12 ms·

A flight search engine that combines flights from different airlines? (2014)

93 points by beatthatflight 2y ago

throawayonthe 2y ago
skiplagged shows you “self-transfer” flight options, which i think solves what OOP was asking
- nroets 2y ago
  And it has data for some smaller airlines like AJet in Turkey.
breadwinner 2y ago
Isn't that what Expedia does?
- lxgr 2y ago
  As explained in the answer, almost always Expedia will issue a single ticket across one or more airlines (the technical term for that is "interlining"), which is different from an itinerary made up of actually separately issued tickets. In the former case, there's always exactly one airline responsible for getting you to your destination in case of a missed connection or itinerary changes; in the latter case, you're often on your own.
  - fy20 2y ago
    I used Kiwi.com for this a few weeks ago (combining multiple European carriers, including Ryanair) and it worked rather well. My first flight was delayed, and it seemed likely I would miss the second leg flight, so they sent me an email with a list of options to reschedule. I'd purchased the 'Premium Protection', so I think I could choose a new option up to €250 (+ hotel if overnight) without paying any extra. I decided to risk taking the first flight, as the second airport was much bigger so figured there would be better flights from there. Fortunately the flight on the second leg was delayed too, so I didn't need to change anything.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      What Kiwi.com is doing with their "separate tickets plus connection insurance" model is called "virtual interlining", and it's an interesting alternative in some scenarios (well-connected airports with many alternatives). But I'd still never risk it on an important connection. I've had a very bad experience with Kiwi.com myself: I booked a Ryanair flight on them without realizing that Ryanair is actively trying to prevent Kiwi from reselling their flights. Kiwi.com apparently works around this by booking tickets on pools of Ryanair retail accounts, to which they don't share the credentials with travelers – making mobile check-in impossible. (And Ryanair at least at the time was charging over 100€ of a "service fee" for a boarding pass print at the airport...) This is only marginally related to booking separate tickets, but I suppose the larger point is that it's never a great situation to be stuck between the lines of two companies actively hostile towards each other, when you really depend on their cooperation to get to your destination. "Official" interline agreements are an explicit statement that two or more airlines will make at least some reasonable effort to get you and your luggage to your destination, and will be on the hook for it (under ICAO regulations) if things don't work out.
  - breadwinner 2y ago
    > in the latter case, you're often on your own If so why would you want this? Isn't the Expedia way of issuing a single ticket better?
    - josephcsible 2y ago
      You never want that, but sometimes you can't get the other way.
      - lxgr 2y ago
        Sometimes one is also significantly cheaper than the other, and if you're flexible and willing to take the risks implied, it can make sense.
    - commandlinefan 2y ago
      According to the poster, he found a combo that wasn't available in the online booking system. From what I recall from my time at Travelocity (coming onto 20 years ago, so probably slightly out of date), there are only a handful of GDS 's(Global Distribution Systems), of which Sabre - the owner of Travelocity - was at the time the largest. Those GDS systems are supposed to know about all of the flights from all of the airlines and find the cheapest route across all airlines and for a long time, they did. But as time went on, carriers like Southwest refused to participate with the GDS's and offered direct fares to customers while competitive GDS's sprang up and started to fragment the ones that were being used. I can't recall exactly which GDS Expedia used (Worldspan or Galileo I think), but I do remember that you could comparison shop between them and us and find lower fares depending on which GDS you were using because they listed some airlines that we didn't and vice versa and even some fares on specific airlines - Sabre was originally an AA subsidiary so tended to have better access to AA fares and was _always_ the cheapest way to fly in or out of Dallas. So what OP is looking for is what the GDS's would call an uber-GDS - which is, of course, what all of them are angling to become, but are being thwarted by competitive business practices. It's entirely possible that he found a route that was partly available on Sabre and partly available on Expedia that was cheaper than what was available on either, but he had to go poking around for it. So, why not make a GDS of GDS'es that searched all of them and found combinations like the one OP found? A lot of companies tried - sites like Travelocity and Expedia and Orbitz were online and scrapeable, after all. The problem was, there was no money to be made in them. Travelocity made a lot of its money through travel agency fees - Travelocity acted as a travel agent and got the same commission on tickets that a brick and mortar travel agent would get. I assume Expedia and Orbitz and Priceline did the same. The aggregators, on the other hand, had to charge a fee on top of that to make their site profitable. There are a few people like OP who have a specialized need to be in a certain place at a certain time that an aggregator of aggregators could come up with, but not enough that were willing to pay a fee on top of the combined flight. In addition, savvy travlers could search the aggregator... and then go book the individual flights directly on the travel sites (you couldn't do this with GDS flights, at least not back then). So yes, Expedia's way is better, and the best option in 99% of cases. It'd be great if the airlines would play ball to give consumers what they wanted, but... well, good luck with that.
joshuaheard 2y ago
Kayak.com might be what you are looking for.
crystal_revenge 2y ago
Happy to see ITA software mentioned in the comments: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/search https://matrix.itasoftware.com/search I still have fond memories of their legendary (pre-leetcode) coding challenges [0] posted on the T (they also hosted the Boston Lisp users group in the early 2000s which was filled with mind-blowingly incredibly brilliant people, everyone there seemed to be an expert in software and had a PhD in some other, non-related field) Having worked a bit in the travel industry, I highly recommend that you never book through a third party (by all means use their search). Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline and typically have abysmal customer service, and I can assure you any "add-ons" offered by a third party are ultimately a scam. 0. https://github.com/mattbraz/ita-puzzles https://github.com/mattbraz/ita-puzzles
- lxgr 2y ago
  > Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline How come I regularly see third-party OTAs offer the same itineraries cheaper than the airline then? Sometimes there's a mystery fee added just before payment, but not nearly always – and I've flown such itineraries once or twice myself (if the difference was significant and I was absolutely certain I wouldn't need any change or extra service). I was under the impression that these effectively share part of their agent fee with the traveler as a form of kickback (to appear as the cheapest option in search, which in the end might end up a win-win for both).
  - EnigmaFlare 2y ago
    One way I've heard is they don't book your ticket immediately but predict when the airline's price will go down and book in then. I imagine they have far better data to enable price prediction than the general public, and can spread the cost of getting it wrong over their other customers.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      At least the ones I’ve used have always sent me a ticket number within at most a few hours, and usually instantly. I’d be surprised if that really was a factor these days.
aero-glide2 2y ago
Skyscanner
azurezyq 2y ago
I think Google Flights can do that?
- lxgr 2y ago
  They can; this usually shows up with a remark of "separate tickets". There are considerable caveats when doing that – it's generally not advisable for connecting flights (you're essentially on the hook for missed connections etc.), and even just for separate outbound and return tickets it can mean trouble (e.g. if the outbound flight is cancelled, there is no obligation for the separate ticket to be refunded to you).
  - trash_cat 2y ago
    Granted I only travel with hand luggage, I never had any issues with cancelled or delayed flighs when booking separate tickets. Even so they are relatvely cheap. It is even cheaper if you book your return flight ticket separately.
    - thrdbndndn 2y ago
      You need to be more clear about what you meant by saying "never had issues". The point is there might be issues because the second flight has no obligation to refund you if you're late (but they might still do out of generosity). It's not like it's gonna happen all the time. So having data points saying that didn't happen is kinda pointless.
    - carlosjobim 2y ago
      > Granted I only travel with hand luggage That makes an enormous difference, since you usually can do your check-in online a day or more before departure. I just had a flight where I had purchased my connections on separate tickets. When I arrived at the baggage drop-off, it was closed and no staff from the airline was anywhere. So I had to bring my big suitcase along through security and then the airline staff at the gate was friendly enough to check it in for me for free. But if you're bringing anything in your checked luggage that security doesn't like, you will have to just leave that item at the airport. You might also have to pay a high fee to bring it to the gate instead of checking it, depending on airline. I had purchased my ticket directly from the airline, so maybe they treated me better because of it?
mattkantor 2y ago
I worked on this for tripstack a while ago. They offer it through their partners. Kiwi is the other one who made it a thing. Now it’s more common to see it all over.
parpfish 2y ago
One search feature I wanted was a way to look up a list of all flights leaving an airport on a certain day. In the early stages of vacation planning, it’s be fun to see a list of all possible direct flights to evaluate my options, but the use case of doing flight searches with an unknown destination isn’t too common. Basically, i want to be able to browse flights like a bus schedule and just see what the possibilities are from a particular start point
- _ea1k 2y ago
  You could use flightaware.com for this. Just search a date and a departure airport. The caveat is that the list will be fairly large, with a lot of repeats.
- kmoser 2y ago
  You can get something similar from https://www.kayak.com/explore/ https://www.kayak.com/explore/ except the results are shown on a map rather than as a list: you specify an origin (and optionally a departure date) and the map shows price icons at all possible destinations.
- mhitza 2y ago
  > One search feature I wanted was a way to look up a list of all flights leaving an airport on a certain day. Skyscanner does this pretty well.
- yunohn 2y ago
  Google Flights does this really well - just leave the destination empty or use something generic, like Europe/USA. I do this all the time to find new places to go to.
- dagw 2y ago
  Google Flights seems to do this. Just leave the destination field empty and select direct flights only.
- jakub_g 2y ago
  Not exactly what you want, but https://www.flightconnections.com https://www.flightconnections.com is nice to learn "where I can fly from airport X in 1 hop / 2 hops".
robertclaus 2y ago
The leading response does a good job calling out that this is pretty risky for the traveller. Similar to skip lagging, if anything goes wrong you can end up is a pretty difficult position.
- coffeebeqn 2y ago
  Even if you have insurance that can cover the cost of the low cost connection ticket you just missed.. try buying a new ticket at the airport for that same day or same week even and you’ve now spent more than getting a regular ticket in the first place. And that regular ticket airline is responsible for getting you to your final destination. I did some extreme budget flying as a youth and you might just get stranded at a random airport so you better be very flexible with your plans. If it’s inside the US maybe you’re fine to rent a car or take a bus or something but if you happened to layover in UAE or something then it gets trickier
tomhoward 2y ago
It's called "virtual interlining". The startup I co-founded (Adioso - YC W09 [1]) tried to do it, including having discussions with a travel insurance provider about offering "layover protection" - so that if one leg was delayed causing you to miss your onward leg(s), your costs are covered. Kiwi.com does this now. We worked on it from about 2008 till 2013 then basically gave up, as it was too hard to offer a service that customers could really love and trust. (It wasn't for nought; the technology we developed was valuable, and the company was able to rebrand and pivot and now does important work for airlines to optimise loads and fares [2], though I left when the rebrand/pivot happened). The thing that makes it hard to do is it's basically impossible to get all the flight inventory, including fares and seat availability, that's complete and up-to-date enough to deliver a service that customers can trust. The engineering challenge is one thing - solving a multi-dimensional travelling salesman problem (price and distance/duration) highly repetitively - but you can solve that with enough smart engineers and "compute", which ITA did in the early 2000s, and on a smaller scale, our team did a decade later. But you could build the most beautiful routing engine the universe has ever