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Ask HN: What is broken in the online travel industry?
Yesterday I was trying to book a flight. It was an absolutely horrible user experience. Broken redirects from flight aggregators. Changing prices. A booking that failed mid-way but still billed me. Am I the only one who thinks the travel industry is broken? What can a startup improve in this field?
- hcho 17y agoA site that analyses flight price fluctuations would be awsome. Currently all the online travel sites work on the assumption that your days are fixed and gives you the prices around that date. A site that would tell me the cheapest time of the year to visit Paris from London would be a lot more useful. Slightly tangential, how do you access flight price data? Is there a company providing the feeds? How much does it cost?
- mooism2 17y agoSabre and Galileo are the companies I can think of off the top of my head. I don't remember the pricing.
- fauigerzigerk 17y agoThe pricing is completely unreasonable. I looked at it a while ago, don't remember the exact figures, but they are based on a very weird system of contracts that severely limits access to this market.
- gaius 17y agoThere used to be EasySABRE (unrelated to cowboys easyJet) which gave you nearly direct access to SABRE data, but it's long since defunct - I think Expedia bought it.
- fauigerzigerk 17y agoI believe farecast did something like this. They were bought by Microsoft.
- hcho 17y agoThanks for that. I checked them on bing, the UI does not do their product justice. It look like yet another cluttered travel web site. Another thought, how hard is it for a travel website that I use frequently to infer that I am from London. I booked lots of fligts in and out from this city. Why not make it my default location after while? Cookies and data mining anyone?
- fauigerzigerk 17y agoThat's a good point. It shouldn't be hard for them to do that.
- ig1 17y agoA lot of the big price comparision sites just use screenscraping to avoid the contractual obligations data feeds have. A non-america centric farecast would be good too
- frossie 17y agoThe best site I have ever found for planning air travel is this: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/prego http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/prego I have been using them since before the web (seriously, you could telnet to their system on a vt100). Unfortunately you can't actually buy a ticket from them! But it will spit out the gobbledygook that a travel agent can use to book exactly that fare, or once you have the specific flights you want to be on you can go through the pain of trying to get the flights on a commercial site. Of the commercial sites, I prefer orbitz as the least sucky of the lot.
- gaius 17y agoWith who? I must've been using Travelocity and Expedia for 10 years now (and easySABRE while it still existed) and I have to say this industry was notable for being ahead of the curve for high-value transactions on the Internet.
- c1sc0 17y agoI used Kayak & Opodo. The problems I experienced were mostly due to how they connect/redirect to each airline's booking system. I was pining for the days when I could call my travel agent and have an actual human take care of my travel arrangements. Something like justbookmeabloodyflight.com: you give them your CC info & a specific travel request. They then book it for you and ONLY contact you if there is a problem.
- gaius 17y agoThey still exist - if I want to speak to a human travel agent I call Amex.