13 ms·

Get away with Google Flights

293 points by rey12rey 12y ago

brotoss 12y ago
Google Flights has been my first search destination for months...the graph is awesome
mootothemax 12y ago
This makes me feel somewhat uneasy. On the one hand, it works really well. On the other, are Google aiming to take over every aggregation service out there? Something about the dominant search engine moving into this space just doesn't sit right with me.
- Bedon292 12y ago
  Search engines are all about aggregation, it seems like a logical step for them. Bing, Yahoo, and even AOL also have their own travel sites, so it is not just the dominant search engine, it is all of them. It is also nice to not have to support some third party by buying tickets through them. Just compare the prices and go directly to the airline.
  - mootothemax 12y ago
    Bing, Yahoo, and even AOL also have their own travel sites The difference is, if I type WAW to LHR into Google, I get flight listings with prices and availability. You're right that Bing, Yahoo etc. have their own separate travel sites, I've yet to see similar results in their search results.
    - hyperliner 12y ago
      But how is that different from typing "2+3" or "what is the speed of light?" or "what is the temperature in San francisco CA?" in the Google search bar? I think it is all about convenience.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      > The difference is, if I type WAW to LHR into Google, I get flight listings with prices and availability. Yes, and I think that's a Good Thing. Google rightly knows that when I type "WAW to LHR", I want to know about the flight, not about where to find out about that flight.
      - Trombone41 12y ago
        An implication of this difference is that google probably charges for that convenience by saving your itinerary somewhere and selling it to your insurance company.
- __Joker 12y ago
  Any personal assistant app can't do away from this aggregations. These are the first and low hanging fruits when it comes to personal assistants, given that more and more the personal assistants and the search engines will morph into one.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Google's stated mission is to "organize world's information". This fits it perfectly.
tgraham 12y ago
Very similar to kayak.co.uk/trips
thezach 12y ago
I've been using this for quite some time... works very well. I only will fly one or two airlines, but I still use Google Flights to compare days, and departure airports because its so much easier!
Bedon292 12y ago
Not sure why they are just posting this now, it has existed for quite a while. It also has hotel searching. Not all companies have prices displayed on the site, but it links directly to the companies rather than paying additional fees through a third party.
- what_ever 12y ago
  You don't always pay additional fees through a third party. If only flight ticket pricing was that easy. There have been instances when I found better deals on other sites compared Google (all of them happen to be international flights). The interface on the other hand is amazing.
  - Bedon292 12y ago
    True, there are not always fees, but they are around. International flights have been a bit harder on all of the major US based flight searches though, right? Have not flown international in quite some time, so not as familiar with them.
- smackfu 12y ago
  Yes, this is basically just an ad for their existing service, wrapped in a blog post.
- yekim 12y ago
  I wasn't even aware of Google Flights until I saw the article posted on HN. Go figure... For some of us, the constant deluge of info, along with work and family life, makes it tough to stay on top of all the latest developments. Glad this service was "re-announced".
  - wbeckler 12y ago
    There's lots of travel sites popping up all the time, including accommodations sites. That's why I built http://AllTheRooms.com http://AllTheRooms.com, which aggregates all the different accommodations sites and deals sites, like Expedia, Groupon, Hotwire, and Airbnb
tarp 12y ago
ITA Software was acquired by Google awhile back. https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
- gringocl 12y ago
  This is an awesome platform, if only you could purchase through this!
  - dsr_ 12y ago
    That's where the money comes from -- and ITA's mission was to be a backend for other people, who would deal with the expensive customer service side themselves. Presumably as a Google service, customer service isn't a priority anymore.
  - simonebrunozzi 12y ago
    Their plan is probably to enable it at some point.
    - gohrt 12y ago
      Matrix has been running 10 years already.
- giarc 12y ago
  This site allows users to search for hidden city ticketing. There are some good instruction pages out there. I've never personally used it since I live in Canada and spoke and hub isn't really a thing up here.
  - smackfu 12y ago
    All sorts of fun games on ITA. Another good one is to set very long connection times, to get a 23 hour stopover in an interesting city for free.
    - jrockway 12y ago
bemmu 12y ago
I love the flexibility this has and after giving it a serious go I never went back to Kayak. If you know exactly when and where to fly, Kayak is great. But with any uncertainty, Google Flights is better for exploring. Maybe you know when to fly, but not when you want to come back. Or maybe you don't even know where you want to fly, in which case you can get destination suggestions. It's also a lot snappier. Now with this flight data they have, I'd imagine being able to just use Google Maps route search to go from A to B such that it would also include flights where applicable. While it kind of does, I am still able to think better routes myself. For example if I search from Tokushima, Japan -> San Francisco, USA, it suggests I should fly from Tokushima. Where actually it's a lot cheaper with almost no time difference to go by bus to Osaka first instead.
- samstave 12y ago
  It would be interesting for a travel engine to list the alternate routes and options and let people vote ion each option to provide weighting to each one based on peoples preference for each. Unless they already do this?
- kremi 12y ago
  Kayak's explore is pretty nice when you have uncertainty: http://www.kayak.com/explore/BER/ http://www.kayak.com/explore/BER/ Although unlike Google Flights, it doesn't let you search for specific dates.
  - rbcgerard 12y ago
    nor does it allow you to search for specific times i.e. if i want to go somewhere for the weekend, flights at 6am on friday are not that useful...
- jasondc 12y ago
