5 ms·

Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]

26 points by adudley 18y ago

jgrahamc 18y ago
Hmm. I don't think the natural language input is a very good idea. It's very error prone and only works correctly if you actually know what language it supports. I tried it and it got confused. Also it didn't correctly recognize a three letter airport code that I used. To be frank I've found that Kayak has the best interface for doing this and there's no need to select which sites to search, etc. The interface here does not seem like an improvement. And maybe it's just me but when I hear 'peedo' I think paedophile and so this company sounds like its name is 'try paedo' to me.
- diN0bot 18y ago
  On the one hand I agree: I'd rather it popped up while I typed "Frankfurt, Germany" to let me disambiguate HHN and FRA, rather than open 20 tabs that all said "do not service that airport". I didn't realize HHN was the wrong code until nothing was found, whereas other sites (eg Kayak) let me disambiguate immediate. On the other hand: not using a date picker is awesome. I've been using nl date parsing on my own sites lately and it's The Best.
  - jsrn 18y ago
    ha! I just tried to find a flight from Frankfurt to Moscow and also wasn't successful because of your software insisting on 'Frankfurt/Hahn(HHN)'. Please fix this fast! I also tried 'From Frankfurt/Main' and 'From FRA' but wasn't understood:-( Apart from that, I like the 'command line approach to finding flights a lot. Suggestion: Why not open the third party travel sites (Orbitz etc.) in a Javascript-Window (instead of a new browser window). Then I tried to report the airport issue to you by clicking on the feedback button on the right. After entering my feedback, upon clicking on 'Submit', the feedback window showed me something like 'there was a problem sending your message...' I tried again, to no avail - sadly, the feedback form didn't tell me what went wrong or what to do next, it only offered me to add a 'sad' emotion to my message. Which wasn't of much use, because the 'problem sending the message' prevented me from showing you my sadness (Ironically, the third party company that makes your feedback system has named itself 'getsatisfaction'). Well, I closed the feedback window and found another way to post my feedback: http://getsatisfaction.com/wundrbar/topics/i_didnt_want_to_post_this_here_but_your_feedback_thing_on_the_right_continued_to_give_me_errors_there http://getsatisfaction.com/wundrbar/topics/i_didnt_want_to_p... I only had to create an account, submit a fake email address, enter a new password (twice) make up a new username and enter a captcha. After that, I had to enter the password again (twice), because it has to be at least 6 characters long. And, of course, enter the captcha again. After that, I was allowed to post my comment! :-)
    - adudley 18y ago
      sorry you had such a hard time leaving feedback. we've been having sporadic issues with getsatisfaction lately. feel free to email any feedback directly to us at info[at]tripeedo[dot]com. we'll also fix the frankfurt issue. thanks for the tip. :)
    - ngrandy 18y ago
      frankfurt/main is now the top match for 'frankfurt'. :) the way to specify an airport if the top match is not right is just to keep typing. eg: london => london all airports (lon); london gatw => london, gatwick (lgw); lon hea => london, heathrow (lhr) similarly: sa fr => san francisco; sa di => san diego typing frankfurt/main didn't work because the slash was confusing the interpreter. i'm fixing that right now.
sammyo 18y ago
Also opening a couple dozen new browser windows is a good way to ensure your site is only used once.
- kirubakaran 18y ago
  Normally I'd agree, but in this case it is exactly what I wanted!
electromagnetic 18y ago
I don't like the pop ups, I want comparable data not 20 different pages, all of which I have to dig through before I get my information.
- adudley 18y ago
  agreed-- but until airlines open up their fare data via APIs, users can only truly get all data by actually searching individual sites. even meta-search sites like Kayak don't have access to all fares, which is why results often vary between the various sites. tripeedo is a step toward making that process more simple.
  - Jasber 18y ago
    What about Open Travel (http://www.opentravel.org/ http://www.opentravel.org/)? Its a format being supported by some of the major players in the travel industry: http://www.opentravel.org/Join/Members.aspx http://www.opentravel.org/Join/Members.aspx I am working in a startup that aggregates rental car rates, similar to Tripeedo using OpenTravel. Its all XML based, and can be a PITA--but the result are a better product and a better user experience.
    - potatolicious 18y ago