seen, and still have a user experience that's kind-of garbage because the industry just keeps the flight inventory data so locked down. These days there are APIs and feeds available from the major distribution platforms - Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport, but it's still not comprehensive. You often still need to negotiate individual agreements with major airlines in order to be able to publish and sell their fares. And even then, many of the low-cost airlines (which are often most of interest to travellers who want to find the cheapest route and deal with self-transfer) are not available through these distributors, and some, like Southwest, have blanket refused to be on 3rd party search sites, only starting to relax that position very recently and only with the dominant platform [3]. Kiwi.com has only recently come to a partnership agreement with Ryanair [4] after being in legal battle with them for years [5]. (I hate the thought of having to be at war with your most important partners). Others have mentioned Skyscanner, which was always the closest to us in what we were each trying to offer (we talked briefly with them about being acquired by them). Right from the beginning when we got funded for Adioso, my mind became fixated on the thought "if only you get every single flight in the world loaded into one big graph database, what could you do with it?", but it turned out to be a very big "if". [1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/adioso/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/adioso/ [2] https://amadeus.com/en/blog/articles/creating-a-private-resale-marketplace-to-optimize-carbon-emissions https://amadeus.com/en/blog/articles/creating-a-private-resa... [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffwhitmore/2024/05/25/southwest-flight-prices-are-now-on-google-travel/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffwhitmore/2024/05/25/southw... [4] https://media.kiwi.com/company-news/kiwi-com-and-ryanair-announce-strategic-partnership https://media.kiwi.com/company-news/kiwi-com-and-ryanair-ann... [5] https://www.travolution.com/news/kiwi.com-celebrates-three-wins-in-court-over-ryanair/ https://www.travolution.com/news/kiwi.com-celebrates-three-w...
chriscappuccio 2y ago
A web search engine that combines results from different web sites? (2022) (openai.com)
adityaathalyo 2y ago
[flagged]
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  What kind of sexist drivel is this?
  - aaron695 2y ago
    [dead]
Ilasky 2y ago
One use case I’d love to see is the ability to find the best price for multiple city tickets. I’m fairly flexible on dates, but getting the best price for it is a super iterative process. Having some similar functionality like excel’s solve function would be awesome to find optimal dates within a range for each destination.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Tepix 2y ago
kiwi.com is also pretty good at this.
mmsc 2y ago
I've never understood the comments on all of the posts like this advising people to never book via a third party. Is it an American thing? I've probably been on around 250 flights in the past 7 years in Europe and I can't remember one time that it was cheaper to book directly than through some third party. Sometimes it's the same price to book direct, but it doesn't matter either way: the support you're going to get is the same, and the insurance or whatever depends on... exactly whatever you've paid for already.
- returningfory2 2y ago
  > the support you're going to get is the same I think this is not true. In my limited experience, if you book a flight through a third party or even a code share agreement, you don’t get full access to the flying airline’s UI and things like changing your flight or dealing with cancellations are a real hassle. Just last week I had an issue where I had booked an Iberia code share flight through American Airlines, but then Iberia bumped me from the flight onto an AA flight. Of course, both Iberia and AA support initially claimed it wasn’t their problem and that I needed to contact the other airline. Maybe in Europe it’s not as much a problem because (1) modifiable flight tickets aren’t as common and (2) passenger rights in the case of delay and cancellations are stronger.
  - cozzyd 2y ago
    Yeah, due to thw Fly America Act, I (usually) have to book through a US carrier even if it's a code share for work travel and run into this problem often...
- barrkel 2y ago
  It's often slightly more expensive to book direct but if you want to e.g. buy extra baggage at a discounted online rate (i.e. not an airport mugging), there is no guarantee that a third party will have a UI for that.
  - mmsc 2y ago
    I've also never booked a flight through one of the 3rd parties where I couldn't access the booking on the airline's website. Some time again (as discussed in this thread), Ryanair had some spat with resellers. So I had to upload a picture of my ID to the Ryanair website in order access my booking that way.
chx 2y ago
Never book anywhere else but the airline website. It's not worth it, these days. There might be some deals but when and no longer if, IRROPS happens you will face an uphill battle to fix your problem playing a triangle between the airline and the OTA you booked with. Flying has changed: past covid and Boeing-being-shit-revealed there are not enough long range planes, in Europe because of the Ukrainian war Hungarian ATC is overwhelmed which creates ripple effects all over and nothing is on time. And that's just the regions I know about. https://travel.stackexchange.com/q/174173 https://travel.stackexchange.com/q/174173 has more.
sho 2y ago
From the great presentation linked: http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/img4.html http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com... > Amazingly, the graph diameter is often as high as 20: there are airports that can take 20 flights minimum to get between I wonder if that's still true. It's hard to imagine. And just the thought of having to optimize that search function made my cortisol levels spike a bit.
- cozzyd 2y ago
  I imagine it must be something like small Pacific island to small town in the Canadian far north or something...
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Canada is too rich - there are more likely to be flights.
    - cozzyd 2y ago
      Yes probably Russian far north is more likely I guess!
  - dmurray 2y ago
    The next line specifies: > typically this will be a small airport in Alaska or Canada to another small airport in Africa or Indonesia It's still mind blowing to me. Surely any Alaskan airport would be within 5 hops of Anchorage (or not have scheduled flights at all, fine, but that can't be the case here), likewise surely any Indonesian airport is within 5 hops of Jakarta, and Anchorage-Jakarta can certainly be done in 3 hops in a multitude of ways. But one of those assumptions is wrong by 7 hops! There aren't even that many airports to consider, the same presentation gives 4000 as the number included in the analysis. Maybe the graph topology is something like a series of tiny airports that each only connect to the next airport in the series, probably by the same flight that makes multiple stops (not unknown in island hopping, and maybe then in Alaska/Canada too). So you don't really board 20 planes but you do require 20 takeoffs and landings.
