all these factors and more, cost per query is quite high. And then on top of all that, conversions for flight searches are quite low and the reward for converting a search is on the order of single digit cents.
tomhoward 5y ago
Others have replied well but I’ll add my own answer... In order for your flight search product to be useful, you need a database containing effectively every flight in the world - all the airlines, all the destinations - and you need to update it every time a fare or seat availability changes. Then you need optimized routing algorithms to find routes that accommodate a vast array of consumer preferences. So, there are giant costs just to get access to all the data in the first place, then write the code and run all the servers. ITA Software offered this as a service via an API, but since a couple of years after Google acquired them they stopped offering access to outsiders. Now the GDS companies (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport) offer API products, but they are still very costly, so big transaction volumes are needed to justify it. There is now one way small/niche businesses can offer flight search and transactions fulfillment; a YC company called Duffel. They still only offer a narrow selection of airlines, but it’s growing. Some other companies like Skyscanner offer access to their API, but only if it’s in their interests (ie, if you generate sales for them; you can’t make much revenue for yourself that way).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]