      I doubt this sort of scheme will gain real traction - much of the airline industry's scheme involves building consumer loyalty (e.g. "I always fly with XYZ Air, they have decent prices and I don't have to hunt around hard to use websites"). An open API destroys this, and makes airfare even more of a commodity than it already is. I've heard anecdotal stories about Kayak being constantly blocked by the sites they scrape.
      - Jasber 18y ago
        Sites like Tripeedo are not geared towards loyal customers-they're geared towards bargain shoppers. OTA is gaining real traction. By my count about 1/3rd of the companies listed on Tripeedo are members of OTA, while many more unofficially support some derivative of it. Most of these companies don't have open API's--they are very private and require NDA's and partnership agreements. There are systems in place to handle use-cases like this. API's are in place for travel agents to search available rates and creating bookings. This is essentially the same concept. Kayak is justifiably being blocked because they're scraping sites. If they had partnership agreements in place this wouldn't happen.
utnick 18y ago
I for one welcome our new meta meta meta travel search engine overlords. :) It worked really well for me. I loved the natural language search, one of the things that beats me down with travel search engines is having to select my date on their little calenders and then figuring out the airport codes of the airports I want to go into. The 2 dozen browser tabs were pretty neat, on a low memory machine that might get annoying, but for my pc it was smooth. One recommendation I have on the natural language sort is to have it recognize times of day i want to leave like morning, afternoon, etc
- adudley 18y ago
  glad you like it, and thanks for the suggestion. time of day is a parameter we'll definitely be adding soon. (it's actually one of the trickier ones to implement).
anthonyrubin 18y ago
If you are going to create a new site in this space it has to be at least as good as Kayak. Tripeedo fails horribly. As others have mentioned, a site that simply opens numerous windows with the results from each site is not adequate.
- briansmith 18y ago
  Tripeedo has two obvious advantages over Kayak: (1) It can help you search discount airlines like JetBlue and Southwest. (2) It will show you fairs that are exclusive to the airlines' websites. (I don't think I've ever run into a situation where the airline's website had a price significantly lower than what was on Kayak but I've heard rumblings that it happens.)
  - jpwagner 18y ago
    I agree with both of these thoughts, but where is tripeedo when kayak partners with all of these? i recently went to hong kong and searched all of these engines and got discouraging prices. I did one search on Cathay Pacific's website and saved close to 40%. I'm almost positive you won't see this with domestic flights (for now.)
    - potatolicious 18y ago
      They won't partner I don't think. Airlines dislike fare competition, it drives profits down and worsens their already-bad financial situation. From the couple guys I know who work in that industry, there is real push-back against aggregation sites. You also provided the evidence of this yourself - I too have had a lot of trouble with Kayak recently, and it seems their ability to scrape accurate fares is severely compromised, and I suspect that airlines have some hand in this.
kirubakaran 18y ago
Awesome UI. I'm blown away.
jncraton 18y ago
This site doesn't load in Chrome for me (aw snap error). Is anyone else getting that? I'm running Chrome 2 on Windows 7.
anuraggoel 18y ago
FF3 and IE7's pop up blockers prevent access to search results. This is default browser behavior. How many people know or care about disabling pop up blocking for individual sites (or changing any defaults, for that matter)?
diN0bot 18y ago
i need tehcnical support: on firefox 3 it first blocked pop-ups, so i enabled and got a spew of opened tabs with no search results found (see my other comment). when i tried to search again ff keeps blocking the pop-ups, even though i keep enabling them. !!! nuts, i really want to buy cheap plane tickets :P i'll keep trying.
- ngrandy 18y ago
  this sounds like a firefox issue. if you choose to enable popups for tripeedo.com, then firefox should remember that choice. let me know if you find otherwise...
kevTheDev 18y ago
i don't seem to get the popups :(
yef 18y ago
I had a frustrating experience with the site. Took me longer to get what I wanted than if I had gone to Kayak (the market leader) or Jetblue (that normally runs my best fare). What, if I may ask, was the vision and rationale behind this approach?
pogos 18y ago
I'd never thought someone would compete with Orbitz.
- smanek 18y ago
  Orbitz, et. al don't actually do their own search. They outsource all the real work to ITA Software in Cambridge, MA - who actually run all the searches on a large cluster of servers running Common Lisp.
khangtoh 18y ago
Disappointing .. Doesn't really work with all the airline sites that it has on main page.
- ngrandy 18y ago
