9 ms·

Adioso is reinventing travel search. Check these never-before-possible searches

229 points by tomhoward 14y ago

thaumaturgy 14y ago
Wow guys, great job. This is how search is supposed to work in 2013, and you're the first ones there.
mech4bg 14y ago
Very impressive stuff, congrats.
brianbreslin 14y ago
great now you're making my wanderlust even worse! ;-)
DigitalSea 14y ago
Whoa. I am super impressed. I thought the title was a bit grandiose, but the ability to perform advanced almost natural like sentence searches that were showcased in the blog post is phenomenal. Expect these guys to get snapped up by the likes of Google or Facebook sometime soon. It looks like 2013 is shaping up to be the year of search especially with the release of Facebook's Open Graph search which operates basically the same.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  > Expect these guys to get snapped up by the likes of Google or Facebook sometime soon. That would be sad.
  - DigitalSea 14y ago
    I am only assuming that's what will happen. If you're innovating in the search space like Google have been doing so for a long time now and of late, Facebook then you're going to attract attention of the bigger players who are trying to gain bigger footholds in a particular niche. Hopefully they don't get acquired and are super successful. Time will tell.
- rjh29 14y ago
  The design is good but the implementation is very slow (for me at least) and the kind of natural language they are processing is trivial. Driverless cars are 'phenomenal'. Regular expressions, not so much.
nreece 14y ago
Adioso is fantastic! A shout out to Tom, Fenn and the team. Great work guys.
ffumarola 14y ago
I rarely say "Wow." I just shared this with 5 people in less than 2 minutes. This is EXACTLY how travel search should be. EXACTLY. I hate the rigidity of having to select days. And then mess with 2/3 day flexible windows on both ends to find cheaper fares. "Travel to Brazil next month for 14 days" is exactly how my vacation planning works, so that's how I want to search it. I have a lot of praise. Only negative is the site is really slow (at least right now).
- ffumarola 14y ago
  Following up on my search: Sao Paulo, BR to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US early March 1 stop return 26 days later I am going on about 10 minutes now with no results. So it isn't slow, it is unusable. Also, it seems to make me choose either direct, 1 stop, or 2+ stops. Which seems odd. Why can't I leave that open-ended so I can look for best price?
hamey 14y ago
Awesome stuff! Great work.
bmmayer1 14y ago
Hey guys-- I LOVE your product but I consistently get way-slower-than-it-should-be load times on all your pages and searches. Just now I got a 502 Bad Gateway. Looks like you have some growing pains, which is great, but I highly recommend investing in a cloud server :)
- ekianjo 14y ago
  Yes, the search is very, very slow. Here from Japan it took at least one minute to get the results of a search. That's "fail" for a service like that. Too bad since the options for search are interesting, but it's way too slow for me to consider it usable.
  - rustynails77 14y ago
    As a long term user with no vested interest in Adioso, it's normally fairly quick (ie. a few seconds at most). It's a great website - i've used it for a few years now - I think almost since day 1 :)
- mctx 14y ago
  Agreed - it's a beautiful site, but way too slow. I get the following results on a search: Adioso Wingtip 31035 ms, Expedia 82331 ms, Cheapoair 38141 ms And the home page takes about 20-30 seconds to load. I'd love to hear about Adioso's backend - anyone from the company here to discuss it? Do you have any caching?
  - tomhoward 14y ago
    Yeah I'm a co-founder, though not an engineer - they're all busy spinning up more servers :) We'll be writing more posts about the core tech in coming weeks, but feel free to let us know what you'd most like to know about.
    - mctx 14y ago
      I've been doing some work with AWS/Heroku recently - just interested in if you're using a cloud service, VPS or physical servers, and what kind of tech powers the site. I'm looking forward to reading more posts and using the service when it's a bit snappier!
est 14y ago
This is fantastic. can we search something like this? Leaving in 3 days to a coastal city speaking English with hotel room prices from x to y with a beach window and a swimming pool.
- heyitsnick 14y ago
  Sounds more like a hotel search than a flight search.
  - est 14y ago
    They are often used together.
    - dagw 14y ago
      Yea, what would be really great would be to be able to put in a total budget for flight plus hotel. I'd love to be able to search for flight to large European city sometime in September with 4 nights at a central 3-5 star hotel for a total of less than $X. That would be a killer feature.
bsimpson 14y ago
I think your iconography is backwards: mobile phones have taught people that a target cursor means "I am here." You should use that for the From, and perhaps the Place icon you're currently using for From instead for To. Also, your filters should be smart enough to enforce their own constraints. I should never have to wait until the results page to get this: "Please reduce the range of trip lengths you are searching for, and we'll be able to find you results." For the record, I got a 502 Bad Gateway nginx on one search results page, but it went away on refresh. I like the ideas you guys are bringing to the table (and the personality of your announcement). Not only are the searches you've demoed here clever, but the filters (afternoon flights shorter than N hours) are nicely integrated. Scrolling feels a bit janky though. Good luck!
- wernah 14y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I wrestled with the iconography for a while. I know the instance your talking about (old google maps mobile used it for 'I am here') and was wondering if anyone was still conditioned to that. I'm not sure who else uses a crosshair icon to good effect. Daniel - Adioso Interface Designer
  - bsimpson 14y ago
    I think it is Google Maps that I'm thinking of, but Google Maps had damn near 100% mobile marketshare until this year.
sabj 14y ago
Have enjoyed watching Adioso develop and evolve over time, continuing to improve. Good job team. But, for me, the lack of additional airline data renders it completely unusable still, to have so many missing - I just can't get the whole picture price OR schedule-wise. I always felt that travel search was a big pain point that I was invested in solving. It also has some very obnoxious data lockdowns after scale. Anyone here have a ready blueprint for some great resources to test and hack around different travel search and booking engines with helpful APIs? I know some offer odds and ends... Everything is running extremely sluggishly for me right now - including the wingtip time reported on the page? - dunno if HN is a contributor but FYI! Totally unusable even vs. doing month-wide ITA Matrix searches.
- deanclatworthy 14y ago
  It seems as if they only search Expedia, judging by the graph's label at the top. Even still, it's missing many cheap and budget airlines. Whilst I commend them for letting me search over a period of time using natural language, I'd rather spend the time searching individual days on a search engine that has more sources.
  - tomhoward 14y ago
    Not just Expedia at all. The progress indicator above the calendar chart shows that we hit Expedia, Cheapoair and Adioso's own Wingtip engine. Wingtip has most low-cost airlines across most of the world. See http://adioso.com/help/coverage http://adioso.com/help/coverage
    - waitwhat 14y ago
      No RyanAir is a bit of a problem, and I'm failing to get EasyJet results to show on some routes (e.g. LGW-TLL)
    - deanclatworthy 14y ago
      +1 for Ryanair (even though they are an awful company). You are also missing norwegian which pretty much is the go-to budget airline for anyone living in the Nordics/Scandanvaia (& Baltics).
toast0 14y ago