  Google flight search seems to be really good at finding cheap routes, I'm looking at SFO -> Rome, Kayak doesn't even show the Delta flight Google shows: https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=SFO;t=FCO,CIA;d=2015-08-14;r=2015-08-28 https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=SFO;t=FCO,CIA;d=201... Delta flight on Google is $1293, $1840 on Kayak
salimmadjd 12y ago
The UI/UX on this product is not that great. Google is offering a similar solution as Kayak. But I'm not sure why they just didn't fully copy Kayak. It feels to me, 1 - google thinks they are smarter than Kayak, 2 - they didn't want to show they are copying Kayak. For example, kayak does a great job of displaying all the options on the left column. Google is hiding everything in drop downs. So then they need to have a blog post to explain how their UI works where kayaks is just intuitive. The same with bar chart pricing (which I like) why hide it behind a silly icon like that. Now they have to educate their users what that icon means. Call it "best days to fly" or even better show that at the bottom of the page.
- jessegavin 12y ago
  I disagree. I spent nearly a year as a UI designer/engineer for a flight search/booking tool and evaluated all the major interfaces. The #1 killer feature google flights has which kills all other flight search tools (I have seen) is speed. They bought a company (ITA) for something close to a billion dollars which provides near realtime search results for flights. Kayak (and others) do a good job of streaming search results, but you still have to wait seconds before you're able to make decisions.
mcdowall 12y ago
I've been using Momondo recently, which has all of these tools and a much better UX. This just feels like a re skin of the ITA site and a bit of a poor effort at that.
- smellf 12y ago
  The Momondo UI is nicer, but Google Flights has the "price in the calendar" feature.
wiradikusuma 12y ago
Tangentially related, does anyone know of any provider where you can e.g. make your own Hipmunk?
- alexhawdon 12y ago
  https://developers.google.com/qpx-express/ https://developers.google.com/qpx-express/ is the API you can use to make your own service like Google Flights/Hipmunk.
sq1020 12y ago
It's super fast which certainly cannot be said about other similar services.
peterwwillis 12y ago
I used Google Flights back in November to plan a 10-day getaway during December. BWI->MIA, MIA->LAX, SFO->BWI. Total airfare cost: $420. It was far easier to do this with GF than with Hipmunk or any other website i'd tried.
solve 12y ago
"cheaper isn’t always better" BS. Non-business flights are the most price-sensitive type of product there could possibly be. Near 100% of people only apply a few very basic filters, e.g. no 12-hour layovers, doesn't depart at 5am, and then choose the cheapest. It's not some sophisticated "balance" that needs some advanced machine learning or personalization to accomplish. It's a few obvious filters that are the same for practically everyone. I'd love to see partial dependance plots for each of the obvious filtering factors, vs how often people chose that flight. That's the best way to do this type of analysis. Not to mention that many times the cheapest flight listed on these travel sites isn't actually available when you try to book it. Wonder how that may have skewed Google's analysis.
- ThatAdamGuy 12y ago
  Hey solve, I thought the exact same thing you did! But then -- as someone who recently joined the Google Flights team -- I helped lead some research that included this topic... and was honestly surprised to find that about 40% of the folks searching on Google Flights DON'T pick the cheapest flight. Price, certainly, is still a huge factor in folks' decision, but convenience plays a very significant role. And, from anecdotal evidence (not part of the same research), brand loyalty is definitely a factor as well (a very price sensitive travel blogger I know still prefers to fly on American, for instance).
radiorental 12y ago
Don't know where they're getting their data from. Boston-dublin in Oct is over $1300 on google flight with Aerlingus Same flight directly on the airline's website is $940. Good luck with that, Google.
- analyst74 12y ago
  Last time I tried it in 2014 for international flights, Google Flight also seems to be a few hundred dollars more expensive than other travel sites.
- aembleton 12y ago
  How does SkyScannner compare for that flight: http://www.skyscanner.net/ http://www.skyscanner.net/ I've always found them to be good.
  - radiorental 12y ago
    they're on the money, same as Kayak
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jonknee 12y ago
  Though I see $550 round trip tickets on Delta, so there's that.
  - what_ever 12y ago
    Pretty sure Aerlingus has a non-stop between Boston and Dublin. Besides, you don't know the exact dates.
  - radiorental 12y ago
    Delta doesn't fly direct. For this particular journey I could elect to spend 26 hours in Istanbul for $700 and change.
- 12y ago
dheera 12y ago
Awesome. I can never understand what antiquated database and UI the other flight reservation websites are using. Simple database queries take 10+ seconds, and then you have to click N more times to get the taxes included. Why can't I query for SELECT * FROM tickets WHERE sqrt((destination_latitude-desired_latitude)^2 - (destination_longitude-desired_longitude)^2) < 5000 AND abs(unix_timestamp(departure)-unix_timestamp('somedate'))<10*86400 ORDER BY (price+taxes+fees); with proper geoindexing and sharding this query should take no more than a fraction of a second, yet airline websites want me to use some stupidly-designed UI that can't implement above query, takes 10+ seconds to return results, and doesn't include the taxes and fees. Thus I need to often manually enter every destination within 5000km and every date combination and manually waste half a day to find the cheapest ticket to "anywhere interesting". Furthermore often times changing the language and country of the website changes ticket prices; a well-designed, globally-consistent database should not allow this to happen. I hope that Google will disrupt and reengineer this ancient system.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  For the same reason I can't just renew a domain at Network Solutions without going through eight different pages trying to upsell me things (and often defaulting to checking on those services). Expedia, Orbitz, etc make money via nag screens and upsells. They have no incentive to make the experience positive or easy. Google seems to.
  - dheera 12y ago
