Will it help predict when mistakes are most likely to occur? The $30 RT EWR to HNL?
Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
111–120 of 170 posts
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#112Earlier 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…
30M LoC sounds insane - what is the main reason behind there being so much code?
It requires a lot of code because the rules that govern the use of fares on a ticket are insanely complicated -- literally beyond anything you could possibly imagine a priori. There are dozens of rule "categories", each larded up with tons of complexity. There's even "Rule Category 25: Fare By Rule" which is essentially a complete macro facility for fares, allowing carriers to literally take an arbitrary fare's rules, modify them in all kinds of random ways, and publish the result as a new "virtual" fare.
As for the GDSes, their code is primarily TPF assembly. So now add the LoC blow-up of using a very low-level language.
There are like 25 people in the world who understand this stuff, and half of them likely work at ITA/Google.
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Indeed, I decided to try it out (having never used it before) and was very impressed.
Historically my flight booking priorities were pretty much 100% price related, but now they're a combination of price and duration.
Alas most sites only let you order by one or the other (literal example: 35 hour flight for $1850; change the sort to duration; 15 hour flight $3300, scroll through the list for _ages_ to try and find the best combination of the two).
Then select the best option outbound, only to find out the return flight is 36 hours... Or that the 16 hour option adds another $800 to the price.
The HipMunk UI was really nice for finding good duration flights in both directions, whilst also making it clear the price implications of which return leg I used (which to me is uncommon, because so many sites treat them as disparate steps, so a change in return flight means you get kicked back to step one.
Not strictly comparing the experience to Google Flights (as I haven't really used it), but to a lot of other flight search sites I've used (Kayak, SkyScanner, WebJet, Airline sites, IWantThatFlight, HelloWorld, among others).
The HipMunk UI actually facilitated that search really well. Very impressed :-) (And it seemed to have equally good prices for the flights I looked at compared to other sites.)
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
That link to Sabre documentation isn't half bad. I was expecting a flaming mess of docs.
Sabre's REST APIs are actually pretty great; they're well-documented and fairly easy to use. The SOAP APIs [0], which contain the real meat (inventory details, PNR lookup, etc) are another story…
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
30M LoC sounds insane - what is the main reason behind there being so much code?
It requires a lot of code because the rules that govern the use of fares on a ticket are insanely complicated -- literally beyond anything you could possibly imagine a priori. There are dozens of rule "categories", each larded up with tons of complexity. There's even "Rule Category 25: Fare By Rule" which is essentially a complete macro facility for fares, allowing carriers to literally take an arbitrary fare's rules…
Also people at Sabre (worked there) and I presume Amadeus (those are two main players - surprised you seemed to "forget" to mention them?).
As to the "categories", people at Sabre working with them used to say in some cases you can not even be sure if the calculation (of a ticket price - "fare") will end in finite time, so the "macro language" is apparently Turing-complete!
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 compli…
That's the exact sort of scenario you would want a travel agent for--if you can trust the agent to get a good fare.
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be very surprised if Google Flights wanted Southwest to pay for inclusion. It already lists Southwest flights with a note "Prices are not available for: Southwest. Flights with unknown prices are at the end of the list." Instead it really sounds like it's Southwest not wanting it to be easy for people to comparison shop. (Disclaimer: I work for Google, on an unrelated project.)
Google hooks into the systems that want Southwest to pay, it's not directly making that decision.
Isn't Google sending customers directly to airline websites to book?
So the way this is working is: Google, Hipmunk, etc. use GDS for queries, and then send customer to airline to book? Does GDS have any ability to sell tickets?
Has Google tried to scrape data directly from Southwest website and Southwest won't let them? Or is it just that Southwest will not provide APIs to make it easy for Google to pull the data?
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 compli…
That's the exact sort of scenario you would want a travel agent for--if you can trust the agent to get a good fare.
Yeah. I actually have broken down and used our company travel service for this. Then at least it's out of my hands. But usually I have too much sunk cost :-) and have sufficient preferences that I just motor through on my own.
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#119I 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 always use SkyScanner - similar UI with options for "find the cheapest flight in a month," but usually way cheaper prices. Also includes Southwest, which Google Flights is missing, if I remember correctly.
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#120I love the interface of Google flights, but I can usually find cheaper tickets elsewhere (usually on skyscanner). I've no idea how ticket pricing works and why one site can be so much cheaper than others, but skyscanner is usually 15-20% cheaper on international flights for me.
Skyscanner also has more airlines than google flights, if I remember correctly. I don't think google flights shows southwest flights, but skyscanner does. I have no idea why.