To be a grumpy old man, I think these type of searches were possible in 2009. http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/03/11/how-to-find-cheap-tickets-with-flexible-date-search/ http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/03/11/how-to-find-cheap... Blame the US Department of Transportation for flexible date searches going away; DOT was requiring headline prices to include all taxes and fees included, but you need to know the full route details to calculate those; and flexible date search was based on fare rules. I hope these guys don't get caught up in that, because flexible searches are awesome.
catsinpants 14y ago
What's the difference between these queries and the ones already available on ITA Matrix?
- jpatokal 14y ago
  ITA is by aviation geeks for aviation geeks. Now I'm totally happy to punch in "MEL LHR EK+ X:KUL", but most normal humans would prefer "Melbourne to London on Emirates with stopover in Kuala Lumpur". Also, ITA has zero support for more open-ended queries beyond limited date ranges, which is what Adioso is focusing on.
casca 14y ago
I've been running searches like this using http://matrix.itasoftware.com http://matrix.itasoftware.com for years but I've built up my own lists of what constitutes "Eastern Europe" and "US West Coast". ITA provides software for the airline industry so has high-speed connections - anyone know what system they're using to get the flight data? This could be a great tool that allows people to do powerful, meaningful searches that have been limited to more technical folk. The business model is there, the big question is whether the queries are allowed to run long enough to find the best results.
- sushi 14y ago
  I believe Matrix uses ITA which was recently acquired by Google http://www.google.com/press/ita/comp.html http://www.google.com/press/ita/comp.html
  - jaredsohn 14y ago
    I don't think you understood the GP's question. Obviously matrix.itasoftware.com has an affiliation with itasoftware.com. :)
- deanclatworthy 14y ago
  I've never found a cheaper flight using Matrix. It must be heavily skewed with the US or missing a lot of European airlines.
  - nekojima 14y ago
    This site is the maximum you should pay, as its what travel agents & aggragators pull data from. I've regular found cheaper flights from onetravel.com, but I use the Matrix site to find flights (for years now), as all available flights & code-shares are usually on there. Some rare exceptions. I normally flight to/from or in Asia and any airline I care to fly, except for a few that only sell on their own website, are listed on the Matrix site.
  - wingerlang 14y ago
    I used matrix (the ios app is great!) and I found it had the cheapest prices and best search, no competition (sweden to japan)
natch 14y ago
Please make it more clear whether the results are round trip or not. The best way to do this is to put a big ROUND TRIP right next to the price, instead of making us guess. I understand the price is shown in a box that encompasses two flights, but I don't know if this is a design mistake, trickery, or an actual RT price. It's good to be more clear than you think you need to be, when it comes to stuff like showing prices to fickle comparison shoppers. Nice stuff though! I look forward to using it when the load isn't so heavy as it seems to be right now. And please don't sell out to someone (cough, Yahoo!) who has a history of cutting the features that users love.
natch 14y ago
Please make it more clear whether the results are round trip or not. The best way to do this is to put a big ROUND TRIP right next to the price, instead of making us guess. I understand the price is shown in a box that encompasses two flights, but I don't know if this is a design mistake, trickery, or an actual RT price. It's good to be more clear than you think you need to be, when it comes to stuff like showing prices to fickle comparison shoppers. Nice stuff though! I look forward to using it when the load isn't so heavy as it seems to be right now. And please don't sell out to someone (cough, Yahoo!) who has a history of cutting the features that users love.
benjaminwootton 14y ago
On a Galaxy S2, the popup is too big and its hard to find the close button. When I found it and clicked on Gdansk, Kiev started loading but then hung.
cj 14y ago
I've been using Google Flights (http://google.com/flights http://google.com/flights) lately, which lets you graph prices depending on departure date and length of stay. Click "flexible dates" in the date-picker. Extremely useful and fast. Seems like adioso is trying to do something similar. Really well designed, but it seems like your servers are stressed with the load right now. I'm looking forward to trying it for my next trip :)
- username3 14y ago
  You should try http://hipmunk.com http://hipmunk.com if you like Google Flights.
  - cj 14y ago
    I have used hipmunk, but Google flights is faster and has better flexible date search.
jakozaur 14y ago
Kudos for determination! http://tomhoward.co/part-1-reality-check http://tomhoward.co/part-1-reality-check http://tomhoward.co/part-2-stunts http://tomhoward.co/part-2-stunts
JacobAldridge 14y ago
I'm a big fan of the Adioso story, and have learnt so much from their experience (even though our Australian-based travel businesses are only superficially similar). I think it will take some time for people to realise that the geography of their real world travel conversations ("ever done South-East Asia?", "I'd love to see Eastern Europe!") can be used in travel searches where traditionally we've had to restrict ourselves to countries, or even cities. As that transition is made, it will open up a whole wonderful world of experiences for people - and hopefully with the corresponding business success for Adioso.
contingencies 14y ago
As someone who ran a travel startup in mainland China for a few years, forgive me for being unimpressed. Here's what happened. I loaded the page and consistently expected to see something impressive to justify the title, but only got: - Source/Destination detection - (DateJS style...) natural language temporal specification What is so impressive about that? It's not even multilingual. Does it do typo detection? Does it do non-airline routes? Does it do passport/visa law interpretation? Embassy/agent/border point locations, open times and fees/currencies for visa acquisition? Black market vs. theoretical currency conversions? Credit card acceptance? Processing times? Time-of-day detection and night-time travel warnings? You could hire me as a once off or occasional consultant for some more cheap ideas and reality-checks (full stack engineer from AU, previously lived US, so not ignorant of performance issues or your team cultures, either) or you could continue retreading old ground. Either way, there's a lot of the latter left to do before impressive happens. Oh yeah... and the slow thing really is a problem. All I can think is that you are scraping data from many sources, because for the query I ran, there is exactly 1 (one) carrier, and a fixed schedule, with exactly 1 (one) price per standard, linear fare-period. There is no excuse for a non-instant response, unless your architecture is somehow borked.
- tomhoward 14y ago
  The features we're showcasing are: - flexibility on dates ("mid July for 10 to 15 days") - broadness on destinations ("Southeast Asia", "Western Europe", "California") - non-geographic searches ("Somewhere warm") - a UI that supports these flexible results. No it's not perfect. Yes it's slow. But no-one else has succeeded in building a product like this - largely because of the limitations in the 40+ year-old travel industry infrastructure. We're determined to find a way to break through that and make this work.
  - contingencies 14y ago