    I switched to Namecheap; they sell stuff but are not annoying about it. Google Domains also looks promising but I'm waiting for them to not be in beta lest they decide to scrap the product. Google would win me over if they offered free SSL certificates. In fact I think they should go ahead and disrupt the SSL industry by doing that too. Nobody should have to pay for a silly cryptographic signature. That would disrupt NS and all the others who try to upsell stuff.
    - nadams 12y ago
      > ...free SSL certificates. In fact I think they should go ahead and disrupt the SSL industry StartSSL already offers free SSL certificates - and they haven't disrupted the industry. Even if Google started offering free SSL certificates - it's only a band-aid to the problem not a solution.
teirce 12y ago
I stumbled across Google Flights a couple of years ago back when it wasn't as pretty, but I've always found it to be incredibly useful, at least for traveling in the continental U.S.
estefan 12y ago
I want to be able to search by criteria like "somewhere sunny", "the mediterranean", "somewhere to party in the summer", etc. I thought this was it, but not quite :-(...
- nedwin 12y ago
  Not quite that level but check out Adioso.com. They have a bunch of natural language search queries that work.
penetrarthur 12y ago
Was it updated? I spent my whole evening yesterday planning the trip.
GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
Minor complaint: the first thing I tried to do was try to find a flight from anywhere in the UK to anywhere in Slovenia. Whilst it lets me be vague about my destination, it doesn't seem to about my starting point... Skyscanner lets me do this
imjk 12y ago
There are sites dedicated to scouring and curating the best deals found using the ITA Software Matrix. http://Theflightdeal.com http://Theflightdeal.com is the best that comes to mind. http://PointsBuzz.com http://PointsBuzz.com also aggregates the various different sites focused on flight deals and maximizing frequent flyer points for the most worthwhile trips.
joelbrewer01 12y ago
I've used Google Flights before, but I almost always end up flying Southwest, which doesn't disclose their prices to aggregators. Does anyone know if Google has tried to strike a deal with them? If anyone could, I imagine it would be Google.
- MicroBerto 12y ago
  Came in to search for a comment on this. Until one of these sites includes all airlines, I'll remain relatively unimpressed with anything new that comes out.
- Avitas 12y ago
  I suppose someone could get bold and attempt to do some scraping. Of course, my money would be on SouthWest stopping this behavior as a violation of their terms of service. Here is their terms of service: https://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/terms-and-conditions/index.html?clk=MBSFTR https://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/terms-and-con... They explicitly take ownership of the content, mention that the information is only for non-commercial use, exclude use of the information on their site for commercial use and additionally use for any other purpose. In case their message is not clear, they go even further and list a variety of prohibited activities. The language of their Terms & Conditions is rather broad. It looks like virtually any activity on their website as a violation. Perhaps that is now the norm.
chinathrow 12y ago
Right into the heart of meta engines. Ouch.
jxf 12y ago
I've been using Google Flights since the middle of last year and love it. However, as a frequent traveler for business/conferences, I think there are some things people should be aware of: * Google's data seems to be not as fresh as Kayak or Hipmunk's is. There have been multiple times when I've tried to book a flight via GF only to be told that there were no seats left when I arrive on the airline's page. I suspect part of the greatly improved speed comes at the cost of aggressive caching that runs a risk of things being out of date. * Google's data is all over the map on pricing. Very frequently the airline's price will be much cheaper than GF. And more than once (especially on United or American Airlines) I've noticed that if I book directly through an airline over a VPN, I save several hundred bucks versus if I click through from Google Flights or Kayak. Conversely, sometimes GF is less expensive and when I land on the airline's page it's more expensive. I think the best thing to use it for is route discoverability: which kind of planes and which airlines fly to which locations, on which days at which times? It's also great for doing complex open-jaw routes or hidden-city fares -- and since those routes don't change very often, the data is more likely to be accurate.
- zatkin 12y ago
  Which VPN gets you the best deals? Also, do you book on Tuesdays?
  - esMazer 12y ago
    I would be interested on this as well!
  - jxf 12y ago
    I only have one VPN, GoldenFrog's VyprVPN service. Sorry, I didn't intend to suggest that I was running multiple VPNs. I haven't experimented extensively with things, but usually setting my exit server to a random country on the other side of the planet (e.g. Malaysia) has yielded consistently good results. And yes, I do tend to book on Tuesdays.
  - ThatAdamGuy 12y ago
    Assuming you're on google.com/flights, I'm fairly sure that using a VPN, changing your IP, flushing your cookies... none of that should change the availability and pricing you see on Flights. And no, don't bother trying to time your bookings. It's kinda like the stock market; trying to beat the market, er, optimize your flights purchase time is likely to lead to sorrow and regret. From the research our Google Flights team did recently, we found that if you wait a week, on average you're gonna pay more for the same flight. And no, we didn't see any universal discount on Tuesdays, either ;)
jkaljundi 12y ago
Tried and most flights between US and Europe were at least $1-300 more expensive than on the usual travel sites.
corwinstephen 12y ago
I've been using Google Flights for over 2 years. Why is it just now getting announced?
chm 12y ago
Incidentally I reserved two tickets yesterday after finding the best prices with Google Flights. It linked me directly to the airline's reservation system a couple of clicks away from confirmation. BTW, I used their map to find the most suitable flight. I could change dates on the fly and see the prices change instantly. It's a great service. Now if they could do the same for railways, I'd gladly pay for the convenience.
- ThatAdamGuy 12y ago
  chm, thanks much! Appreciate the kudos!
GBond 12y ago
A lot of the features seem highly inspired by Hipmunk.
unrulyOddish 12y ago