nomilk 2y ago
Google built something amazing in Google Flights [1] (and they haven't ruined it yet). It's no-nonsense, easy to filter by number of stops, and 'date grid' is great for scoping out savings by departing a day or two earlier/later without having open multiple tabs as other sites necessitate. Only criticisms are extremely mild ones: it defaults to 'return', doesn't remember your currency, and bizarrely defaults to a month ahead for the departure date (actually, they must have very recently fixed this because it doesn't do that anymore!) [1] https://www.google.com/travel/flights https://www.google.com/travel/flights
- khuey 2y ago
  My biggest criticism of Google Flights is that sometimes the price it shows you is only available through some sketchy third party OTA based out of a foreign country that only offers support through email. Good luck if anything goes wrong or needs to be changed with your ticket.
  - nomilk 2y ago
    > third party (online travel agent) I've used Google flights ~50 times and hadn't seen too many recommendations for flights booked through OTAs, but hard agree with avoiding them (and booking directly with the airline).
  - dboreham 2y ago
    Fun fact: sometimes Google Flights will show a (lower) fare on United that doesn't exist on United's own site. But if you click though to United from Google, it magically now does exist, and can be ticketed. I don't know if this happens with other airlines (I look for and book mostly United).
    - nomilk 2y ago
      Didn't know this! Although had seen the opposite: flights (/prices) listed on google that are no longer listed on the airline's site.
- dboreham 2y ago
nomilk 2y ago
Interesting to see Hipmunk [1] among the suggestions. I believe Steve Huffman (reddit founder) started that and was yc funded. [1] https://travel.stackexchange.com/a/26833/100794 https://travel.stackexchange.com/a/26833/100794
bojangleslover 2y ago
Adjacent plug for a free Chrome Extension: FlyOnTime embeds flight delay probability straight into Google Flights. Very useful when you're evaluating a number of flights from the same origin and destination but at different times. Helps you really know what you're paying for. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/flyontime/mjhocoppejcanpaojgcfbojaebiegjkp?hl=en-US https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/flyontime/mjhocoppe...
bluGill 2y ago
I want to search from multiple cities. I have often saved a lot of money by flying out of an airport 1.5 hours drive away from home.
- fckgw 2y ago
  Most major airlines support this. Search for "Los Angeles" on Southwest, for example, and you can simultaneously choose from LAX, Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario, or any number of airports across the region.
dgd123 2y ago
tomhoward is correct. It's called "virtual interlining". I started the team that built it at Hopper (started working on it in Fall 2020 and we launched our first version in Fall 2021). They're called Mix & Match fares on the Hopper app. It's a really hard problem. So hard that we didn't even try to solve the "best" flight. We used a bunch of heuristics to find what we believed would be "better" flights. We measured what we called "beat rate" which was the rate that a VI flight was the cheapest on our flight list. When I left the team, our beat rate was around 0.5 (so a VI flight was the cheapest half the time).
- rockostrich 2y ago
  Hey DGD, fancy seeing you here. It was a pleasure working with you! -jon
  - dgd123 2y ago
    Great seeing you too Jon! I figure if a thread on something travel-related comes up, there's bound to be Hopper people on it
traceroute66 2y ago
In my experience, these tools have lost their value in the post-COVID world because the airlines have (a) collectively hiked their prices, and (b) have slashed and otherwise aggressively changed their route structure. I spent many a happy hour <2020 on ITA Matrix. It was well worth learning as a tool back then despite its terse interface and tricky syntax. But these days? The sorts of clever tricks you could do before are no longer viable for the reasons I outlined at the top, i.e. connections no longer exist and/or the price is no longer attractive. And before anyone tries to tell me otherwise, my experience is bang up to date. What I said above is based on 2024 experience.
- snakeyjake 2y ago
  During COVID when nobody was flying fares dropped. But today fares are the lowest they've been in the history of aviation, except for during COVID which should never be factored into trends. Inflation-adjusted averages for fares, both overall and on specific routes, for the last 30 years are here: https://www.bts.gov/air-fares https://www.bts.gov/air-fares Even with fees and taxes airfare is the lowest it's ever been. Internationally the difference is even greater than the halving of US domestic ticket prices over the last 30 years. The tricks no longer work because the bottom has been reached and there are no more pennies to pinch. If one buys a ticket today, right now, for next month one can fly from DC to LA for $98-- round trip. Then they will complain about paying $30 for a bag.... I can fly first class from New York to Frankfurt for less than what an economy class ticket cost when I was visiting my Oma in the 80s and 90s and that's NOT adjusted for inflation.
  - aidenn0 2y ago
    > If one buys a ticket today, right now, for next month one can fly from DC to LA for $98-- round trip. Then they will complain about paying $30 for a bag.... LA<->DC is my most commonly booked flight and I haven't paid less than $300 (net baggage fees) in almost 20 years. On top of that, I end up with less legroom than I did 20 years ago.
    - snakeyjake 2y ago
dumbfounder 2y ago
I have long wanted to build an engine that let's you book a vacation on points. You connect all the points programs you have and it shows you how to leverage them to get the best deals on flights and hotels. The trick here is that you can transfer points from credit cards to some airlines and hotels, and sometimes the points are worth more when transferred. But, integrating with all these systems is the problem, and it's a big problem. Especially since there is no way any of the players want this to happen. Maybe it could be built as a browser plugin?
- TZubiri 2y ago
  I dream of a world where we can see a price and choose to pay it or not pay it and that's it.
- xur17 2y ago
  There are a number of sites that do this that have been released in the last few years. https://www.pointsyeah.com https://www.pointsyeah.com is probably my favorite since their free offering is very workable.
- throwaway838423 2y ago
  I guess users could enter the data manually as well.
TZubiri 2y ago
Aviato

