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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

#51

Post by baby »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #36
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…

I think Amadeus is a popular one, matrix itasoftware is another one.

I know that for airlines like easyjet you need to visit their website to get fares though. (Or Google would have to build a site crawler)

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

#52

Post by squeaky-clean »

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…

> Does each airline have their own way of exporting this data? Is there a single entity that aggregates from all of them?

I work with a lot of smaller airlines, and from my experience I can tell you no. Many of them can't even tell you their actual route list or flight schedule or pricing logic. They typically buy a booking engine solution from just a few major players (Sabre, Amadeus, TravelPort) who do have centralized data, but access to them is slow, expensive (at scale) and restrictive.

I've been told by one of the GDS's that our use case doesn't apply for direct GDS access, and we have to go through the airlines' access method. I don't know if these booking engine solutions include access to an API or not, however most airlines have said either they don't have an available API, or don't know how to share access to one.

Some of the larger airlines do seem to have their stuff together. But we're just starting to work with them, and because of all the bureaucracy involved it will likely be months before anything happens.

The screen scraping method djhworld mentions is a worthwhile approach if you'd personally like to track a few routes. I've done the same to watch prices to NYC (I visit friends often) on a few of the low-cost airlines. It's nice because you can tailor the logic to your preferences. Such as don't bother searching flights that don't include a weekend in the trip; or set my alert threshold 25% higher when the trip involves a holiday or long weekend.

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

#53

Post by pc86 »

icebraining wrote: post #7
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…

My favourite is http://adioso.com , it's even cleaner than Google Flights and it has "Anytime" as a choice for date of departure.

TIL there are no flights between BWI and Dallas in January.

Maybe it's load but as others have said it doesn't seem to be returning complete (or in my case, any) data.

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

#54

Post by tofflos »

ryandrake wrote: post #40
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 w…

The user interfaces are poor because the quality of the underlying data is poor. The GDS I worked with simply did not offer any useful queries so it was impossible to get good results. A GDS usually charges per request so it quickly gets expensive and slow to aggregate multiple queries into a view that would be useful to the user. Also the terms and conditions of a GDS usually prohibits caching that could be used to make the user experience fast and inexpensive.

Finally the pricing models are non-intuitive and different airlines have different administrators who all type in their respective pricing slightly differently. To get the the best prices you have to tune each query to the particular style used by the administrator.

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

#56

Post by JoshTriplett »

dice wrote: post #49
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…

>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'v…

Seconding Hipmunk; incredibly good UI.

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

#57

Post by dmbaggett »

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…

Fares and rules come from ATPCO (http://atpco.net). Flights come from OAG (http://www.oag.com). Seat availability requires data directly from the carrier, usually via a live query to the carrier's reservation system.

The GDS companies get this data from these sources and then in turn provide (crappy) APIs for customers to use to query it.

In general, if you're doing bookings you can get small amounts of the data (a query at a time) from a GDS. Otherwise you're looking at millions of dollars per year. And then you need to write code to parse it and price tickets using it (approximately 1M LoC if you're terse about it -- more like 30M if you're a GDS).

(I know all this because I co-founded ITA Software, whose software now powers Google Flights.)

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

#58

Post by cbr »

ryandrake wrote: post #40
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 w…

    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.
Google Flights has this: https://www.google.com/flights/?f=0#search;f=SFO,OAK,SJC;t=L...

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on an unrelated project.)

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

#59

Post by sluggg »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #52
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…

> Does each airline have their own way of exporting this data? Is there a single entity that aggregates from all of them? I work with a lot of smaller airlines, and from my experience I can tell you no. Many of them can't even tell you their actual route list or flight schedule or pricing logic. They typically buy a booking engine solution from just a few major players (Sabre, Amadeus, TravelPort) who do have central…

Your information is spot on. I have been working with Sabre daily for a few years now, and I don't want to think about the time I have wasted waiting for a Sabre response... it does go down once a week, which I guess is a perk

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

#60

Post by h1srf »

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #5
pkaye wrote: post #3

I wonder if the airlines will start gaming thing. Seeing what people are being told and doing the opposite to catch them off guard.

I've had the experience of switching from a localized google to google.com/ncr and had ticket prices drop ~4X. I think airlines already try to game the system based on country of origin.

A lot of times, airlines sell tickets based on where the ticket is issued for multiple reasons. If you read some fare rules for these country/region restricted tickets, it'll say something like "valid only when ticket issued in Japan" which leads to people trying to get a flight ticketed on a region specific site of orbitz/expedia/some-airline.co.jp
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