Hmmmm. I'm searching New York to Europe (March 25th to April 23rd) and it's giving me a $303 round trip to Madrid. Thats absolutely incredible, but when I click through the fair jumps to over $800. Anyone else experiencing things of that ilk?
- solve 12y ago
  Exactly what I was saying. Google here is claiming that people don't often buy the cheapest listed flight... and the reason is because they can't.
peter303 12y ago
I like daily price bargraph. Gives a sense of overall prices.
gsmethells 12y ago
I just used this to book my flight to PyCon 2015 oddly enough. It was pretty damn easy to use and let me jump from its search results to directly booking with Air Canada. Pretty smooth...
bruceb 12y ago
I find Momondo to have one of the better layouts of prices when trying to find cheaper days. http://www.momondo.com/ http://www.momondo.com/
otar 12y ago
I think SkyPicker is worth mentioning here: https://skypicker.com https://skypicker.com If you are flexible where you want to go, when, how much you can stay, etc... then you get really good suggestions.
- abawany 12y ago
  Minor: got a certificate error when I clicked on this url. However that disappeared when I manually typed in www.skypicker.com in the browser. Most likely cause it seems is because their site certificate is *.skypicker.com
davidf18 12y ago
How is it that we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago and we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates? I find this really baffling. It is a service all customers want yet even the great Google can't seem to provide this. Meanwhile Google puts out so many "experimental products" that they later dispose. There is talk of Google getting into cell-phone service and the are already getting into Google fiber. I wish Google would use its pricing power and buy entire flights between major cities domestic and international (eg, NYC to Chicago, LA, SF, Miami, Atlanta, and London). Moreover, an airline can really make its profits on airline fuel speculation since this is the most volatile component of airline costs.
- danellis 12y ago
  > we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates? What makes you say we can't? Isn't that exactly what this is?
- jordigh 12y ago
  > How is it that we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago and we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates? Because the airlines have their own army of geniuses working very hard to make sure that this is difficult to do: http://www.cheapair.com/blog/travel-tips/air-fares-101-why-do-fares-change-all-the-time/ http://www.cheapair.com/blog/travel-tips/air-fares-101-why-d... Who are you? How much money do you have? How badly do you want these tickets? How often are you checking the price, what else have you bought? How are your buying habits compared to everyone else's? These are the questions the airlines are trying to answer in order to maximise how much money they can get off each individual.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Wow. So as a United "elite" member, just doing searches on their app or site but with my account, is gonna cost me? Because I've never seen this happen. I seem to get the lowest fare they have. I've not done serious tests, just seen when other people look up my flights, on say, Kayak, they get the same prices.
Yhippa 12y ago
I used to be a hardcore Hipmunk user and I still think I prefer it to Google Flights. I had some trouble recently with Hipmunk linking to flights that don't exist on the airline's websites. I've been using Google Flights ever since. Hopefully Hipmunk will get things back in order again.
nso 12y ago
That notification about avg. delays is an absolute killer feature. http://i.imgur.com/Nb0EYDh.png http://i.imgur.com/Nb0EYDh.png
- jrockway 12y ago
  As someone who is always running late, I pick the flights that are most often delayed.
penetrarthur 12y ago
I would love GF to have a feature where you select a departure airport and arrival airport and dates, and make GF find me where to go in between. Like a search with multiple cities but so that you decide the departure city of the first flight and the arrival city of the second flight.
scintill76 12y ago
Open-ended destination is great, but I've sometimes wished for open-ended source. My usecase is something like a casual multi-stop trip, where you have an eventual destination in mind, but would like to save money, or see where else you can go along the way for a similar amount of money. I've worked around it by manually checking nearby routes, or getting a feel for options with open-ended reverse flights and then searching the reverse again.
diltonm 12y ago
I just ran a comparison with Expedia (which seems to no longer be ASP.NET based as an aside); not too surprised, Expedia found the cheaper flights. Read, cheaper, not necessarily better.
ThatAdamGuy 12y ago
Hey everyone, just spotted this thread and was really happy to see all the comments about Google Flights. Though I've been at Google for nearly 9 years, I'm pretty new to the Flights team, so there's still a lot I'm learning... but I'll try to tackle at least few questions below :) (I'm also both an oldtimer and newtimer to HN; long time lurker, and I opened an account ages ago, but sorry I've not been active here before!)
- CardenB 12y ago
  Hey Adam, I'm joining the flights team this summer. Could I maybe talk to you a bit to get some perspective? Feel free to email me: cardenbag@gmail.com
  - ThatAdamGuy 12y ago
    Congrats... and done! Looking forward to having you onboard!
michaelrbock 12y ago
I'm a fan of https://www.vamo.com/ https://www.vamo.com/ for multi-city trips. You put in your point of origin and all the cities you want to visit (and for how long), and it routes you between the cities on the best type of transportation and offers accommodation suggestions as well.
_puk 12y ago
Is this a purposeful reference to the late Lunn Poly [0] "Flights with Google? Get Away!" 0 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunn_Poly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunn_Poly
NamTaf 12y ago
Two complaints: 1) When I go to the front page (https://www.google.com/flights/ https://www.google.com/flights/), everything from and including the 'return/one way/multi stop' row down is fixed-width at about 650px even when my window is far larger. This sort of fixes itself once I start selecting cities, but is randomly narrower than the auto-sizing search bar + other stuff above it. I'm on Win7 x64 / FF 36.0. 2) Please localise currencies. You auto-detect me in Brisbane, Australia. If I pick a flight to Sydney on AU carriers, I don't care about prices in USD. You either convert it to USD in the first place (or just assume 1AUD=1USD) but don't when you display it to me.