throawayonthe 2y ago

skiplagged shows you “self-transfer” flight options, which i think solves what OOP was asking

nroets 2y ago
And it has data for some smaller airlines like AJet in Turkey.

breadwinner 2y ago

Isn't that what Expedia does?

lxgr 2y ago
As explained in the answer, almost always Expedia will issue a single ticket across one or more airlines (the technical term for that is "interlining"), which is different from an itinerary made up of actually separately issued tickets. In the former case, there's always exactly one airline responsible for getting you to your destination in case of a missed connection or itinerary changes; in the latter case, you're often on your own.
- fy20 2y ago
  I used Kiwi.com for this a few weeks ago (combining multiple European carriers, including Ryanair) and it worked rather well. My first flight was delayed, and it seemed likely I would miss the second leg flight, so they sent me an email with a list of options to reschedule. I'd purchased the 'Premium Protection', so I think I could choose a new option up to €250 (+ hotel if overnight) without paying any extra. I decided to risk taking the first flight, as the second airport was much bigger so figured there would be better flights from there. Fortunately the flight on the second leg was delayed too, so I didn't need to change anything.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    What Kiwi.com is doing with their "separate tickets plus connection insurance" model is called "virtual interlining", and it's an interesting alternative in some scenarios (well-connected airports with many alternatives). But I'd still never risk it on an important connection. I've had a very bad experience with Kiwi.com myself: I booked a Ryanair flight on them without realizing that Ryanair is actively trying to prevent Kiwi from reselling their flights. Kiwi.com apparently works around this by booking tickets on pools of Ryanair retail accounts, to which they don't share the credentials with travelers – making mobile check-in impossible. (And Ryanair at least at the time was charging over 100€ of a "service fee" for a boarding pass print at the airport...) This is only marginally related to booking separate tickets, but I suppose the larger point is that it's never a great situation to be stuck between the lines of two companies actively hostile towards each other, when you really depend on their cooperation to get to your destination. "Official" interline agreements are an explicit statement that two or more airlines will make at least some reasonable effort to get you and your luggage to your destination, and will be on the hook for it (under ICAO regulations) if things don't work out.
- breadwinner 2y ago
  > in the latter case, you're often on your own If so why would you want this? Isn't the Expedia way of issuing a single ticket better?
  - josephcsible 2y ago
    You never want that, but sometimes you can't get the other way.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Sometimes one is also significantly cheaper than the other, and if you're flexible and willing to take the risks implied, it can make sense.
  - commandlinefan 2y ago
    According to the poster, he found a combo that wasn't available in the online booking system. From what I recall from my time at Travelocity (coming onto 20 years ago, so probably slightly out of date), there are only a handful of GDS 's(Global Distribution Systems), of which Sabre - the owner of Travelocity - was at the time the largest. Those GDS systems are supposed to know about all of the flights from all of the airlines and find the cheapest route across all airlines and for a long time, they did. But as time went on, carriers like Southwest refused to participate with the GDS's and offered direct fares to customers while competitive GDS's sprang up and started to fragment the ones that were being used. I can't recall exactly which GDS Expedia used (Worldspan or Galileo I think), but I do remember that you could comparison shop between them and us and find lower fares depending on which GDS you were using because they listed some airlines that we didn't and vice versa and even some fares on specific airlines - Sabre was originally an AA subsidiary so tended to have better access to AA fares and was _always_ the cheapest way to fly in or out of Dallas. So what OP is looking for is what the GDS's would call an uber-GDS - which is, of course, what all of them are angling to become, but are being thwarted by competitive business practices. It's entirely possible that he found a route that was partly available on Sabre and partly available on Expedia that was cheaper than what was available on either, but he had to go poking around for it. So, why not make a GDS of GDS'es that searched all of them and found combinations like the one OP found? A lot of companies tried - sites like Travelocity and Expedia and Orbitz were online and scrapeable, after all. The problem was, there was no money to be made in them. Travelocity made a lot of its money through travel agency fees - Travelocity acted as a travel agent and got the same commission on tickets that a brick and mortar travel agent would get. I assume Expedia and Orbitz and Priceline did the same. The aggregators, on the other hand, had to charge a fee on top of that to make their site profitable. There are a few people like OP who have a specialized need to be in a certain place at a certain time that an aggregator of aggregators could come up with, but not enough that were willing to pay a fee on top of the combined flight. In addition, savvy travlers could search the aggregator... and then go book the individual flights directly on the travel sites (you couldn't do this with GDS flights, at least not back then). So yes, Expedia's way is better, and the best option in 99% of cases. It'd be great if the airlines would play ball to give consumers what they wanted, but... well, good luck with that.

joshuaheard 2y ago

Kayak.com might be what you are looking for.

crystal_revenge 2y ago

Happy to see ITA software mentioned in the comments: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/search https://matrix.itasoftware.com/search I still have fond memories of their legendary (pre-leetcode) coding challenges [0] posted on the T (they also hosted the Boston Lisp users group in the early 2000s which was filled with mind-blowingly incredibly brilliant people, everyone there seemed to be an expert in software and had a PhD in some other, non-related field) Having worked a bit in the travel industry, I highly recommend that you never book through a third party (by all means use their search). Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline and typically have abysmal customer service, and I can assure you any "add-ons" offered by a third party are ultimately a scam. 0. https://github.com/mattbraz/ita-puzzles https://github.com/mattbraz/ita-puzzles

lxgr 2y ago
> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline How come I regularly see third-party OTAs offer the same itineraries cheaper than the airline then? Sometimes there's a mystery fee added just before payment, but not nearly always – and I've flown such itineraries once or twice myself (if the difference was significant and I was absolutely certain I wouldn't need any change or extra service). I was under the impression that these effectively share part of their agent fee with the traveler as a form of kickback (to appear as the cheapest option in search, which in the end might end up a win-win for both).
- EnigmaFlare 2y ago
  One way I've heard is they don't book your ticket immediately but predict when the airline's price will go down and book in then. I imagine they have far better data to enable price prediction than the general public, and can spread the cost of getting it wrong over their other customers.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    At least the ones I’ve used have always sent me a ticket number within at most a few hours, and usually instantly. I’d be surprised if that really was a factor these days.