    > flexibility on dates ("mid July for 10 to 15 days") Leave and return date flexibility exists within sites like Kayak, I use it all the time. Though it would be nice to make it more flexible, I agree, but this is not a new or killer feature. > - broadness on destinations ("Southeast Asia", "Western Europe", "California") Many people have this, usually powered by iffy geonames databases that are monolingual, out of date, or just plain wrong. These existing systems work fine for major destinations though. Best of luck doing the smaller ones and/or other languages better. > - non-geographic searches ("Somewhere warm") Iffy. Looks cute on advertising, but of dubious value given that everyone's definition is different. Example: Warm for a northern European or Canadian might be southern France in the European winter. At the same time, even further south and where it may be warmer in northern Africa, someone from LA or Sydney would not find it 'warm'. > no-one else has succeeded in building a product like this Major travel aggregators such as Qunar.com and Kayak.com are pretty ballpark. While you can definitely top their UIs in numerous small ways, you will have to make the net UI change valued enough to sway and keep users. Good luck with that. I would go back to your target market and their use cases ... look at what they value ... un-tech-bias your judgements .. re-align your USP. (Suggestion: consider a range of 'cheapstake' to 'livin it fine' budget per day in a city/country and refocus on helping people to find new and innovative destinations they might like to visit but have never considered, by helping them to find destinations that meet their budget requirements. I know this is really a strong potential selling point for loads of weather-dissatisfied Londoners, and South America and Asia are strong potential regions for north Americans. Ditto south&SEA for Chinese, who are cashed to the hilt right now.) OK, that's it for the free assistance ;)
beatpanda 14y ago
This is great — SkyScanner (which I almost never hear about, even though it's fantastic) has similar functionality, but definitely not the ability to search for "somewhere warm". I like that. But what's up with travel startups not allowing remote workers? I'm looking for work right now, including at a travel startup, and that's just baffling to me. Some of them offer an enhanced vacation "perk", but that sort of misses the point — I (and probably a lot of people who are passionate about travel) am more put off by having to be in the same place 48-52 weeks out of the year than I would be having to carry a laptop to wheverer it is I feel like being in the world.
- tomhoward 14y ago
  Half of our team members work remotely from home, in other parts of the world from our main base in Melbourne. And we encourage our team members to travel as much as possible, working remotely from anywhere in the world.
  - beatpanda 14y ago
    Very cool! Your jobs page made me think otherwise: "You're interested in travel (and have ideally done a lot of it) but you're also adventurous enough to pack your bags and join us in San Francisco or Melbourne, Australia. (We'll be happy with a remote working arrangement initially, but we're after people with a willingness to relocate eventually if things work out.)" (emphasis mine) But in that case you'll be hearing from me shortly :)
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - kokey 14y ago
    A feature I miss with Skyscanner is to search for flights leaving say in the evening (e.g. Wednesday after work), and returning in the afternoon (e.g. Sunday afternoon). I normally have to search for the days I want (Wednesday to Sunday) and then use the sliders to get flights for the time of day that I want. However, this really throws off the part where they sort destination by price, since the time of day I want to depart seriously affects the price.
zmmmmm 14y ago
The natural language isn't as flexible as it seems to have been made out to be: "We've had an an error. Struggled to complete search: Couldn't find a place called "bali some time in the next 3 months"
- tomhoward 14y ago
  We didn't make out that we could accept any time string - yet; the power is in the ability to handle flexibility of dates and destinations. But yes, among many things we need to improve, the search parser needs to be more capable, and we'll be improving that as soon as we can find the time.
  - ElliotH 14y ago
    I look forward to the improvements. Beware the effect of being 'nearly there' with the natural language stuff though. Failures on queries that feel like they 'should work' can get annoying very quickly.
danielharan 14y ago
Travelling in Kathmandu right now on a slow connection and haven't managed to load the page after 2 minutes. I guess the target market isn't already traveling...
just_wondering 14y ago
I think it is great what you are doing. Of course, this is what travel search should be like. Though, I'm genuinely curious, what are you really trying to achieve? Sure, more flexible nice is great. But it is definitely not a killer feature. Low price seems to be key when it comes to mass air travel. As far as I can tell from the responses, all you do is show fares from airline aggregators (I also got a timeout when I tried). Is this really a viable business model? I'm sure they will eventually come around to offer the same search features that you have. In the meantime, there are already many competitors that offer improved search interfaces (e.g. skyscanner.net, which I have used for my last trip). How are you differentiating yourself from these services? Also, while I think that improved search is needed, I would suggest reconsidering which aggregators you include. For my last trip, I found a great fare on cheapoair.com (through skyscanner), but at the last moment, I was having second thoughts, and decided to google them. Well, to say the least, they do not appear to have a very good reputation. Similar with edreams. But I never booked with them, so perhaps, they are not as bad as some of the online reviews suggest. However, one thing that's pretty vexing is that they often will advertise a fare, but then when you go to there site, and try to book it, it is no longer available. I know that you're just providing their data, but as far as I'm concerned this is a major annoyance. Just yet another reason that makes me doubt your current business model is viable. Not to mention that you are up against sites like travelocity, which is essentially owned by the airlines themselves...would love to hear your side of the story, though!
- tomhoward 14y ago
  I'm sure they will eventually come around to offer the same search features that you have. That's what we thought when we started working on this 5 years ago. We're at how little progress has been made. We see a huge variety of opportunities for innovation both in technology and business models. Stay tuned :)
johnlinvc 14y ago
Is it hacker newsed? I'm having 502 bad gate way.
sasolit 14y ago
I don't get what's so special about this as http://www.fact-finder.com/semantic-travel-search.html http://www.fact-finder.com/semantic-travel-search.html has been around in Germany at least for two years.
tnhh 14y ago
Nice concept. But if I search for "Scotland" I am offered the Shetlands (close-ish), Rutland Vermont, Syria, Estonia or Mexico.
jacobr 14y ago
You should down-prioritize airport codes in the search, especially since it's natural language search. I searched for a flight to Goa, and got "GOA (Genoua)". I could then correct it to a bunch of other airports, several in India but only one with "Goa" in its name. What I was looking for was flights to any airport in Goa, India.
hayksaakian 14y ago
How many trendy startups can travel search really support?
- tomhoward 14y ago
  Any number until one gets it right.
  - hayksaakian 14y ago
    I just want amazon to take on airfair. Delicious low margin ticket prices can't only exist in my dreams...
- notahacker 14y ago
  A lot more than "social" really, since there's a concrete business model behind them and nobody dominates the space.
notahacker 14y ago
A dynamic search suggest feature would be a very useful to show what natural-language variants are actually possible.
filip01 14y ago
Very impressive, but searching for Stockholm to "Somewhere warm", "any friday" gave me a list of cities and images but "no flights". Why? Is Stockholm not yet supported?
smiler 14y ago
Do people actually need these kind of searches when they book travel? I don't know about anybody else but my life is pretty scheduled and the dates I can go on holiday are fairly fixed and planned months in advance. Research of where to go is done with my wife on tripadvisor and looking through brochues. Ebookers / Expedia search is pretty easy - pick the dates, pick the location, compare prices. I just don't see the need for these kind of searches
