Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#31

Post by vthallam » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 5:08 PM UTC

bluetidepro wrote: post #26

I've searched with Google Flights a few times, but they are consistently more expensive than the flights I find with other services (Hipmunk, specifically). Has anyone else noticed this before, too? Does anyone know why the prices would be that much different? For the searches I've done, Google Flights is close to $150 more than what Hipmunk shows. Does Hipmunk maybe just have some sort of promo or lower price that G…

My experience is completely different. I've been using Google flights for 2 years now, it always shows me the best price compared to cheapoair/hipmunk. Also I love the clean UI :)

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#32

Post by skybrian » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 5:09 PM UTC

karakal wrote: post #23

I'm curious, how does one gain access to flight schedules/fares? Is this something that anyone can get their hands on and create a service (complexity aside), or do you need some sort of license that costs thousands of dollars? Does each airline have their own way of exporting this data? Is there a single entity that aggregates from all of them? How does the actual data look like? (Is it a dump every X hours, or some…

In Google's case it comes from an acquisition [1]. Not all airlines share data. For example, you won't find Southwest fares except on their own website.

[1] http://www.itasoftware.com/about/

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#33

Post by bluetidepro » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 5:10 PM UTC

vthallam wrote: post #31

bluetidepro wrote: post #26

I've searched with Google Flights a few times, but they are consistently more expensive than the flights I find with other services (Hipmunk, specifically). Has anyone else noticed this before, too? Does anyone know why the prices would be that much different? For the searches I've done, Google Flights is close to $150 more than what Hipmunk shows. Does Hipmunk maybe just have some sort of promo or lower price that G…

My experience is completely different. I've been using Google flights for 2 years now, it always shows me the best price compared to cheapoair/hipmunk. Also I love the clean UI :)

Yeah, totally right, it could easily be subjective to what you're searching for and when/where. I could have just had bad luck with Google Flights vs what I saw on Hipmunk. Just wondering if anyone knows more about the structure/algorithm of it all and why it may be different so much per site. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#34

Post by scelerat » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 5:13 PM UTC

bluetidepro wrote: post #26

I've searched with Google Flights a few times, but they are consistently more expensive than the flights I find with other services (Hipmunk, specifically). Has anyone else noticed this before, too? Does anyone know why the prices would be that much different? For the searches I've done, Google Flights is close to $150 more than what Hipmunk shows. Does Hipmunk maybe just have some sort of promo or lower price that G…

Likewise, several searches for upcoming trips of mine on Google Flights result in significantly more expensive flights than on Hipmunk.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#35

Post by leojg » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 5:14 PM UTC

bluetidepro wrote: post #26

I've searched with Google Flights a few times, but they are consistently more expensive than the flights I find with other services (Hipmunk, specifically). Has anyone else noticed this before, too? Does anyone know why the prices would be that much different? For the searches I've done, Google Flights is close to $150 more than what Hipmunk shows. Does Hipmunk maybe just have some sort of promo or lower price that G…

I try to compare Kayak skyscanner and google flights every time I search for a flight. Mixed results, but anyway after finding a low price, go to the airline site to check.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#36

Post by NikolaeVarius » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 5:17 PM UTC

karakal wrote: post #23

I'm curious, how does one gain access to flight schedules/fares? Is this something that anyone can get their hands on and create a service (complexity aside), or do you need some sort of license that costs thousands of dollars? Does each airline have their own way of exporting this data? Is there a single entity that aggregates from all of them? How does the actual data look like? (Is it a dump every X hours, or some…

There is a GDS that all (or most) vendors send data to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Distribution_System

Downstream companies then query this data and show them to you. The competition comes from the complex caching and delivery mechanisms that the companies use to get you the best price.

It's not really an area that is ripe for disruption. The margins are extremely low and there are only really two companies that make a majority of the money. Expedia and the Priceline group.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#37

Post by Zenst » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 5:29 PM UTC

I take it they do not factor in currency, which would be factor if paying via credit card and exchange rates change if paying in another currency than home.

That would be I feel very dynamic in part, though still something that plays more of a factor in price than other aspects.

I'm not sure how much Airlines adjust for that and given all fuel is ties tot he USD($) then more a factor for non USD pricing with the exchange rate of the USD.

Now a feature that monitored that and fuel cost changes could potentially give people a heads up before the airlines adjust and might be a good feature.

Though I can count the number of flights I have taken on my hands, so not that afay with the dynamics Airlines use to adjust prices and the frequency.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#38

Post by Kliment » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

twentythree wrote: post #30

yalogin wrote: post #10

Almost every site offers this. Isn't this unhelpful in the last ng run? Consumer behavior will change and the price will smooth out or the window of lower prices will be gone or the percentage of change will become smaller.

