Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 6:55 PM UTC

dmbaggett wrote: post #57

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…

Post by jmarbach » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 6:57 PM UTC

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…

Post by ojbyrne » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 7:01 PM UTC

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…

Post by lavezzi » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 7:03 PM UTC

jmarbach wrote: post #21

lmkg wrote: 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)/¯

Similarly, the article mentions that Google Flights is now more closely competing with Hopper, a mobile app for finding flights. Hopper already offers this price prediction service, and it is powered by Sabre's price prediction API: https://developer.sabre.com/docs/read/rest_apis/air/intellig... Disclosure: I own another competing flight search tool, https://concorde.io

Post by netfire » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

cbr wrote: post #65

netfire wrote: post #8

The title is a little misleading. The screenshot shows that Google is showing that "prices will likely increase" which is different than the "fares will increase" in the title. "fares might increase" would be more appropriate here.

Are you trying to draw a distinction between "prices" and "fares", or just "will likely" vs "will"?