- LinaLauneBaer 14y ago
  I am self employed and thus I can more or less travel at any time I want. I can easily trade flexibility against money if this allows me to travel more.
- binxbolling 14y ago
  It seems odd that you would have to ask, but yes, there are people with more flexibility than you.
- andybak 14y ago
  "I just don't see the need for these kind of searches" seems a bit strong. Other people might have slightly less restrictive employment situations. Anyway - avoiding fixed date searches is only one part of this. Even if your dates are fixed it's nice to see non-fixed destination searches. (I already know about Skyscanner)
waitwhat 14y ago
Some more feedback: If I do a search for direct, one-way flights from Tallinn to anywhere next month, the experience is awful. "anywhere" appears to search a list of cities in sequence, not in parallel. The top city on the list is Beijing (I doubt Tallinn-Beijing has ever existed or ever will); Dubai, Shanghai and Incheon are also in the first ten. Combine this with the server speed, and you have me staring at a throbber for far, far too long for searches that I know won't succeed and should have been trivially filtered out. If I repeat the search, the same 48 cities are shown in the same order. Please stop trying to get me to go to Beijing. Consider a longer list, randomising the order and searching in parallel. Your search results show no direct flights from Tallinn to London or Paris next month. This appears to miss results from RyanAir, EasyJet and Estonian Air. (Of these, your coverage page only claims to support EasyJet.)
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  On a side note, why would you buy a one-way ticket? Every time I've ever checked it's cheaper to buy a two-way ticket and then just not use the return flight.
  - dagw 14y ago
    That has not been my experience at all. I just checked a flight from Gothenburg to Amsterdam leaving in three weeks time(a random example), and a one-way ticket was almost exactly half the price of a return flight. In fact it's been a long time since I've seen too significant a discount for a return flight vs two single flights.
    - flyinRyan 14y ago
      Oh ok. Well, that's what I would expect but when I left the US for good one-way tickets were about double two-way.
  - waitwhat 14y ago
    For the cheapo European carriers, you are generally billed for each leg seperately, and there is no discount for buying a return ticket. But the real reason for looking for a one-way ticket was simply an attempt to speed up the awful search times.
gebe 14y ago
Cool stuff but maybe not as revolutionary as the title claims it to be. Minus the NLP most of these searches have been possible for years at my favourite swedish travel aggregator site.
- tomhoward 14y ago
  I'll bet you it can't. Please prove me wrong.
- dagw 14y ago
  Which site?
dgiol 14y ago
Nice. I really like adioso. I have recommended it to a few people already. I also think Skyscanner (also mentioned in this discussion) is very good.
yock 14y ago
Did you seriously just redirect me to someone elses website because you didn't like what browser I'm (forced to be) on?
fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
This is fantastic. As a college instructor, I have flexible schedule options, but I can't afford to pay too much. I also hate trying to pen-test the normal airline reservation system for the cheapest flight days/times/etc.
ssharp 14y ago
My wife and I are at a point where we want to do some travel this year, are not picky where we go, don't mind spending money, but don't want to waste money (read: find good bargains). This type of search is really what I'm looking for. I love that you can type in "somewhere warm" and give general time frames. I don't know if something this flexible has been implemented elsewhere (maybe without the natural language search) but I haven't seen something this flexible before. I'll have to try this out a few times along with my standard travel search to see how the results quality compares but I'm hoping this provides insights into deals and locations that were previously much harder to find.
throwaw_250113 14y ago
Disclosure: Shameless plug from a team member of yet another travel search Startup 90di (which mainly searches for flights, trains, buses in India). * Seeing what Adioso has done, and also that there is a good deal of overlap. Could not resist, telling about our Startup. We do what we call as 'free text search'. Its customized for searches in India, like you can do something like: 'Bangalore to Kanpur by train via Delhi'. Or you can just search by a train name, or number, or flight number or by Airline name and many other things. Some more examples of free text searches possible are at: http://www.90di.com/travel/help/examples.html http://www.90di.com/travel/help/examples.html If you are interested, please do try out 90di.com, and any feedback is welcome. * Sorry for using a throwaway. I do maintain another account here, and contribute positively, I promise :-)
- ElliotH 14y ago
  Out of interest, why the throwaway?
  - throwaw_250113 14y ago
    Hi, Because, my other (main) account is anonymous - just to be able to speak my mind without any attachments :-)
hoopism 14y ago
Concept is great but the response time kept me from trying the service out. at 50 seconds worth of search time you've lost me.
mikeevans 14y ago
I'm really excited about trying this after all the positive feedback listed here, but I've only had 504 errors and result pages containing "Damn We've had an an error."
giociferri 14y ago
This is really fantastic... every times when i need to search a flight to go from my city in a cheap way around europe i had to do a lot of researches.... this is a really useful service!
kgosser 14y ago
Was skeptical from the hyperbolic headline, but wow. This is a clear solution to an overlooked Job To Be Done and I applaud the team and service. I plan on using them next time I conduct travel plans.
akosner 14y ago
Very cool looking, but it does not return the best prices for the searches. I compared to hipmunk (which doesn't always have the best prices itself) and found significantly lower fares. Keep at it, guys!
RyanZAG 14y ago
Doesn't seem to be localizing prices to local currency? For travel search, it's really important to localize prices if you want to get some of that outside USA business.
nsomniact 14y ago
A while back we used Siri and natural language to do flight search and status, www.youtube.com/watch?v=edJ-1caUmmc The inspiration came from sites like SkyScanner
bchallenor 14y ago
I'm pretty sure that the 88 people [1] who want to go from "MEL to Perth UK" actually want to go the other Perth. Interestingly only 3 have signed up for "MEL to Perth AU" - perhaps you could add some heuristics to your autocomplete? Similarly for "Auckland NZ to Christchurch UK" - people might be getting more than they bargained for there. :) [1] http://adioso.com/following/missing_routes http://adioso.com/following/missing_routes
_casperc 14y ago
One thing that seems to missing from most travel sites is the ability to compose a travel consisting of several legs. For instance, this spring I am going to India with work, after which I want to travel to somewhere in southeast asia, probably with one or two stops, and then home to copenhagen. It should be possible to have an overview over my entire travel, not just the one leg or a simple return trip as my travels are rarely just that. (looks good though, I am definitely going to try it)
toddrew 14y ago
I love this. I'm currently searching for the cheapest way, I dont care how long it takes, to get from Guatemala City to as close as I can get to Santiago, Chile. After a number of Adioso searches I found that it would be much cheaper for me to fly - Guatemala - Miami - Lima, saving me around $400 per person (flying with my gf). A feature I would love would be a reverse search. Searching by destination with an open ended departure location. I'd love to put in Departure: North America Destination:Santiago, Chile and find the cheapest option.