  yeah, we need to fix or warn about that better. the reason that the airline searches don't work reliably is that most airlines only serve a few airports, and if you search for airports they don't serve, the result is not always handled gracefully. some airlines prompt for a known airport - some just give up and display an error. to counter this, we would need to maintain a list of all airports served by each airline, and only let users launch valid searches to the airline sites. i think that is good from a usability perspective, and it's definitely doable, but maintaining it is time-consuming. that's why we haven't done it yet. but, we may well get to it soon.
prakash 18y ago
once I selected all "travel sites" & all "airlines", i got a warning "you are about to open 20 tabs" and I promptly closed the tab. I don't like the idea of opening that many tabs or the fact that I need to select individual airlines or sites. I rather get all the data in 1 page first and then filter by removing airlines/ sites. I really like the cleartrip guys when it comes to travel/ticket booking. It's mostly India only but check out the UI & usability -- really nice. http://cleartrip.com http://cleartrip.com
jbrun 18y ago
That is a great site, beats all others hands down. Pop-ups suck, but still beats the other sites. I love entering the date in words.
jbrun 18y ago
Is the parsing algorithm for the location and date proprietary or is it based on something existing? If so, what?
- ngrandy 18y ago
  it's custom built. the site is rails hosted on heroku. ruby already had some decent time/date parsing, and there is a great natural language time/date library called chronic that helps out too. but otherwise it's custom-built.
jsdalton 18y ago
What I was really hoping to find here was a travel search site that let me find cheap fares without necessarily having firm dates in mind. To me, Tripeedo just puts the functionality of kayak in a slightly different UI, as opposed to offering a new way to interact with the data itself.
- ngrandy 18y ago
  increasingly, travel sites are letting people do those kind of flexible dates search, which is a promising trend. you're right, for the time being tripeedo is primarily a different UI (though one we feel is more user-friendly), along with the benefit of only entering trip details once.
gamble 18y ago
Wow, that was annoying. Opening two dozen browser windows without warning, half of which contain errors? Not cool.
- ngrandy 18y ago
  we try to warn (in 2 ways on the homepage) that popups will be opened. how could we make it more clear in a user-friendly way?
mcargian 18y ago
Most meta travel sites like this get their commissions one of two ways, either a commission for booking a flight, or a click through commission to the travel site. It is in tripeedo's best interest to open as many popups as possible. They are adding little to no value on the flight pricing. Thumbs down.
markessien 18y ago
Yikes, that was an awful experience. I didn't know it would open tabs, so I selected all items. And of all the tabs it opened, almost none gave me any useful information.
- ngrandy 18y ago
  sorry about that - we try to make it clear that new windows open, by saying so in the instructions on the left, and also displaying a message when more than 5 airfare providers are selected. how could we make it more clear in a user-friendly way?
  - markessien 18y ago
    Most critical to me was that most of the airlines displayed there were not relevant to me. I usually use about 5 airlines (and I think most people do so also), and I KNOW the airlines that I use. They are Air France, KLM, Lufthansa, Turkish Airlines and EasyJet. Your site would be VERY useful if it would send queries to those particular airlines and open tabs after running a correct search on all those airlines. But your site is useless with the America-Centric airlines you have there. My suggestion would be to also add a natual language processor where I can type in the airlines I fly with, and this this info is immediately saved in a cookie for the next time I use the site. Also, when I start the search, an account should immediately be created for me.
kin 18y ago
Site works fine for me in Chrome. A lot of travel agencies have systems that actually can check all airlines for their flight information. I would suggest you look into that and run off of a hybrid between server and queries instead of waiting for an API and in the meantime tell people something is easy when in fact it really isn't. Most of my queries return errors on the pop-ups.
aneesh 18y ago
First we had aggregators like Kayak, Expedia and Farecast. That's clearly too much work, so now with Tripeedo we have aggregators for the aggregators!
utefan001 18y ago
Seriously, I love the pop ups. I believe you have to respect the boundaries of different companies (jetblue, southwest, etc). The amount of time that this saves on my flight purchasing is huge. Well done!