293 points by rey12rey 12y ago

Google Flights has been my first search destination for months...the graph is awesome

This makes me feel somewhat uneasy. On the one hand, it works really well. On the other, are Google aiming to take over every aggregation service out there? Something about the dominant search engine moving into this space just doesn't sit right with me.

Bedon292 12y ago
Search engines are all about aggregation, it seems like a logical step for them. Bing, Yahoo, and even AOL also have their own travel sites, so it is not just the dominant search engine, it is all of them. It is also nice to not have to support some third party by buying tickets through them. Just compare the prices and go directly to the airline.
- mootothemax 12y ago
  Bing, Yahoo, and even AOL also have their own travel sites The difference is, if I type WAW to LHR into Google, I get flight listings with prices and availability. You're right that Bing, Yahoo etc. have their own separate travel sites, I've yet to see similar results in their search results.
  - hyperliner 12y ago
    But how is that different from typing "2+3" or "what is the speed of light?" or "what is the temperature in San francisco CA?" in the Google search bar? I think it is all about convenience.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    > The difference is, if I type WAW to LHR into Google, I get flight listings with prices and availability. Yes, and I think that's a Good Thing. Google rightly knows that when I type "WAW to LHR", I want to know about the flight, not about where to find out about that flight.
    - Trombone41 12y ago
      An implication of this difference is that google probably charges for that convenience by saving your itinerary somewhere and selling it to your insurance company.
__Joker 12y ago
Any personal assistant app can't do away from this aggregations. These are the first and low hanging fruits when it comes to personal assistants, given that more and more the personal assistants and the search engines will morph into one.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Google's stated mission is to "organize world's information". This fits it perfectly.

tgraham 12y ago

Very similar to kayak.co.uk/trips

thezach 12y ago

I've been using this for quite some time... works very well. I only will fly one or two airlines, but I still use Google Flights to compare days, and departure airports because its so much easier!

Bedon292 12y ago

Not sure why they are just posting this now, it has existed for quite a while. It also has hotel searching. Not all companies have prices displayed on the site, but it links directly to the companies rather than paying additional fees through a third party.

what_ever 12y ago
You don't always pay additional fees through a third party. If only flight ticket pricing was that easy. There have been instances when I found better deals on other sites compared Google (all of them happen to be international flights). The interface on the other hand is amazing.
- Bedon292 12y ago
  True, there are not always fees, but they are around. International flights have been a bit harder on all of the major US based flight searches though, right? Have not flown international in quite some time, so not as familiar with them.
smackfu 12y ago
Yes, this is basically just an ad for their existing service, wrapped in a blog post.
yekim 12y ago
I wasn't even aware of Google Flights until I saw the article posted on HN. Go figure... For some of us, the constant deluge of info, along with work and family life, makes it tough to stay on top of all the latest developments. Glad this service was "re-announced".
- wbeckler 12y ago
  There's lots of travel sites popping up all the time, including accommodations sites. That's why I built http://AllTheRooms.com http://AllTheRooms.com, which aggregates all the different accommodations sites and deals sites, like Expedia, Groupon, Hotwire, and Airbnb

tarp 12y ago

ITA Software was acquired by Google awhile back. https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/

gringocl 12y ago
This is an awesome platform, if only you could purchase through this!
- dsr_ 12y ago
  That's where the money comes from -- and ITA's mission was to be a backend for other people, who would deal with the expensive customer service side themselves. Presumably as a Google service, customer service isn't a priority anymore.
- simonebrunozzi 12y ago
  Their plan is probably to enable it at some point.
  - gohrt 12y ago
    Matrix has been running 10 years already.
giarc 12y ago
This site allows users to search for hidden city ticketing. There are some good instruction pages out there. I've never personally used it since I live in Canada and spoke and hub isn't really a thing up here.
- smackfu 12y ago
  All sorts of fun games on ITA. Another good one is to set very long connection times, to get a 23 hour stopover in an interesting city for free.
  - jrockway 12y ago

bemmu 12y ago

I love the flexibility this has and after giving it a serious go I never went back to Kayak. If you know exactly when and where to fly, Kayak is great. But with any uncertainty, Google Flights is better for exploring. Maybe you know when to fly, but not when you want to come back. Or maybe you don't even know where you want to fly, in which case you can get destination suggestions. It's also a lot snappier. Now with this flight data they have, I'd imagine being able to just use Google Maps route search to go from A to B such that it would also include flights where applicable. While it kind of does, I am still able to think better routes myself. For example if I search from Tokushima, Japan -> San Francisco, USA, it suggests I should fly from Tokushima. Where actually it's a lot cheaper with almost no time difference to go by bus to Osaka first instead.

samstave 12y ago
It would be interesting for a travel engine to list the alternate routes and options and let people vote ion each option to provide weighting to each one based on peoples preference for each. Unless they already do this?
kremi 12y ago
Kayak's explore is pretty nice when you have uncertainty: http://www.kayak.com/explore/BER/ http://www.kayak.com/explore/BER/ Although unlike Google Flights, it doesn't let you search for specific dates.
- rbcgerard 12y ago
  nor does it allow you to search for specific times i.e. if i want to go somewhere for the weekend, flights at 6am on friday are not that useful...
jasondc 12y ago
Google flight search seems to be really good at finding cheap routes, I'm looking at SFO -> Rome, Kayak doesn't even show the Delta flight Google shows: https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=SFO;t=FCO,CIA;d=2015-08-14;r=2015-08-28 https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=SFO;t=FCO,CIA;d=201... Delta flight on Google is $1293, $1840 on Kayak

salimmadjd 12y ago

The UI/UX on this product is not that great. Google is offering a similar solution as Kayak. But I'm not sure why they just didn't fully copy Kayak. It feels to me, 1 - google thinks they are smarter than Kayak, 2 - they didn't want to show they are copying Kayak. For example, kayak does a great job of displaying all the options on the left column. Google is hiding everything in drop downs. So then they need to have a blog post to explain how their UI works where kayaks is just intuitive. The same with bar chart pricing (which I like) why hide it behind a silly icon like that. Now they have to educate their users what that icon means. Call it "best days to fly" or even better show that at the bottom of the page.