229 points by tomhoward 14y ago

thaumaturgy 14y ago

Wow guys, great job. This is how search is supposed to work in 2013, and you're the first ones there.

mech4bg 14y ago

Very impressive stuff, congrats.

brianbreslin 14y ago

great now you're making my wanderlust even worse! ;-)

DigitalSea 14y ago

Whoa. I am super impressed. I thought the title was a bit grandiose, but the ability to perform advanced almost natural like sentence searches that were showcased in the blog post is phenomenal. Expect these guys to get snapped up by the likes of Google or Facebook sometime soon. It looks like 2013 is shaping up to be the year of search especially with the release of Facebook's Open Graph search which operates basically the same.

skrebbel 14y ago
> Expect these guys to get snapped up by the likes of Google or Facebook sometime soon. That would be sad.
- DigitalSea 14y ago
  I am only assuming that's what will happen. If you're innovating in the search space like Google have been doing so for a long time now and of late, Facebook then you're going to attract attention of the bigger players who are trying to gain bigger footholds in a particular niche. Hopefully they don't get acquired and are super successful. Time will tell.
rjh29 14y ago
The design is good but the implementation is very slow (for me at least) and the kind of natural language they are processing is trivial. Driverless cars are 'phenomenal'. Regular expressions, not so much.

nreece 14y ago

Adioso is fantastic! A shout out to Tom, Fenn and the team. Great work guys.

ffumarola 14y ago

I rarely say "Wow." I just shared this with 5 people in less than 2 minutes. This is EXACTLY how travel search should be. EXACTLY. I hate the rigidity of having to select days. And then mess with 2/3 day flexible windows on both ends to find cheaper fares. "Travel to Brazil next month for 14 days" is exactly how my vacation planning works, so that's how I want to search it. I have a lot of praise. Only negative is the site is really slow (at least right now).

ffumarola 14y ago
Following up on my search: Sao Paulo, BR to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US early March 1 stop return 26 days later I am going on about 10 minutes now with no results. So it isn't slow, it is unusable. Also, it seems to make me choose either direct, 1 stop, or 2+ stops. Which seems odd. Why can't I leave that open-ended so I can look for best price?

hamey 14y ago

Awesome stuff! Great work.

bmmayer1 14y ago

Hey guys-- I LOVE your product but I consistently get way-slower-than-it-should-be load times on all your pages and searches. Just now I got a 502 Bad Gateway. Looks like you have some growing pains, which is great, but I highly recommend investing in a cloud server :)

ekianjo 14y ago
Yes, the search is very, very slow. Here from Japan it took at least one minute to get the results of a search. That's "fail" for a service like that. Too bad since the options for search are interesting, but it's way too slow for me to consider it usable.
- rustynails77 14y ago
  As a long term user with no vested interest in Adioso, it's normally fairly quick (ie. a few seconds at most). It's a great website - i've used it for a few years now - I think almost since day 1 :)
mctx 14y ago
Agreed - it's a beautiful site, but way too slow. I get the following results on a search: Adioso Wingtip 31035 ms, Expedia 82331 ms, Cheapoair 38141 ms And the home page takes about 20-30 seconds to load. I'd love to hear about Adioso's backend - anyone from the company here to discuss it? Do you have any caching?
- tomhoward 14y ago
  Yeah I'm a co-founder, though not an engineer - they're all busy spinning up more servers :) We'll be writing more posts about the core tech in coming weeks, but feel free to let us know what you'd most like to know about.
  - mctx 14y ago
    I've been doing some work with AWS/Heroku recently - just interested in if you're using a cloud service, VPS or physical servers, and what kind of tech powers the site. I'm looking forward to reading more posts and using the service when it's a bit snappier!

est 14y ago

This is fantastic. can we search something like this? Leaving in 3 days to a coastal city speaking English with hotel room prices from x to y with a beach window and a swimming pool.

heyitsnick 14y ago
Sounds more like a hotel search than a flight search.
- est 14y ago
  They are often used together.
  - dagw 14y ago
    Yea, what would be really great would be to be able to put in a total budget for flight plus hotel. I'd love to be able to search for flight to large European city sometime in September with 4 nights at a central 3-5 star hotel for a total of less than $X. That would be a killer feature.

bsimpson 14y ago

I think your iconography is backwards: mobile phones have taught people that a target cursor means "I am here." You should use that for the From, and perhaps the Place icon you're currently using for From instead for To. Also, your filters should be smart enough to enforce their own constraints. I should never have to wait until the results page to get this: "Please reduce the range of trip lengths you are searching for, and we'll be able to find you results." For the record, I got a 502 Bad Gateway nginx on one search results page, but it went away on refresh. I like the ideas you guys are bringing to the table (and the personality of your announcement). Not only are the searches you've demoed here clever, but the filters (afternoon flights shorter than N hours) are nicely integrated. Scrolling feels a bit janky though. Good luck!

wernah 14y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I wrestled with the iconography for a while. I know the instance your talking about (old google maps mobile used it for 'I am here') and was wondering if anyone was still conditioned to that. I'm not sure who else uses a crosshair icon to good effect. Daniel - Adioso Interface Designer
- bsimpson 14y ago
  I think it is Google Maps that I'm thinking of, but Google Maps had damn near 100% mobile marketshare until this year.

sabj 14y ago

Have enjoyed watching Adioso develop and evolve over time, continuing to improve. Good job team. But, for me, the lack of additional airline data renders it completely unusable still, to have so many missing - I just can't get the whole picture price OR schedule-wise. I always felt that travel search was a big pain point that I was invested in solving. It also has some very obnoxious data lockdowns after scale. Anyone here have a ready blueprint for some great resources to test and hack around different travel search and booking engines with helpful APIs? I know some offer odds and ends... Everything is running extremely sluggishly for me right now - including the wingtip time reported on the page? - dunno if HN is a contributor but FYI! Totally unusable even vs. doing month-wide ITA Matrix searches.

deanclatworthy 14y ago
It seems as if they only search Expedia, judging by the graph's label at the top. Even still, it's missing many cheap and budget airlines. Whilst I commend them for letting me search over a period of time using natural language, I'd rather spend the time searching individual days on a search engine that has more sources.
- tomhoward 14y ago
  Not just Expedia at all. The progress indicator above the calendar chart shows that we hit Expedia, Cheapoair and Adioso's own Wingtip engine. Wingtip has most low-cost airlines across most of the world. See http://adioso.com/help/coverage http://adioso.com/help/coverage
  - waitwhat 14y ago
    No RyanAir is a bit of a problem, and I'm failing to get EasyJet results to show on some routes (e.g. LGW-TLL)
  - deanclatworthy 14y ago
    +1 for Ryanair (even though they are an awful company). You are also missing norwegian which pretty much is the go-to budget airline for anyone living in the Nordics/Scandanvaia (& Baltics).