aero-glide2 2y ago

Skyscanner

azurezyq 2y ago

I think Google Flights can do that?

lxgr 2y ago
They can; this usually shows up with a remark of "separate tickets". There are considerable caveats when doing that – it's generally not advisable for connecting flights (you're essentially on the hook for missed connections etc.), and even just for separate outbound and return tickets it can mean trouble (e.g. if the outbound flight is cancelled, there is no obligation for the separate ticket to be refunded to you).
- trash_cat 2y ago
  Granted I only travel with hand luggage, I never had any issues with cancelled or delayed flighs when booking separate tickets. Even so they are relatvely cheap. It is even cheaper if you book your return flight ticket separately.
  - thrdbndndn 2y ago
    You need to be more clear about what you meant by saying "never had issues". The point is there might be issues because the second flight has no obligation to refund you if you're late (but they might still do out of generosity). It's not like it's gonna happen all the time. So having data points saying that didn't happen is kinda pointless.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    > Granted I only travel with hand luggage That makes an enormous difference, since you usually can do your check-in online a day or more before departure. I just had a flight where I had purchased my connections on separate tickets. When I arrived at the baggage drop-off, it was closed and no staff from the airline was anywhere. So I had to bring my big suitcase along through security and then the airline staff at the gate was friendly enough to check it in for me for free. But if you're bringing anything in your checked luggage that security doesn't like, you will have to just leave that item at the airport. You might also have to pay a high fee to bring it to the gate instead of checking it, depending on airline. I had purchased my ticket directly from the airline, so maybe they treated me better because of it?

mattkantor 2y ago

I worked on this for tripstack a while ago. They offer it through their partners. Kiwi is the other one who made it a thing. Now it’s more common to see it all over.

parpfish 2y ago

One search feature I wanted was a way to look up a list of all flights leaving an airport on a certain day. In the early stages of vacation planning, it’s be fun to see a list of all possible direct flights to evaluate my options, but the use case of doing flight searches with an unknown destination isn’t too common. Basically, i want to be able to browse flights like a bus schedule and just see what the possibilities are from a particular start point

_ea1k 2y ago
You could use flightaware.com for this. Just search a date and a departure airport. The caveat is that the list will be fairly large, with a lot of repeats.
kmoser 2y ago
You can get something similar from https://www.kayak.com/explore/ https://www.kayak.com/explore/ except the results are shown on a map rather than as a list: you specify an origin (and optionally a departure date) and the map shows price icons at all possible destinations.
mhitza 2y ago
> One search feature I wanted was a way to look up a list of all flights leaving an airport on a certain day. Skyscanner does this pretty well.
yunohn 2y ago
Google Flights does this really well - just leave the destination empty or use something generic, like Europe/USA. I do this all the time to find new places to go to.
dagw 2y ago
Google Flights seems to do this. Just leave the destination field empty and select direct flights only.
jakub_g 2y ago
Not exactly what you want, but https://www.flightconnections.com https://www.flightconnections.com is nice to learn "where I can fly from airport X in 1 hop / 2 hops".

robertclaus 2y ago

The leading response does a good job calling out that this is pretty risky for the traveller. Similar to skip lagging, if anything goes wrong you can end up is a pretty difficult position.

coffeebeqn 2y ago
Even if you have insurance that can cover the cost of the low cost connection ticket you just missed.. try buying a new ticket at the airport for that same day or same week even and you’ve now spent more than getting a regular ticket in the first place. And that regular ticket airline is responsible for getting you to your final destination. I did some extreme budget flying as a youth and you might just get stranded at a random airport so you better be very flexible with your plans. If it’s inside the US maybe you’re fine to rent a car or take a bus or something but if you happened to layover in UAE or something then it gets trickier