26 points by adudley 18y ago

Hmm. I don't think the natural language input is a very good idea. It's very error prone and only works correctly if you actually know what language it supports. I tried it and it got confused. Also it didn't correctly recognize a three letter airport code that I used. To be frank I've found that Kayak has the best interface for doing this and there's no need to select which sites to search, etc. The interface here does not seem like an improvement. And maybe it's just me but when I hear 'peedo' I think paedophile and so this company sounds like its name is 'try paedo' to me.

diN0bot 18y ago
On the one hand I agree: I'd rather it popped up while I typed "Frankfurt, Germany" to let me disambiguate HHN and FRA, rather than open 20 tabs that all said "do not service that airport". I didn't realize HHN was the wrong code until nothing was found, whereas other sites (eg Kayak) let me disambiguate immediate. On the other hand: not using a date picker is awesome. I've been using nl date parsing on my own sites lately and it's The Best.
- jsrn 18y ago
  ha! I just tried to find a flight from Frankfurt to Moscow and also wasn't successful because of your software insisting on 'Frankfurt/Hahn(HHN)'. Please fix this fast! I also tried 'From Frankfurt/Main' and 'From FRA' but wasn't understood:-( Apart from that, I like the 'command line approach to finding flights a lot. Suggestion: Why not open the third party travel sites (Orbitz etc.) in a Javascript-Window (instead of a new browser window). Then I tried to report the airport issue to you by clicking on the feedback button on the right. After entering my feedback, upon clicking on 'Submit', the feedback window showed me something like 'there was a problem sending your message...' I tried again, to no avail - sadly, the feedback form didn't tell me what went wrong or what to do next, it only offered me to add a 'sad' emotion to my message. Which wasn't of much use, because the 'problem sending the message' prevented me from showing you my sadness (Ironically, the third party company that makes your feedback system has named itself 'getsatisfaction'). Well, I closed the feedback window and found another way to post my feedback: http://getsatisfaction.com/wundrbar/topics/i_didnt_want_to_post_this_here_but_your_feedback_thing_on_the_right_continued_to_give_me_errors_there http://getsatisfaction.com/wundrbar/topics/i_didnt_want_to_p... I only had to create an account, submit a fake email address, enter a new password (twice) make up a new username and enter a captcha. After that, I had to enter the password again (twice), because it has to be at least 6 characters long. And, of course, enter the captcha again. After that, I was allowed to post my comment! :-)
  - adudley 18y ago
    sorry you had such a hard time leaving feedback. we've been having sporadic issues with getsatisfaction lately. feel free to email any feedback directly to us at info[at]tripeedo[dot]com. we'll also fix the frankfurt issue. thanks for the tip. :)
  - ngrandy 18y ago
    frankfurt/main is now the top match for 'frankfurt'. :) the way to specify an airport if the top match is not right is just to keep typing. eg: london => london all airports (lon); london gatw => london, gatwick (lgw); lon hea => london, heathrow (lhr) similarly: sa fr => san francisco; sa di => san diego typing frankfurt/main didn't work because the slash was confusing the interpreter. i'm fixing that right now.

sammyo 18y ago

Also opening a couple dozen new browser windows is a good way to ensure your site is only used once.

kirubakaran 18y ago
Normally I'd agree, but in this case it is exactly what I wanted!

electromagnetic 18y ago

I don't like the pop ups, I want comparable data not 20 different pages, all of which I have to dig through before I get my information.

