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How often do you get a meaningfully better result than google.com/flights? Outside of booking with points, it's all basically the same thing and I can book on g

by jdross 11mo ago

How often do you get a meaningfully better result than google.com/flights? Outside of booking with points, it's all basically the same thing and I can book on google on my phone in under a minute

dghlsakjg 11mo ago
I live in a place where I have to fly to a nearby bigger airport to go anywhere outside my province. In other words, everything is a compromise on routing, layovers and cost. When I lived in a big city, it was just timing and cost that mattered. Frequently it isn't that google flights on a phone doesn't find the same flight, its that it is much easier to figure out the tradeoffs with more screen real estate. E.g. I can see that a flight is cheaper, but it involves mixing airlines, and a terminal change that I probably can't trust on a tight schedule in winter.
ellisv 11mo ago
For tasks like planning travel I often am trying to optimize multiple goals at once. I might find cheaper flights on certain days but more expensive hotels. This is much easier on larger screens because you can view more information side by side.
asdff 11mo ago
It's not that you get a meaningfully better result. It is that you can open an arbitrary number of results and trivially compare them side by side. Essentially multitasking multiple concurrent searches and scenarios. Smartphones limit you to one view at a time on the screen and make it somewhat clumsy to flip through tabs in comparison.
leptons 11mo ago
I hope you don't think booking travel ends with the flights. There's so much more to getting the most out of a trip than the flight, or the hotel.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  That's the thing for us whose life is mostly "by the seat of their pants", there really isn't. You book the tickets, you go there, see what you feel like doing, do those things, and go home. Done that for all my travels more or less, never felt like I missed anything and had a blast most of the times. I still do everything important on a computer and wouldn't book the flight on a smartphone, but that probably says more about my age than anything else.
  - wingworks 11mo ago
    I mostly use a computer because you can get a better idea what is a good deal, and fits in my budget. If I had stacks of cash, I could easily see myself booking everything via my phone. But I'm too much of a penny pincher.. But I do often only pre-book the first night/s accom, then book the rest as I travel and know where I will be when. But I do travel with my laptop, and often will park up somewhere and hotspot it, to find that days accom. (+ I get cash back deals on computer)
  - tayo42 11mo ago
    I don't over plan trips, but I still want to make sure I'm not overpaying. There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around. Things like that. Also getting hotels or vacation rentals and go through the reviews and seeing which neighborhoods you want to stay in
    - embedding-shape 11mo ago
      > There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around. For me, not knowing those things and figuring them out on the spot is part of why I love vacations, and going through review of neighborhoods or figuring out the exact place where to stay would remove a lot of the fun.
      - tayo42 11mo ago
koyote 11mo ago
I could go into detail how being able to have a dozen tabs open almost always gives a better result than simply picking the first flight on google flights. But let's assume there's no difference: Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes? If you have the choice to use a real computer for this, then why not? It's not like booking a big trip is something you do while sitting on a bus. Then of course there's accommodation, itineraries, visas, trip research...
- lurking_swe 11mo ago
  just for the record, I completely agree that _research_ is way easier on a computer. But i take issue with this concern: > Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes? My iphone (safari) auto-fills almost all of those details. It’s also likely that semi-frequent travelers have an account with the airline in question, so passport and TSA precheck info is pre-saved too. It’s simply a non-issue in my experience.
  - saaaaaam 11mo ago
    Indeed. I often complete purchases via mobile because the experience is better. For example, using Apple Pay. The ability to have details auto-fill works on desktop, but it works far better on mobile I find. The idea of manually typing any of this stuff in is very old fashioned.
  - andyferris 11mo ago
    My personal experience is that Chrome on my PC is more reliable/predictable than Safari on my iPad. Now I am wondering if this is Safari/Chrome thing and not a mobile/desktop thing. Certainly if the autofill doesn't work and I do need to to type it in, the PC is way easier. I'm thinking international travel for 5 people - all my responsibility and I don't want to get held up half way across the world when no one has slept for a day, work visas beign contingent on correctness, etc.
moduspol 11mo ago
Even that presumes you already know when you’ll want to leave and come back. For me, I’ve got a vague idea, but it’ll depend on how much time I want to spend there. And that’ll be based on what I want to do, which may only be available certain days of the week or times of day. And that’s before factoring in the prices of those things relative to their availability and how much I want to do them. To figure all this out, I’m going to need to keep notes across several browser tabs, likely while communicating asynchronously with whoever else is going on the trip. All of this is dramatically easier with an actual computer.
chaseadam17 11mo ago
Dude, you've got to check every possible combination of departure and arrival dates from each different nearby airport then check everything again as one ways using different carriers then compare paying cash to using points then compare Airbnb to hotels then recheck the flights to make sure that paying slightly more for different dates or routes wouldn't be offset by saving more on the hotel... then you can book. Takes about 50 tabs.
- wyclif 11mo ago
  At this point, don't AI agents help a lot with this and diminish the need for the workflow you're describing?
  - Zanfa 11mo ago
    Why would you trust current gen AI to make decisions when paying thousands of dollars for flights and hotels? That’s an insane amount of risk to take.
  - whatevaa 11mo ago
    You will still need to verify their hallucinations.
cookiengineer 11mo ago
Use an iPhone or Macbook Pro, pay more. Use an Android or Linux laptop, pay less. Not kidding, pricing is based on these bullshit assumptions more than you might think. For the German market, for example, it's also cheaper to buy tickets on Thursday evening around 22:00-23:30. Paid around 400$ less for a 2k trip, multiple times, reproducibly, not depending on seasons or years.
raverbashing 11mo ago
Yes the results are pretty much all there on Google Flights But if you want to shuffle times/dates/different choices of flights to find the "best one" (which does not mean the cheapest one with weird connections)
javier2 11mo ago
This. its enough to check a couple of alternatives, the prices are nearly the same most of the time. If you can move dates for your travel, that is far more impactful, like if you have the option to avoid major holidays or such. Note that I am not in the US, and I do agree that it is much better to do research on my desktop!