toast0 14y ago

To be a grumpy old man, I think these type of searches were possible in 2009. http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/03/11/how-to-find-cheap-tickets-with-flexible-date-search/ http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/03/11/how-to-find-cheap... Blame the US Department of Transportation for flexible date searches going away; DOT was requiring headline prices to include all taxes and fees included, but you need to know the full route details to calculate those; and flexible date search was based on fare rules. I hope these guys don't get caught up in that, because flexible searches are awesome.

catsinpants 14y ago

What's the difference between these queries and the ones already available on ITA Matrix?

jpatokal 14y ago
ITA is by aviation geeks for aviation geeks. Now I'm totally happy to punch in "MEL LHR EK+ X:KUL", but most normal humans would prefer "Melbourne to London on Emirates with stopover in Kuala Lumpur". Also, ITA has zero support for more open-ended queries beyond limited date ranges, which is what Adioso is focusing on.

casca 14y ago

I've been running searches like this using http://matrix.itasoftware.com http://matrix.itasoftware.com for years but I've built up my own lists of what constitutes "Eastern Europe" and "US West Coast". ITA provides software for the airline industry so has high-speed connections - anyone know what system they're using to get the flight data? This could be a great tool that allows people to do powerful, meaningful searches that have been limited to more technical folk. The business model is there, the big question is whether the queries are allowed to run long enough to find the best results.

sushi 14y ago
I believe Matrix uses ITA which was recently acquired by Google http://www.google.com/press/ita/comp.html http://www.google.com/press/ita/comp.html
- jaredsohn 14y ago
  I don't think you understood the GP's question. Obviously matrix.itasoftware.com has an affiliation with itasoftware.com. :)
deanclatworthy 14y ago
I've never found a cheaper flight using Matrix. It must be heavily skewed with the US or missing a lot of European airlines.
- nekojima 14y ago
  This site is the maximum you should pay, as its what travel agents & aggragators pull data from. I've regular found cheaper flights from onetravel.com, but I use the Matrix site to find flights (for years now), as all available flights & code-shares are usually on there. Some rare exceptions. I normally flight to/from or in Asia and any airline I care to fly, except for a few that only sell on their own website, are listed on the Matrix site.
- wingerlang 14y ago
  I used matrix (the ios app is great!) and I found it had the cheapest prices and best search, no competition (sweden to japan)

natch 14y ago

Please make it more clear whether the results are round trip or not. The best way to do this is to put a big ROUND TRIP right next to the price, instead of making us guess. I understand the price is shown in a box that encompasses two flights, but I don't know if this is a design mistake, trickery, or an actual RT price. It's good to be more clear than you think you need to be, when it comes to stuff like showing prices to fickle comparison shoppers. Nice stuff though! I look forward to using it when the load isn't so heavy as it seems to be right now. And please don't sell out to someone (cough, Yahoo!) who has a history of cutting the features that users love.

natch 14y ago

benjaminwootton 14y ago

On a Galaxy S2, the popup is too big and its hard to find the close button. When I found it and clicked on Gdansk, Kiev started loading but then hung.

cj 14y ago

I've been using Google Flights (http://google.com/flights http://google.com/flights) lately, which lets you graph prices depending on departure date and length of stay. Click "flexible dates" in the date-picker. Extremely useful and fast. Seems like adioso is trying to do something similar. Really well designed, but it seems like your servers are stressed with the load right now. I'm looking forward to trying it for my next trip :)

username3 14y ago
You should try http://hipmunk.com http://hipmunk.com if you like Google Flights.
- cj 14y ago
  I have used hipmunk, but Google flights is faster and has better flexible date search.

jakozaur 14y ago

Kudos for determination! http://tomhoward.co/part-1-reality-check http://tomhoward.co/part-1-reality-check http://tomhoward.co/part-2-stunts http://tomhoward.co/part-2-stunts

JacobAldridge 14y ago

I'm a big fan of the Adioso story, and have learnt so much from their experience (even though our Australian-based travel businesses are only superficially similar). I think it will take some time for people to realise that the geography of their real world travel conversations ("ever done South-East Asia?", "I'd love to see Eastern Europe!") can be used in travel searches where traditionally we've had to restrict ourselves to countries, or even cities. As that transition is made, it will open up a whole wonderful world of experiences for people - and hopefully with the corresponding business success for Adioso.

contingencies 14y ago

As someone who ran a travel startup in mainland China for a few years, forgive me for being unimpressed. Here's what happened. I loaded the page and consistently expected to see something impressive to justify the title, but only got: - Source/Destination detection - (DateJS style...) natural language temporal specification What is so impressive about that? It's not even multilingual. Does it do typo detection? Does it do non-airline routes? Does it do passport/visa law interpretation? Embassy/agent/border point locations, open times and fees/currencies for visa acquisition? Black market vs. theoretical currency conversions? Credit card acceptance? Processing times? Time-of-day detection and night-time travel warnings? You could hire me as a once off or occasional consultant for some more cheap ideas and reality-checks (full stack engineer from AU, previously lived US, so not ignorant of performance issues or your team cultures, either) or you could continue retreading old ground. Either way, there's a lot of the latter left to do before impressive happens. Oh yeah... and the slow thing really is a problem. All I can think is that you are scraping data from many sources, because for the query I ran, there is exactly 1 (one) carrier, and a fixed schedule, with exactly 1 (one) price per standard, linear fare-period. There is no excuse for a non-instant response, unless your architecture is somehow borked.