jessegavin 12y ago
I disagree. I spent nearly a year as a UI designer/engineer for a flight search/booking tool and evaluated all the major interfaces. The #1 killer feature google flights has which kills all other flight search tools (I have seen) is speed. They bought a company (ITA) for something close to a billion dollars which provides near realtime search results for flights. Kayak (and others) do a good job of streaming search results, but you still have to wait seconds before you're able to make decisions.

mcdowall 12y ago

I've been using Momondo recently, which has all of these tools and a much better UX. This just feels like a re skin of the ITA site and a bit of a poor effort at that.

smellf 12y ago
The Momondo UI is nicer, but Google Flights has the "price in the calendar" feature.

wiradikusuma 12y ago

Tangentially related, does anyone know of any provider where you can e.g. make your own Hipmunk?

alexhawdon 12y ago
https://developers.google.com/qpx-express/ https://developers.google.com/qpx-express/ is the API you can use to make your own service like Google Flights/Hipmunk.

sq1020 12y ago

It's super fast which certainly cannot be said about other similar services.

peterwwillis 12y ago

I used Google Flights back in November to plan a 10-day getaway during December. BWI->MIA, MIA->LAX, SFO->BWI. Total airfare cost: $420. It was far easier to do this with GF than with Hipmunk or any other website i'd tried.

solve 12y ago

"cheaper isn’t always better" BS. Non-business flights are the most price-sensitive type of product there could possibly be. Near 100% of people only apply a few very basic filters, e.g. no 12-hour layovers, doesn't depart at 5am, and then choose the cheapest. It's not some sophisticated "balance" that needs some advanced machine learning or personalization to accomplish. It's a few obvious filters that are the same for practically everyone. I'd love to see partial dependance plots for each of the obvious filtering factors, vs how often people chose that flight. That's the best way to do this type of analysis. Not to mention that many times the cheapest flight listed on these travel sites isn't actually available when you try to book it. Wonder how that may have skewed Google's analysis.

ThatAdamGuy 12y ago
Hey solve, I thought the exact same thing you did! But then -- as someone who recently joined the Google Flights team -- I helped lead some research that included this topic... and was honestly surprised to find that about 40% of the folks searching on Google Flights DON'T pick the cheapest flight. Price, certainly, is still a huge factor in folks' decision, but convenience plays a very significant role. And, from anecdotal evidence (not part of the same research), brand loyalty is definitely a factor as well (a very price sensitive travel blogger I know still prefers to fly on American, for instance).

radiorental 12y ago

Don't know where they're getting their data from. Boston-dublin in Oct is over $1300 on google flight with Aerlingus Same flight directly on the airline's website is $940. Good luck with that, Google.

analyst74 12y ago
Last time I tried it in 2014 for international flights, Google Flight also seems to be a few hundred dollars more expensive than other travel sites.
aembleton 12y ago
How does SkyScannner compare for that flight: http://www.skyscanner.net/ http://www.skyscanner.net/ I've always found them to be good.
- radiorental 12y ago
  they're on the money, same as Kayak
deleted 12y ago
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jonknee 12y ago
Though I see $550 round trip tickets on Delta, so there's that.
- what_ever 12y ago
  Pretty sure Aerlingus has a non-stop between Boston and Dublin. Besides, you don't know the exact dates.
- radiorental 12y ago
  Delta doesn't fly direct. For this particular journey I could elect to spend 26 hours in Istanbul for $700 and change.
12y ago

dheera 12y ago

Awesome. I can never understand what antiquated database and UI the other flight reservation websites are using. Simple database queries take 10+ seconds, and then you have to click N more times to get the taxes included. Why can't I query for SELECT * FROM tickets WHERE sqrt((destination_latitude-desired_latitude)^2 - (destination_longitude-desired_longitude)^2) < 5000 AND abs(unix_timestamp(departure)-unix_timestamp('somedate'))<10*86400 ORDER BY (price+taxes+fees); with proper geoindexing and sharding this query should take no more than a fraction of a second, yet airline websites want me to use some stupidly-designed UI that can't implement above query, takes 10+ seconds to return results, and doesn't include the taxes and fees. Thus I need to often manually enter every destination within 5000km and every date combination and manually waste half a day to find the cheapest ticket to "anywhere interesting". Furthermore often times changing the language and country of the website changes ticket prices; a well-designed, globally-consistent database should not allow this to happen. I hope that Google will disrupt and reengineer this ancient system.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
For the same reason I can't just renew a domain at Network Solutions without going through eight different pages trying to upsell me things (and often defaulting to checking on those services). Expedia, Orbitz, etc make money via nag screens and upsells. They have no incentive to make the experience positive or easy. Google seems to.
- dheera 12y ago
  I switched to Namecheap; they sell stuff but are not annoying about it. Google Domains also looks promising but I'm waiting for them to not be in beta lest they decide to scrap the product. Google would win me over if they offered free SSL certificates. In fact I think they should go ahead and disrupt the SSL industry by doing that too. Nobody should have to pay for a silly cryptographic signature. That would disrupt NS and all the others who try to upsell stuff.
  - nadams 12y ago
    > ...free SSL certificates. In fact I think they should go ahead and disrupt the SSL industry StartSSL already offers free SSL certificates - and they haven't disrupted the industry. Even if Google started offering free SSL certificates - it's only a band-aid to the problem not a solution.