by jdross 11mo ago

How often do you get a meaningfully better result than google.com/flights? Outside of booking with points, it's all basically the same thing and I can book on google on my phone in under a minute

dghlsakjg 11mo ago

I live in a place where I have to fly to a nearby bigger airport to go anywhere outside my province. In other words, everything is a compromise on routing, layovers and cost. When I lived in a big city, it was just timing and cost that mattered. Frequently it isn't that google flights on a phone doesn't find the same flight, its that it is much easier to figure out the tradeoffs with more screen real estate. E.g. I can see that a flight is cheaper, but it involves mixing airlines, and a terminal change that I probably can't trust on a tight schedule in winter.

ellisv 11mo ago

For tasks like planning travel I often am trying to optimize multiple goals at once. I might find cheaper flights on certain days but more expensive hotels. This is much easier on larger screens because you can view more information side by side.

asdff 11mo ago

It's not that you get a meaningfully better result. It is that you can open an arbitrary number of results and trivially compare them side by side. Essentially multitasking multiple concurrent searches and scenarios. Smartphones limit you to one view at a time on the screen and make it somewhat clumsy to flip through tabs in comparison.

leptons 11mo ago

I hope you don't think booking travel ends with the flights. There's so much more to getting the most out of a trip than the flight, or the hotel.

embedding-shape 11mo ago
That's the thing for us whose life is mostly "by the seat of their pants", there really isn't. You book the tickets, you go there, see what you feel like doing, do those things, and go home. Done that for all my travels more or less, never felt like I missed anything and had a blast most of the times. I still do everything important on a computer and wouldn't book the flight on a smartphone, but that probably says more about my age than anything else.
- wingworks 11mo ago
  I mostly use a computer because you can get a better idea what is a good deal, and fits in my budget. If I had stacks of cash, I could easily see myself booking everything via my phone. But I'm too much of a penny pincher.. But I do often only pre-book the first night/s accom, then book the rest as I travel and know where I will be when. But I do travel with my laptop, and often will park up somewhere and hotspot it, to find that days accom. (+ I get cash back deals on computer)
- tayo42 11mo ago
  I don't over plan trips, but I still want to make sure I'm not overpaying. There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around. Things like that. Also getting hotels or vacation rentals and go through the reviews and seeing which neighborhoods you want to stay in
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    > There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around. For me, not knowing those things and figuring them out on the spot is part of why I love vacations, and going through review of neighborhoods or figuring out the exact place where to stay would remove a lot of the fun.
    - tayo42 11mo ago

