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Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

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

#41
post #4

Bing Travel had predictions for fare fluctuations for air tickets back in 2009. It was pretty awesome back when I flied a lot, but they apparently killed the feature in 2014. Now Google's bringing it back, two years later. I don't understand the future sometimes. ¯\(°_o)/¯

Kayak has had it for as long as I can recall, and still does.

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

#42
post #4

Bing Travel had predictions for fare fluctuations for air tickets back in 2009. It was pretty awesome back when I flied a lot, but they apparently killed the feature in 2014. Now Google's bringing it back, two years later. I don't understand the future sometimes. ¯\(°_o)/¯

Kayak has this too. I use it all the time.

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

#44

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 w…

>These sites all seem to be geared toward business travelers who must travel on particular days from and to particular airports.

Yep. They're pretty clearly designed for the 99% or so case and just (ungracefully) throw their hands in the air for the other 1% or so.

As you say, it's hard to really make the system do the work around finding a cheap flight within a set of parameters.

I've also spent hours booking complicated multi-destination flights, especially in Asia when you need to use multiple carriers. Simply booking as a series of one-way flights can end up costing thousands of dollars more than something more optimized. So you need to end up manually trying various combinations of one-way and round-trip flights and then piecing together the separate itineraries at the end.

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

#46

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…

I wonder if it's because people already associate them with being the cheapest, they want people to just default to going to their site and be too lazy to check the comparison sites. If they made it easy to compare, they would lose out on that crowd for any time they weren't the cheapest. Maybe it also allows competitors to beat their prices algorithmically.

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

#48

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…

I wonder if it's because people already associate them with being the cheapest, they want people to just default to going to their site and be too lazy to check the comparison sites. If they made it easy to compare, they would lose out on that crowd for any time they weren't the cheapest. Maybe it also allows competitors to beat their prices algorithmically.

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

#49

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…

>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

Funny, I was just thinking of how dissapointing the Google UI was: it took me three clicks and two page loads to see where and for how long a layover was. Have you tried Hipmunk[0]? Their interface for flight listings is the best I've ever used.

0: https://www.hipmunk.com

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

#50
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…

I've known "regular" people in the past that have written small scale services for themselves that scrape prices daily from an airlines own booking system and then provide a service so you can track it and see if there are price fluctuations.

Not sure on the legality of it though.

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