adudley 18y ago
agreed-- but until airlines open up their fare data via APIs, users can only truly get all data by actually searching individual sites. even meta-search sites like Kayak don't have access to all fares, which is why results often vary between the various sites. tripeedo is a step toward making that process more simple.
- Jasber 18y ago
  What about Open Travel (http://www.opentravel.org/ http://www.opentravel.org/)? Its a format being supported by some of the major players in the travel industry: http://www.opentravel.org/Join/Members.aspx http://www.opentravel.org/Join/Members.aspx I am working in a startup that aggregates rental car rates, similar to Tripeedo using OpenTravel. Its all XML based, and can be a PITA--but the result are a better product and a better user experience.
  - potatolicious 18y ago
    I doubt this sort of scheme will gain real traction - much of the airline industry's scheme involves building consumer loyalty (e.g. "I always fly with XYZ Air, they have decent prices and I don't have to hunt around hard to use websites"). An open API destroys this, and makes airfare even more of a commodity than it already is. I've heard anecdotal stories about Kayak being constantly blocked by the sites they scrape.
    - Jasber 18y ago
      Sites like Tripeedo are not geared towards loyal customers-they're geared towards bargain shoppers. OTA is gaining real traction. By my count about 1/3rd of the companies listed on Tripeedo are members of OTA, while many more unofficially support some derivative of it. Most of these companies don't have open API's--they are very private and require NDA's and partnership agreements. There are systems in place to handle use-cases like this. API's are in place for travel agents to search available rates and creating bookings. This is essentially the same concept. Kayak is justifiably being blocked because they're scraping sites. If they had partnership agreements in place this wouldn't happen.

utnick 18y ago

I for one welcome our new meta meta meta travel search engine overlords. :) It worked really well for me. I loved the natural language search, one of the things that beats me down with travel search engines is having to select my date on their little calenders and then figuring out the airport codes of the airports I want to go into. The 2 dozen browser tabs were pretty neat, on a low memory machine that might get annoying, but for my pc it was smooth. One recommendation I have on the natural language sort is to have it recognize times of day i want to leave like morning, afternoon, etc

adudley 18y ago
glad you like it, and thanks for the suggestion. time of day is a parameter we'll definitely be adding soon. (it's actually one of the trickier ones to implement).

anthonyrubin 18y ago

If you are going to create a new site in this space it has to be at least as good as Kayak. Tripeedo fails horribly. As others have mentioned, a site that simply opens numerous windows with the results from each site is not adequate.

briansmith 18y ago
Tripeedo has two obvious advantages over Kayak: (1) It can help you search discount airlines like JetBlue and Southwest. (2) It will show you fairs that are exclusive to the airlines' websites. (I don't think I've ever run into a situation where the airline's website had a price significantly lower than what was on Kayak but I've heard rumblings that it happens.)
- jpwagner 18y ago
  I agree with both of these thoughts, but where is tripeedo when kayak partners with all of these? i recently went to hong kong and searched all of these engines and got discouraging prices. I did one search on Cathay Pacific's website and saved close to 40%. I'm almost positive you won't see this with domestic flights (for now.)
  - potatolicious 18y ago
    They won't partner I don't think. Airlines dislike fare competition, it drives profits down and worsens their already-bad financial situation. From the couple guys I know who work in that industry, there is real push-back against aggregation sites. You also provided the evidence of this yourself - I too have had a lot of trouble with Kayak recently, and it seems their ability to scrape accurate fares is severely compromised, and I suspect that airlines have some hand in this.

kirubakaran 18y ago

Awesome UI. I'm blown away.

jncraton 18y ago

This site doesn't load in Chrome for me (aw snap error). Is anyone else getting that? I'm running Chrome 2 on Windows 7.

anuraggoel 18y ago

FF3 and IE7's pop up blockers prevent access to search results. This is default browser behavior. How many people know or care about disabling pop up blocking for individual sites (or changing any defaults, for that matter)?

diN0bot 18y ago

i need tehcnical support: on firefox 3 it first blocked pop-ups, so i enabled and got a spew of opened tabs with no search results found (see my other comment). when i tried to search again ff keeps blocking the pop-ups, even though i keep enabling them. !!! nuts, i really want to buy cheap plane tickets :P i'll keep trying.

ngrandy 18y ago
this sounds like a firefox issue. if you choose to enable popups for tripeedo.com, then firefox should remember that choice. let me know if you find otherwise...

kevTheDev 18y ago

i don't seem to get the popups :(

yef 18y ago

I had a frustrating experience with the site. Took me longer to get what I wanted than if I had gone to Kayak (the market leader) or Jetblue (that normally runs my best fare). What, if I may ask, was the vision and rationale behind this approach?

pogos 18y ago

I'd never thought someone would compete with Orbitz.

smanek 18y ago
Orbitz, et. al don't actually do their own search. They outsource all the real work to ITA Software in Cambridge, MA - who actually run all the searches on a large cluster of servers running Common Lisp.