tomhoward 14y ago
The features we're showcasing are: - flexibility on dates ("mid July for 10 to 15 days") - broadness on destinations ("Southeast Asia", "Western Europe", "California") - non-geographic searches ("Somewhere warm") - a UI that supports these flexible results. No it's not perfect. Yes it's slow. But no-one else has succeeded in building a product like this - largely because of the limitations in the 40+ year-old travel industry infrastructure. We're determined to find a way to break through that and make this work.
- contingencies 14y ago
  > flexibility on dates ("mid July for 10 to 15 days") Leave and return date flexibility exists within sites like Kayak, I use it all the time. Though it would be nice to make it more flexible, I agree, but this is not a new or killer feature. > - broadness on destinations ("Southeast Asia", "Western Europe", "California") Many people have this, usually powered by iffy geonames databases that are monolingual, out of date, or just plain wrong. These existing systems work fine for major destinations though. Best of luck doing the smaller ones and/or other languages better. > - non-geographic searches ("Somewhere warm") Iffy. Looks cute on advertising, but of dubious value given that everyone's definition is different. Example: Warm for a northern European or Canadian might be southern France in the European winter. At the same time, even further south and where it may be warmer in northern Africa, someone from LA or Sydney would not find it 'warm'. > no-one else has succeeded in building a product like this Major travel aggregators such as Qunar.com and Kayak.com are pretty ballpark. While you can definitely top their UIs in numerous small ways, you will have to make the net UI change valued enough to sway and keep users. Good luck with that. I would go back to your target market and their use cases ... look at what they value ... un-tech-bias your judgements .. re-align your USP. (Suggestion: consider a range of 'cheapstake' to 'livin it fine' budget per day in a city/country and refocus on helping people to find new and innovative destinations they might like to visit but have never considered, by helping them to find destinations that meet their budget requirements. I know this is really a strong potential selling point for loads of weather-dissatisfied Londoners, and South America and Asia are strong potential regions for north Americans. Ditto south&SEA for Chinese, who are cashed to the hilt right now.) OK, that's it for the free assistance ;)

beatpanda 14y ago

This is great — SkyScanner (which I almost never hear about, even though it's fantastic) has similar functionality, but definitely not the ability to search for "somewhere warm". I like that. But what's up with travel startups not allowing remote workers? I'm looking for work right now, including at a travel startup, and that's just baffling to me. Some of them offer an enhanced vacation "perk", but that sort of misses the point — I (and probably a lot of people who are passionate about travel) am more put off by having to be in the same place 48-52 weeks out of the year than I would be having to carry a laptop to wheverer it is I feel like being in the world.

tomhoward 14y ago
Half of our team members work remotely from home, in other parts of the world from our main base in Melbourne. And we encourage our team members to travel as much as possible, working remotely from anywhere in the world.
- beatpanda 14y ago
  Very cool! Your jobs page made me think otherwise: "You're interested in travel (and have ideally done a lot of it) but you're also adventurous enough to pack your bags and join us in San Francisco or Melbourne, Australia. (We'll be happy with a remote working arrangement initially, but we're after people with a willingness to relocate eventually if things work out.)" (emphasis mine) But in that case you'll be hearing from me shortly :)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- kokey 14y ago
  A feature I miss with Skyscanner is to search for flights leaving say in the evening (e.g. Wednesday after work), and returning in the afternoon (e.g. Sunday afternoon). I normally have to search for the days I want (Wednesday to Sunday) and then use the sliders to get flights for the time of day that I want. However, this really throws off the part where they sort destination by price, since the time of day I want to depart seriously affects the price.

zmmmmm 14y ago

The natural language isn't as flexible as it seems to have been made out to be: "We've had an an error. Struggled to complete search: Couldn't find a place called "bali some time in the next 3 months"

tomhoward 14y ago
We didn't make out that we could accept any time string - yet; the power is in the ability to handle flexibility of dates and destinations. But yes, among many things we need to improve, the search parser needs to be more capable, and we'll be improving that as soon as we can find the time.
- ElliotH 14y ago
  I look forward to the improvements. Beware the effect of being 'nearly there' with the natural language stuff though. Failures on queries that feel like they 'should work' can get annoying very quickly.

danielharan 14y ago

Travelling in Kathmandu right now on a slow connection and haven't managed to load the page after 2 minutes. I guess the target market isn't already traveling...

just_wondering 14y ago

I think it is great what you are doing. Of course, this is what travel search should be like. Though, I'm genuinely curious, what are you really trying to achieve? Sure, more flexible nice is great. But it is definitely not a killer feature. Low price seems to be key when it comes to mass air travel. As far as I can tell from the responses, all you do is show fares from airline aggregators (I also got a timeout when I tried). Is this really a viable business model? I'm sure they will eventually come around to offer the same search features that you have. In the meantime, there are already many competitors that offer improved search interfaces (e.g. skyscanner.net, which I have used for my last trip). How are you differentiating yourself from these services? Also, while I think that improved search is needed, I would suggest reconsidering which aggregators you include. For my last trip, I found a great fare on cheapoair.com (through skyscanner), but at the last moment, I was having second thoughts, and decided to google them. Well, to say the least, they do not appear to have a very good reputation. Similar with edreams. But I never booked with them, so perhaps, they are not as bad as some of the online reviews suggest. However, one thing that's pretty vexing is that they often will advertise a fare, but then when you go to there site, and try to book it, it is no longer available. I know that you're just providing their data, but as far as I'm concerned this is a major annoyance. Just yet another reason that makes me doubt your current business model is viable. Not to mention that you are up against sites like travelocity, which is essentially owned by the airlines themselves...would love to hear your side of the story, though!

tomhoward 14y ago
I'm sure they will eventually come around to offer the same search features that you have. That's what we thought when we started working on this 5 years ago. We're at how little progress has been made. We see a huge variety of opportunities for innovation both in technology and business models. Stay tuned :)

johnlinvc 14y ago

Is it hacker newsed? I'm having 502 bad gate way.

sasolit 14y ago

I don't get what's so special about this as http://www.fact-finder.com/semantic-travel-search.html http://www.fact-finder.com/semantic-travel-search.html has been around in Germany at least for two years.

tnhh 14y ago

Nice concept. But if I search for "Scotland" I am offered the Shetlands (close-ish), Rutland Vermont, Syria, Estonia or Mexico.

jacobr 14y ago

You should down-prioritize airport codes in the search, especially since it's natural language search. I searched for a flight to Goa, and got "GOA (Genoua)". I could then correct it to a bunch of other airports, several in India but only one with "Goa" in its name. What I was looking for was flights to any airport in Goa, India.

hayksaakian 14y ago

How many trendy startups can travel search really support?

tomhoward 14y ago
Any number until one gets it right.
- hayksaakian 14y ago
  I just want amazon to take on airfair. Delicious low margin ticket prices can't only exist in my dreams...
notahacker 14y ago
A lot more than "social" really, since there's a concrete business model behind them and nobody dominates the space.

notahacker 14y ago

A dynamic search suggest feature would be a very useful to show what natural-language variants are actually possible.

filip01 14y ago

Very impressive, but searching for Stockholm to "Somewhere warm", "any friday" gave me a list of cities and images but "no flights". Why? Is Stockholm not yet supported?

smiler 14y ago

Do people actually need these kind of searches when they book travel? I don't know about anybody else but my life is pretty scheduled and the dates I can go on holiday are fairly fixed and planned months in advance. Research of where to go is done with my wife on tripadvisor and looking through brochues. Ebookers / Expedia search is pretty easy - pick the dates, pick the location, compare prices. I just don't see the need for these kind of searches