teirce 12y ago

I stumbled across Google Flights a couple of years ago back when it wasn't as pretty, but I've always found it to be incredibly useful, at least for traveling in the continental U.S.

estefan 12y ago

I want to be able to search by criteria like "somewhere sunny", "the mediterranean", "somewhere to party in the summer", etc. I thought this was it, but not quite :-(...

nedwin 12y ago
Not quite that level but check out Adioso.com. They have a bunch of natural language search queries that work.

penetrarthur 12y ago

Was it updated? I spent my whole evening yesterday planning the trip.

GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago

Minor complaint: the first thing I tried to do was try to find a flight from anywhere in the UK to anywhere in Slovenia. Whilst it lets me be vague about my destination, it doesn't seem to about my starting point... Skyscanner lets me do this

imjk 12y ago

There are sites dedicated to scouring and curating the best deals found using the ITA Software Matrix. http://Theflightdeal.com http://Theflightdeal.com is the best that comes to mind. http://PointsBuzz.com http://PointsBuzz.com also aggregates the various different sites focused on flight deals and maximizing frequent flyer points for the most worthwhile trips.

joelbrewer01 12y ago

I've used Google Flights before, but I almost always end up flying Southwest, which doesn't disclose their prices to aggregators. Does anyone know if Google has tried to strike a deal with them? If anyone could, I imagine it would be Google.

MicroBerto 12y ago
Came in to search for a comment on this. Until one of these sites includes all airlines, I'll remain relatively unimpressed with anything new that comes out.
Avitas 12y ago
I suppose someone could get bold and attempt to do some scraping. Of course, my money would be on SouthWest stopping this behavior as a violation of their terms of service. Here is their terms of service: https://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/terms-and-conditions/index.html?clk=MBSFTR https://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/terms-and-con... They explicitly take ownership of the content, mention that the information is only for non-commercial use, exclude use of the information on their site for commercial use and additionally use for any other purpose. In case their message is not clear, they go even further and list a variety of prohibited activities. The language of their Terms & Conditions is rather broad. It looks like virtually any activity on their website as a violation. Perhaps that is now the norm.

chinathrow 12y ago

Right into the heart of meta engines. Ouch.

jxf 12y ago

I've been using Google Flights since the middle of last year and love it. However, as a frequent traveler for business/conferences, I think there are some things people should be aware of: * Google's data seems to be not as fresh as Kayak or Hipmunk's is. There have been multiple times when I've tried to book a flight via GF only to be told that there were no seats left when I arrive on the airline's page. I suspect part of the greatly improved speed comes at the cost of aggressive caching that runs a risk of things being out of date. * Google's data is all over the map on pricing. Very frequently the airline's price will be much cheaper than GF. And more than once (especially on United or American Airlines) I've noticed that if I book directly through an airline over a VPN, I save several hundred bucks versus if I click through from Google Flights or Kayak. Conversely, sometimes GF is less expensive and when I land on the airline's page it's more expensive. I think the best thing to use it for is route discoverability: which kind of planes and which airlines fly to which locations, on which days at which times? It's also great for doing complex open-jaw routes or hidden-city fares -- and since those routes don't change very often, the data is more likely to be accurate.

zatkin 12y ago
Which VPN gets you the best deals? Also, do you book on Tuesdays?
- esMazer 12y ago
  I would be interested on this as well!
- jxf 12y ago
  I only have one VPN, GoldenFrog's VyprVPN service. Sorry, I didn't intend to suggest that I was running multiple VPNs. I haven't experimented extensively with things, but usually setting my exit server to a random country on the other side of the planet (e.g. Malaysia) has yielded consistently good results. And yes, I do tend to book on Tuesdays.
- ThatAdamGuy 12y ago
  Assuming you're on google.com/flights, I'm fairly sure that using a VPN, changing your IP, flushing your cookies... none of that should change the availability and pricing you see on Flights. And no, don't bother trying to time your bookings. It's kinda like the stock market; trying to beat the market, er, optimize your flights purchase time is likely to lead to sorrow and regret. From the research our Google Flights team did recently, we found that if you wait a week, on average you're gonna pay more for the same flight. And no, we didn't see any universal discount on Tuesdays, either ;)

jkaljundi 12y ago

Tried and most flights between US and Europe were at least $1-300 more expensive than on the usual travel sites.

corwinstephen 12y ago

I've been using Google Flights for over 2 years. Why is it just now getting announced?

chm 12y ago

Incidentally I reserved two tickets yesterday after finding the best prices with Google Flights. It linked me directly to the airline's reservation system a couple of clicks away from confirmation. BTW, I used their map to find the most suitable flight. I could change dates on the fly and see the prices change instantly. It's a great service. Now if they could do the same for railways, I'd gladly pay for the convenience.

ThatAdamGuy 12y ago
chm, thanks much! Appreciate the kudos!