tomhoward 2y ago

It's called "virtual interlining". The startup I co-founded (Adioso - YC W09 [1]) tried to do it, including having discussions with a travel insurance provider about offering "layover protection" - so that if one leg was delayed causing you to miss your onward leg(s), your costs are covered. Kiwi.com does this now. We worked on it from about 2008 till 2013 then basically gave up, as it was too hard to offer a service that customers could really love and trust. (It wasn't for nought; the technology we developed was valuable, and the company was able to rebrand and pivot and now does important work for airlines to optimise loads and fares [2], though I left when the rebrand/pivot happened). The thing that makes it hard to do is it's basically impossible to get all the flight inventory, including fares and seat availability, that's complete and up-to-date enough to deliver a service that customers can trust. The engineering challenge is one thing - solving a multi-dimensional travelling salesman problem (price and distance/duration) highly repetitively - but you can solve that with enough smart engineers and "compute", which ITA did in the early 2000s, and on a smaller scale, our team did a decade later. But you could build the most beautiful routing engine the universe has ever seen, and still have a user experience that's kind-of garbage because the industry just keeps the flight inventory data so locked down. These days there are APIs and feeds available from the major distribution platforms - Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport, but it's still not comprehensive. You often still need to negotiate individual agreements with major airlines in order to be able to publish and sell their fares. And even then, many of the low-cost airlines (which are often most of interest to travellers who want to find the cheapest route and deal with self-transfer) are not available through these distributors, and some, like Southwest, have blanket refused to be on 3rd party search sites, only starting to relax that position very recently and only with the dominant platform [3]. Kiwi.com has only recently come to a partnership agreement with Ryanair [4] after being in legal battle with them for years [5]. (I hate the thought of having to be at war with your most important partners). Others have mentioned Skyscanner, which was always the closest to us in what we were each trying to offer (we talked briefly with them about being acquired by them). Right from the beginning when we got funded for Adioso, my mind became fixated on the thought "if only you get every single flight in the world loaded into one big graph database, what could you do with it?", but it turned out to be a very big "if". [1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/adioso/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/adioso/ [2] https://amadeus.com/en/blog/articles/creating-a-private-resale-marketplace-to-optimize-carbon-emissions https://amadeus.com/en/blog/articles/creating-a-private-resa... [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffwhitmore/2024/05/25/southwest-flight-prices-are-now-on-google-travel/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffwhitmore/2024/05/25/southw... [4] https://media.kiwi.com/company-news/kiwi-com-and-ryanair-announce-strategic-partnership https://media.kiwi.com/company-news/kiwi-com-and-ryanair-ann... [5] https://www.travolution.com/news/kiwi.com-celebrates-three-wins-in-court-over-ryanair/ https://www.travolution.com/news/kiwi.com-celebrates-three-w...

chriscappuccio 2y ago

A web search engine that combines results from different web sites? (2022) (openai.com)

adityaathalyo 2y ago

[flagged]

CaptainFever 2y ago
What kind of sexist drivel is this?
- aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]

Ilasky 2y ago

One use case I’d love to see is the ability to find the best price for multiple city tickets. I’m fairly flexible on dates, but getting the best price for it is a super iterative process. Having some similar functionality like excel’s solve function would be awesome to find optimal dates within a range for each destination.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Tepix 2y ago

kiwi.com is also pretty good at this.

mmsc 2y ago

I've never understood the comments on all of the posts like this advising people to never book via a third party. Is it an American thing? I've probably been on around 250 flights in the past 7 years in Europe and I can't remember one time that it was cheaper to book directly than through some third party. Sometimes it's the same price to book direct, but it doesn't matter either way: the support you're going to get is the same, and the insurance or whatever depends on... exactly whatever you've paid for already.

returningfory2 2y ago
> the support you're going to get is the same I think this is not true. In my limited experience, if you book a flight through a third party or even a code share agreement, you don’t get full access to the flying airline’s UI and things like changing your flight or dealing with cancellations are a real hassle. Just last week I had an issue where I had booked an Iberia code share flight through American Airlines, but then Iberia bumped me from the flight onto an AA flight. Of course, both Iberia and AA support initially claimed it wasn’t their problem and that I needed to contact the other airline. Maybe in Europe it’s not as much a problem because (1) modifiable flight tickets aren’t as common and (2) passenger rights in the case of delay and cancellations are stronger.
- cozzyd 2y ago
  Yeah, due to thw Fly America Act, I (usually) have to book through a US carrier even if it's a code share for work travel and run into this problem often...
barrkel 2y ago
It's often slightly more expensive to book direct but if you want to e.g. buy extra baggage at a discounted online rate (i.e. not an airport mugging), there is no guarantee that a third party will have a UI for that.
- mmsc 2y ago
  I've also never booked a flight through one of the 3rd parties where I couldn't access the booking on the airline's website. Some time again (as discussed in this thread), Ryanair had some spat with resellers. So I had to upload a picture of my ID to the Ryanair website in order access my booking that way.

chx 2y ago

Never book anywhere else but the airline website. It's not worth it, these days. There might be some deals but when and no longer if, IRROPS happens you will face an uphill battle to fix your problem playing a triangle between the airline and the OTA you booked with. Flying has changed: past covid and Boeing-being-shit-revealed there are not enough long range planes, in Europe because of the Ukrainian war Hungarian ATC is overwhelmed which creates ripple effects all over and nothing is on time. And that's just the regions I know about. https://travel.stackexchange.com/q/174173 https://travel.stackexchange.com/q/174173 has more.

sho 2y ago

From the great presentation linked: http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/img4.html http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com... > Amazingly, the graph diameter is often as high as 20: there are airports that can take 20 flights minimum to get between I wonder if that's still true. It's hard to imagine. And just the thought of having to optimize that search function made my cortisol levels spike a bit.

cozzyd 2y ago
I imagine it must be something like small Pacific island to small town in the Canadian far north or something...
- bluGill 2y ago
  Canada is too rich - there are more likely to be flights.
  - cozzyd 2y ago
    Yes probably Russian far north is more likely I guess!
- dmurray 2y ago
  The next line specifies: > typically this will be a small airport in Alaska or Canada to another small airport in Africa or Indonesia It's still mind blowing to me. Surely any Alaskan airport would be within 5 hops of Anchorage (or not have scheduled flights at all, fine, but that can't be the case here), likewise surely any Indonesian airport is within 5 hops of Jakarta, and Anchorage-Jakarta can certainly be done in 3 hops in a multitude of ways. But one of those assumptions is wrong by 7 hops! There aren't even that many airports to consider, the same presentation gives 4000 as the number included in the analysis. Maybe the graph topology is something like a series of tiny airports that each only connect to the next airport in the series, probably by the same flight that makes multiple stops (not unknown in island hopping, and maybe then in Alaska/Canada too). So you don't really board 20 planes but you do require 20 takeoffs and landings.