It might be unhelpful to the users who know how to take advantage of the current system, but hopefully the net impact will be greater price transparency, which helps consumers in the long run; people will pay more for things which cost the airline more, but not for arbitrary reasons like booking too early. In general, flight pricing seems rather opaque; I'm always confused by flights from city A to city B that are mo…

The problem is that there is no single price at which you can fill the plane enough and cover expenses. Set the price too low and your plane fills up but your costs are not covered. Set your price too high and you have so many empty seats that even with the handful of people paying outrageous prices you can't cover the cost of crew, fuel, and ground services. This means you have to sell some tickets at low prices, to attract the masses, and some tickets at high prices, to cover expenses. But now you have the problem of trying to prevent the people who can afford and are willing to buy expensive tickets from using the cheap fares. This is what leads to all the obscure rules about saturday night stays and layover impact and time of booking and whatnot. For a lot more info on this, see http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...

Interestingly, low-fare airlines have tried working around the problem by setting prices super low, such that they lose money on each flight by default, but making it up in auxiliary services - either selling addons that cost them nothing on margin to implement (priority boarding, early checkin, seat selection), upselling external high-margin services (car rental, hotel bookings, airport transfer services, insurance, phone cards) or directly extracting money from customers (obtrusive advertising, in-flight sales pitches, extremely punitive charges for baggage/airport checkin/over-weight fees/not following obscure rules). This seems more sustainable than the traditional approach of customer price segmentation if price transparency increases over time.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#39

Post by illnewsthat » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

throwaway287391 wrote: post #27

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #2

I almost never use anything other google flights when searching for a ticket. The UI is just so much better and easier to use than the ridiculous bloated crap that most travel sites are (especially when they are trying to shove car-rental and hotel deals in your face). The one drawback is sometimes they are missing local / smaller airlines from their list of flights (which can be a major price difference from the maj…

> The one drawback is sometimes they are missing local / smaller airlines from their list of flights (which can be a major price difference from the major ones) on short flights. Not to mention they're missing Southwest, but that's Southwest's fault -- they seem to have some sort of policy against allowing any third parties to list their flights. In addition to being really annoying since I have to make two searches…

> How could not having all that free advertising from flight search engines possibly be a good thing for Southwest?

It's not 'free'. See this quora answer for more: (https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Southwest-choose-not-to-offer...)

Short Answer: It costs money to be there and they can control the variables and environment better on their website.

Long Answer: It dates back to Southwest's routes in competing with the car for travel. In order to be price competitive, they did not want to pay travel agents a 10% commission. (This was the 1970s) So they sold tickets by the phone, at the airport, or at their office, but always direct.

As computers evolved, travel agents began connecting to an airlines fares by computer, rather than books and a phone. Airlines began developing proprietary systems for managing ticket sales, allowing other airlines to be in their systems for a fee. The biggest were Apollo (United) and Sabre (American). Southwest still refused to pay the distribution costs of the tickets.

When the internet became more broadly available to consumers, Southwest jumped on the opportunity, becoming the first major airline to sell tickets online. Other airline followed and soon after, 3rd party sites came to be, using the GDS' (Global Distribution Systems) like Sabre and Apollo to display all of the flights and fares. Acting like modern day travel agents, and putting many travel agents out of business.

Today, while Southwest has become a much larger airline, it still does not want to pay the GDS' for access to their systems. However, today Southwest has a much stronger brand which can drive more people to their website. And by having the website as the primary channel of distribution, they can control a lot of things that they could not within the confines of a GDS.

It has been debated whether the GDS' are really necessary anymore as middlemen. And besides Southwest, other airlines are trying to bring more people to their controlled distribution channel. In the past few days, Delta and American have removed their flight from several 3rd party websites.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#40

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #2

I almost never use anything other google flights when searching for a ticket. The UI is just so much better and easier to use than the ridiculous bloated crap that most travel sites are (especially when they are trying to shove car-rental and hotel deals in your face). The one drawback is sometimes they are missing local / smaller airlines from their list of flights (which can be a major price difference from the maj…

Almost all flight searching / pricing tools have comically bad user interfaces. It's as if the product designers at these companies deliberately went out of their way to limit my options and make me search over and over and over and over.

When's a cheap day to fly to and return from Las Vegas? Sorry. Can't answer that, you need to specify the exact day you want to depart and the exact day you want to come back, and we might let you look at results + or - 3 days, unless you don't specify the exact departure airport.

These sites all seem to be geared toward business travelers who must travel on particular days from and to particular airports. Anything off that beaten path is an exercise in frustration.