koyote 11mo ago

I could go into detail how being able to have a dozen tabs open almost always gives a better result than simply picking the first flight on google flights. But let's assume there's no difference: Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes? If you have the choice to use a real computer for this, then why not? It's not like booking a big trip is something you do while sitting on a bus. Then of course there's accommodation, itineraries, visas, trip research...

lurking_swe 11mo ago
just for the record, I completely agree that _research_ is way easier on a computer. But i take issue with this concern: > Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes? My iphone (safari) auto-fills almost all of those details. It’s also likely that semi-frequent travelers have an account with the airline in question, so passport and TSA precheck info is pre-saved too. It’s simply a non-issue in my experience.
- saaaaaam 11mo ago
  Indeed. I often complete purchases via mobile because the experience is better. For example, using Apple Pay. The ability to have details auto-fill works on desktop, but it works far better on mobile I find. The idea of manually typing any of this stuff in is very old fashioned.
- andyferris 11mo ago
  My personal experience is that Chrome on my PC is more reliable/predictable than Safari on my iPad. Now I am wondering if this is Safari/Chrome thing and not a mobile/desktop thing. Certainly if the autofill doesn't work and I do need to to type it in, the PC is way easier. I'm thinking international travel for 5 people - all my responsibility and I don't want to get held up half way across the world when no one has slept for a day, work visas beign contingent on correctness, etc.

moduspol 11mo ago

Even that presumes you already know when you’ll want to leave and come back. For me, I’ve got a vague idea, but it’ll depend on how much time I want to spend there. And that’ll be based on what I want to do, which may only be available certain days of the week or times of day. And that’s before factoring in the prices of those things relative to their availability and how much I want to do them. To figure all this out, I’m going to need to keep notes across several browser tabs, likely while communicating asynchronously with whoever else is going on the trip. All of this is dramatically easier with an actual computer.

chaseadam17 11mo ago

Dude, you've got to check every possible combination of departure and arrival dates from each different nearby airport then check everything again as one ways using different carriers then compare paying cash to using points then compare Airbnb to hotels then recheck the flights to make sure that paying slightly more for different dates or routes wouldn't be offset by saving more on the hotel... then you can book. Takes about 50 tabs.

wyclif 11mo ago
At this point, don't AI agents help a lot with this and diminish the need for the workflow you're describing?
- Zanfa 11mo ago
  Why would you trust current gen AI to make decisions when paying thousands of dollars for flights and hotels? That’s an insane amount of risk to take.
- whatevaa 11mo ago
  You will still need to verify their hallucinations.

cookiengineer 11mo ago

Use an iPhone or Macbook Pro, pay more. Use an Android or Linux laptop, pay less. Not kidding, pricing is based on these bullshit assumptions more than you might think. For the German market, for example, it's also cheaper to buy tickets on Thursday evening around 22:00-23:30. Paid around 400$ less for a 2k trip, multiple times, reproducibly, not depending on seasons or years.

raverbashing 11mo ago

Yes the results are pretty much all there on Google Flights But if you want to shuffle times/dates/different choices of flights to find the "best one" (which does not mean the cheapest one with weird connections)

javier2 11mo ago

This. its enough to check a couple of alternatives, the prices are nearly the same most of the time. If you can move dates for your travel, that is far more impactful, like if you have the option to avoid major holidays or such. Note that I am not in the US, and I do agree that it is much better to do research on my desktop!