LinaLauneBaer 14y ago
I am self employed and thus I can more or less travel at any time I want. I can easily trade flexibility against money if this allows me to travel more.
binxbolling 14y ago
It seems odd that you would have to ask, but yes, there are people with more flexibility than you.
andybak 14y ago
"I just don't see the need for these kind of searches" seems a bit strong. Other people might have slightly less restrictive employment situations. Anyway - avoiding fixed date searches is only one part of this. Even if your dates are fixed it's nice to see non-fixed destination searches. (I already know about Skyscanner)

waitwhat 14y ago

Some more feedback: If I do a search for direct, one-way flights from Tallinn to anywhere next month, the experience is awful. "anywhere" appears to search a list of cities in sequence, not in parallel. The top city on the list is Beijing (I doubt Tallinn-Beijing has ever existed or ever will); Dubai, Shanghai and Incheon are also in the first ten. Combine this with the server speed, and you have me staring at a throbber for far, far too long for searches that I know won't succeed and should have been trivially filtered out. If I repeat the search, the same 48 cities are shown in the same order. Please stop trying to get me to go to Beijing. Consider a longer list, randomising the order and searching in parallel. Your search results show no direct flights from Tallinn to London or Paris next month. This appears to miss results from RyanAir, EasyJet and Estonian Air. (Of these, your coverage page only claims to support EasyJet.)

flyinRyan 14y ago
On a side note, why would you buy a one-way ticket? Every time I've ever checked it's cheaper to buy a two-way ticket and then just not use the return flight.
- dagw 14y ago
  That has not been my experience at all. I just checked a flight from Gothenburg to Amsterdam leaving in three weeks time(a random example), and a one-way ticket was almost exactly half the price of a return flight. In fact it's been a long time since I've seen too significant a discount for a return flight vs two single flights.
  - flyinRyan 14y ago
    Oh ok. Well, that's what I would expect but when I left the US for good one-way tickets were about double two-way.
- waitwhat 14y ago
  For the cheapo European carriers, you are generally billed for each leg seperately, and there is no discount for buying a return ticket. But the real reason for looking for a one-way ticket was simply an attempt to speed up the awful search times.

gebe 14y ago

Cool stuff but maybe not as revolutionary as the title claims it to be. Minus the NLP most of these searches have been possible for years at my favourite swedish travel aggregator site.

tomhoward 14y ago
I'll bet you it can't. Please prove me wrong.
dagw 14y ago
Which site?

dgiol 14y ago

Nice. I really like adioso. I have recommended it to a few people already. I also think Skyscanner (also mentioned in this discussion) is very good.

yock 14y ago

Did you seriously just redirect me to someone elses website because you didn't like what browser I'm (forced to be) on?

fnordfnordfnord 14y ago

This is fantastic. As a college instructor, I have flexible schedule options, but I can't afford to pay too much. I also hate trying to pen-test the normal airline reservation system for the cheapest flight days/times/etc.

ssharp 14y ago

My wife and I are at a point where we want to do some travel this year, are not picky where we go, don't mind spending money, but don't want to waste money (read: find good bargains). This type of search is really what I'm looking for. I love that you can type in "somewhere warm" and give general time frames. I don't know if something this flexible has been implemented elsewhere (maybe without the natural language search) but I haven't seen something this flexible before. I'll have to try this out a few times along with my standard travel search to see how the results quality compares but I'm hoping this provides insights into deals and locations that were previously much harder to find.

throwaw_250113 14y ago

Disclosure: Shameless plug from a team member of yet another travel search Startup 90di (which mainly searches for flights, trains, buses in India). * Seeing what Adioso has done, and also that there is a good deal of overlap. Could not resist, telling about our Startup. We do what we call as 'free text search'. Its customized for searches in India, like you can do something like: 'Bangalore to Kanpur by train via Delhi'. Or you can just search by a train name, or number, or flight number or by Airline name and many other things. Some more examples of free text searches possible are at: http://www.90di.com/travel/help/examples.html http://www.90di.com/travel/help/examples.html If you are interested, please do try out 90di.com, and any feedback is welcome. * Sorry for using a throwaway. I do maintain another account here, and contribute positively, I promise :-)

ElliotH 14y ago
Out of interest, why the throwaway?
- throwaw_250113 14y ago
  Hi, Because, my other (main) account is anonymous - just to be able to speak my mind without any attachments :-)

hoopism 14y ago

Concept is great but the response time kept me from trying the service out. at 50 seconds worth of search time you've lost me.

mikeevans 14y ago

I'm really excited about trying this after all the positive feedback listed here, but I've only had 504 errors and result pages containing "Damn We've had an an error."

giociferri 14y ago

This is really fantastic... every times when i need to search a flight to go from my city in a cheap way around europe i had to do a lot of researches.... this is a really useful service!

kgosser 14y ago

Was skeptical from the hyperbolic headline, but wow. This is a clear solution to an overlooked Job To Be Done and I applaud the team and service. I plan on using them next time I conduct travel plans.

akosner 14y ago

Very cool looking, but it does not return the best prices for the searches. I compared to hipmunk (which doesn't always have the best prices itself) and found significantly lower fares. Keep at it, guys!

RyanZAG 14y ago

Doesn't seem to be localizing prices to local currency? For travel search, it's really important to localize prices if you want to get some of that outside USA business.

nsomniact 14y ago

A while back we used Siri and natural language to do flight search and status, www.youtube.com/watch?v=edJ-1caUmmc The inspiration came from sites like SkyScanner

bchallenor 14y ago

I'm pretty sure that the 88 people [1] who want to go from "MEL to Perth UK" actually want to go the other Perth. Interestingly only 3 have signed up for "MEL to Perth AU" - perhaps you could add some heuristics to your autocomplete? Similarly for "Auckland NZ to Christchurch UK" - people might be getting more than they bargained for there. :) [1] http://adioso.com/following/missing_routes http://adioso.com/following/missing_routes

_casperc 14y ago

One thing that seems to missing from most travel sites is the ability to compose a travel consisting of several legs. For instance, this spring I am going to India with work, after which I want to travel to somewhere in southeast asia, probably with one or two stops, and then home to copenhagen. It should be possible to have an overview over my entire travel, not just the one leg or a simple return trip as my travels are rarely just that. (looks good though, I am definitely going to try it)

toddrew 14y ago

I love this. I'm currently searching for the cheapest way, I dont care how long it takes, to get from Guatemala City to as close as I can get to Santiago, Chile. After a number of Adioso searches I found that it would be much cheaper for me to fly - Guatemala - Miami - Lima, saving me around $400 per person (flying with my gf). A feature I would love would be a reverse search. Searching by destination with an open ended departure location. I'd love to put in Departure: North America Destination:Santiago, Chile and find the cheapest option.