Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

Post by mcfunk » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 7:53 PM UTC

Post by dmbaggett » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 8:01 PM UTC

auvi wrote: post #90

dmbaggett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you don't mind sharing, does ITA/Google Flights still use Common Lisp for the backend?

Post by jrockway » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 8:09 PM UTC

h1srf wrote: post #60

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post by bluedino » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 8:25 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 snowwrestler » Tue, Oct 18, 2016, 8:28 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…