khangtoh 18y ago

Disappointing .. Doesn't really work with all the airline sites that it has on main page.

ngrandy 18y ago
yeah, we need to fix or warn about that better. the reason that the airline searches don't work reliably is that most airlines only serve a few airports, and if you search for airports they don't serve, the result is not always handled gracefully. some airlines prompt for a known airport - some just give up and display an error. to counter this, we would need to maintain a list of all airports served by each airline, and only let users launch valid searches to the airline sites. i think that is good from a usability perspective, and it's definitely doable, but maintaining it is time-consuming. that's why we haven't done it yet. but, we may well get to it soon.

prakash 18y ago

once I selected all "travel sites" & all "airlines", i got a warning "you are about to open 20 tabs" and I promptly closed the tab. I don't like the idea of opening that many tabs or the fact that I need to select individual airlines or sites. I rather get all the data in 1 page first and then filter by removing airlines/ sites. I really like the cleartrip guys when it comes to travel/ticket booking. It's mostly India only but check out the UI & usability -- really nice. http://cleartrip.com http://cleartrip.com

jbrun 18y ago

That is a great site, beats all others hands down. Pop-ups suck, but still beats the other sites. I love entering the date in words.

jbrun 18y ago

Is the parsing algorithm for the location and date proprietary or is it based on something existing? If so, what?

ngrandy 18y ago
it's custom built. the site is rails hosted on heroku. ruby already had some decent time/date parsing, and there is a great natural language time/date library called chronic that helps out too. but otherwise it's custom-built.

jsdalton 18y ago

What I was really hoping to find here was a travel search site that let me find cheap fares without necessarily having firm dates in mind. To me, Tripeedo just puts the functionality of kayak in a slightly different UI, as opposed to offering a new way to interact with the data itself.

ngrandy 18y ago
increasingly, travel sites are letting people do those kind of flexible dates search, which is a promising trend. you're right, for the time being tripeedo is primarily a different UI (though one we feel is more user-friendly), along with the benefit of only entering trip details once.

gamble 18y ago

Wow, that was annoying. Opening two dozen browser windows without warning, half of which contain errors? Not cool.

ngrandy 18y ago
we try to warn (in 2 ways on the homepage) that popups will be opened. how could we make it more clear in a user-friendly way?

mcargian 18y ago

Most meta travel sites like this get their commissions one of two ways, either a commission for booking a flight, or a click through commission to the travel site. It is in tripeedo's best interest to open as many popups as possible. They are adding little to no value on the flight pricing. Thumbs down.

markessien 18y ago

Yikes, that was an awful experience. I didn't know it would open tabs, so I selected all items. And of all the tabs it opened, almost none gave me any useful information.

ngrandy 18y ago
sorry about that - we try to make it clear that new windows open, by saying so in the instructions on the left, and also displaying a message when more than 5 airfare providers are selected. how could we make it more clear in a user-friendly way?
- markessien 18y ago
  Most critical to me was that most of the airlines displayed there were not relevant to me. I usually use about 5 airlines (and I think most people do so also), and I KNOW the airlines that I use. They are Air France, KLM, Lufthansa, Turkish Airlines and EasyJet. Your site would be VERY useful if it would send queries to those particular airlines and open tabs after running a correct search on all those airlines. But your site is useless with the America-Centric airlines you have there. My suggestion would be to also add a natual language processor where I can type in the airlines I fly with, and this this info is immediately saved in a cookie for the next time I use the site. Also, when I start the search, an account should immediately be created for me.

kin 18y ago

Site works fine for me in Chrome. A lot of travel agencies have systems that actually can check all airlines for their flight information. I would suggest you look into that and run off of a hybrid between server and queries instead of waiting for an API and in the meantime tell people something is easy when in fact it really isn't. Most of my queries return errors on the pop-ups.

aneesh 18y ago

First we had aggregators like Kayak, Expedia and Farecast. That's clearly too much work, so now with Tripeedo we have aggregators for the aggregators!

utefan001 18y ago

Seriously, I love the pop ups. I believe you have to respect the boundaries of different companies (jetblue, southwest, etc). The amount of time that this saves on my flight purchasing is huge. Well done!