nomilk 2y ago

Google built something amazing in Google Flights [1] (and they haven't ruined it yet). It's no-nonsense, easy to filter by number of stops, and 'date grid' is great for scoping out savings by departing a day or two earlier/later without having open multiple tabs as other sites necessitate. Only criticisms are extremely mild ones: it defaults to 'return', doesn't remember your currency, and bizarrely defaults to a month ahead for the departure date (actually, they must have very recently fixed this because it doesn't do that anymore!) [1] https://www.google.com/travel/flights https://www.google.com/travel/flights

khuey 2y ago
My biggest criticism of Google Flights is that sometimes the price it shows you is only available through some sketchy third party OTA based out of a foreign country that only offers support through email. Good luck if anything goes wrong or needs to be changed with your ticket.
- nomilk 2y ago
  > third party (online travel agent) I've used Google flights ~50 times and hadn't seen too many recommendations for flights booked through OTAs, but hard agree with avoiding them (and booking directly with the airline).
- dboreham 2y ago
  Fun fact: sometimes Google Flights will show a (lower) fare on United that doesn't exist on United's own site. But if you click though to United from Google, it magically now does exist, and can be ticketed. I don't know if this happens with other airlines (I look for and book mostly United).
  - nomilk 2y ago
    Didn't know this! Although had seen the opposite: flights (/prices) listed on google that are no longer listed on the airline's site.
dboreham 2y ago

nomilk 2y ago

Interesting to see Hipmunk [1] among the suggestions. I believe Steve Huffman (reddit founder) started that and was yc funded. [1] https://travel.stackexchange.com/a/26833/100794 https://travel.stackexchange.com/a/26833/100794

bojangleslover 2y ago

Adjacent plug for a free Chrome Extension: FlyOnTime embeds flight delay probability straight into Google Flights. Very useful when you're evaluating a number of flights from the same origin and destination but at different times. Helps you really know what you're paying for. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/flyontime/mjhocoppejcanpaojgcfbojaebiegjkp?hl=en-US https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/flyontime/mjhocoppe...

bluGill 2y ago

I want to search from multiple cities. I have often saved a lot of money by flying out of an airport 1.5 hours drive away from home.

fckgw 2y ago
Most major airlines support this. Search for "Los Angeles" on Southwest, for example, and you can simultaneously choose from LAX, Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario, or any number of airports across the region.

dgd123 2y ago

tomhoward is correct. It's called "virtual interlining". I started the team that built it at Hopper (started working on it in Fall 2020 and we launched our first version in Fall 2021). They're called Mix & Match fares on the Hopper app. It's a really hard problem. So hard that we didn't even try to solve the "best" flight. We used a bunch of heuristics to find what we believed would be "better" flights. We measured what we called "beat rate" which was the rate that a VI flight was the cheapest on our flight list. When I left the team, our beat rate was around 0.5 (so a VI flight was the cheapest half the time).

rockostrich 2y ago
Hey DGD, fancy seeing you here. It was a pleasure working with you! -jon
- dgd123 2y ago
  Great seeing you too Jon! I figure if a thread on something travel-related comes up, there's bound to be Hopper people on it

traceroute66 2y ago

In my experience, these tools have lost their value in the post-COVID world because the airlines have (a) collectively hiked their prices, and (b) have slashed and otherwise aggressively changed their route structure. I spent many a happy hour <2020 on ITA Matrix. It was well worth learning as a tool back then despite its terse interface and tricky syntax. But these days? The sorts of clever tricks you could do before are no longer viable for the reasons I outlined at the top, i.e. connections no longer exist and/or the price is no longer attractive. And before anyone tries to tell me otherwise, my experience is bang up to date. What I said above is based on 2024 experience.

snakeyjake 2y ago
During COVID when nobody was flying fares dropped. But today fares are the lowest they've been in the history of aviation, except for during COVID which should never be factored into trends. Inflation-adjusted averages for fares, both overall and on specific routes, for the last 30 years are here: https://www.bts.gov/air-fares https://www.bts.gov/air-fares Even with fees and taxes airfare is the lowest it's ever been. Internationally the difference is even greater than the halving of US domestic ticket prices over the last 30 years. The tricks no longer work because the bottom has been reached and there are no more pennies to pinch. If one buys a ticket today, right now, for next month one can fly from DC to LA for $98-- round trip. Then they will complain about paying $30 for a bag.... I can fly first class from New York to Frankfurt for less than what an economy class ticket cost when I was visiting my Oma in the 80s and 90s and that's NOT adjusted for inflation.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  > If one buys a ticket today, right now, for next month one can fly from DC to LA for $98-- round trip. Then they will complain about paying $30 for a bag.... LA<->DC is my most commonly booked flight and I haven't paid less than $300 (net baggage fees) in almost 20 years. On top of that, I end up with less legroom than I did 20 years ago.
  - snakeyjake 2y ago

dumbfounder 2y ago

I have long wanted to build an engine that let's you book a vacation on points. You connect all the points programs you have and it shows you how to leverage them to get the best deals on flights and hotels. The trick here is that you can transfer points from credit cards to some airlines and hotels, and sometimes the points are worth more when transferred. But, integrating with all these systems is the problem, and it's a big problem. Especially since there is no way any of the players want this to happen. Maybe it could be built as a browser plugin?

TZubiri 2y ago
I dream of a world where we can see a price and choose to pay it or not pay it and that's it.
xur17 2y ago
There are a number of sites that do this that have been released in the last few years. https://www.pointsyeah.com https://www.pointsyeah.com is probably my favorite since their free offering is very workable.
throwaway838423 2y ago
I guess users could enter the data manually as well.

TZubiri 2y ago

Aviato