GBond 12y ago

A lot of the features seem highly inspired by Hipmunk.

unrulyOddish 12y ago

Hmmmm. I'm searching New York to Europe (March 25th to April 23rd) and it's giving me a $303 round trip to Madrid. Thats absolutely incredible, but when I click through the fair jumps to over $800. Anyone else experiencing things of that ilk?

solve 12y ago
Exactly what I was saying. Google here is claiming that people don't often buy the cheapest listed flight... and the reason is because they can't.

peter303 12y ago

I like daily price bargraph. Gives a sense of overall prices.

gsmethells 12y ago

I just used this to book my flight to PyCon 2015 oddly enough. It was pretty damn easy to use and let me jump from its search results to directly booking with Air Canada. Pretty smooth...

bruceb 12y ago

I find Momondo to have one of the better layouts of prices when trying to find cheaper days. http://www.momondo.com/ http://www.momondo.com/

otar 12y ago

I think SkyPicker is worth mentioning here: https://skypicker.com https://skypicker.com If you are flexible where you want to go, when, how much you can stay, etc... then you get really good suggestions.

abawany 12y ago
Minor: got a certificate error when I clicked on this url. However that disappeared when I manually typed in www.skypicker.com in the browser. Most likely cause it seems is because their site certificate is *.skypicker.com

davidf18 12y ago

How is it that we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago and we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates? I find this really baffling. It is a service all customers want yet even the great Google can't seem to provide this. Meanwhile Google puts out so many "experimental products" that they later dispose. There is talk of Google getting into cell-phone service and the are already getting into Google fiber. I wish Google would use its pricing power and buy entire flights between major cities domestic and international (eg, NYC to Chicago, LA, SF, Miami, Atlanta, and London). Moreover, an airline can really make its profits on airline fuel speculation since this is the most volatile component of airline costs.

danellis 12y ago
> we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates? What makes you say we can't? Isn't that exactly what this is?
jordigh 12y ago
> How is it that we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago and we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates? Because the airlines have their own army of geniuses working very hard to make sure that this is difficult to do: http://www.cheapair.com/blog/travel-tips/air-fares-101-why-do-fares-change-all-the-time/ http://www.cheapair.com/blog/travel-tips/air-fares-101-why-d... Who are you? How much money do you have? How badly do you want these tickets? How often are you checking the price, what else have you bought? How are your buying habits compared to everyone else's? These are the questions the airlines are trying to answer in order to maximise how much money they can get off each individual.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Wow. So as a United "elite" member, just doing searches on their app or site but with my account, is gonna cost me? Because I've never seen this happen. I seem to get the lowest fare they have. I've not done serious tests, just seen when other people look up my flights, on say, Kayak, they get the same prices.

Yhippa 12y ago

I used to be a hardcore Hipmunk user and I still think I prefer it to Google Flights. I had some trouble recently with Hipmunk linking to flights that don't exist on the airline's websites. I've been using Google Flights ever since. Hopefully Hipmunk will get things back in order again.

nso 12y ago

That notification about avg. delays is an absolute killer feature. http://i.imgur.com/Nb0EYDh.png http://i.imgur.com/Nb0EYDh.png

jrockway 12y ago
As someone who is always running late, I pick the flights that are most often delayed.

penetrarthur 12y ago

I would love GF to have a feature where you select a departure airport and arrival airport and dates, and make GF find me where to go in between. Like a search with multiple cities but so that you decide the departure city of the first flight and the arrival city of the second flight.

scintill76 12y ago

Open-ended destination is great, but I've sometimes wished for open-ended source. My usecase is something like a casual multi-stop trip, where you have an eventual destination in mind, but would like to save money, or see where else you can go along the way for a similar amount of money. I've worked around it by manually checking nearby routes, or getting a feel for options with open-ended reverse flights and then searching the reverse again.

diltonm 12y ago

I just ran a comparison with Expedia (which seems to no longer be ASP.NET based as an aside); not too surprised, Expedia found the cheaper flights. Read, cheaper, not necessarily better.

ThatAdamGuy 12y ago

Hey everyone, just spotted this thread and was really happy to see all the comments about Google Flights. Though I've been at Google for nearly 9 years, I'm pretty new to the Flights team, so there's still a lot I'm learning... but I'll try to tackle at least few questions below :) (I'm also both an oldtimer and newtimer to HN; long time lurker, and I opened an account ages ago, but sorry I've not been active here before!)

CardenB 12y ago
Hey Adam, I'm joining the flights team this summer. Could I maybe talk to you a bit to get some perspective? Feel free to email me: cardenbag@gmail.com
- ThatAdamGuy 12y ago
  Congrats... and done! Looking forward to having you onboard!

michaelrbock 12y ago

I'm a fan of https://www.vamo.com/ https://www.vamo.com/ for multi-city trips. You put in your point of origin and all the cities you want to visit (and for how long), and it routes you between the cities on the best type of transportation and offers accommodation suggestions as well.

_puk 12y ago

Is this a purposeful reference to the late Lunn Poly [0] "Flights with Google? Get Away!" 0 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunn_Poly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunn_Poly

NamTaf 12y ago

Two complaints: 1) When I go to the front page (https://www.google.com/flights/ https://www.google.com/flights/), everything from and including the 'return/one way/multi stop' row down is fixed-width at about 650px even when my window is far larger. This sort of fixes itself once I start selecting cities, but is randomly narrower than the auto-sizing search bar + other stuff above it. I'm on Win7 x64 / FF 36.0. 2) Please localise currencies. You auto-detect me in Brisbane, Australia. If I pick a flight to Sydney on AU carriers, I don't care about prices in USD. You either convert it to USD in the first place (or just assume 1AUD=1USD) but don't when you display it to me.