Earlier 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…
Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
151–160 of 170 posts
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't mind sharing, does ITA/Google Flights still use Common Lisp for the backend?
Yes. The core of the backend is still in Common Lisp (and C++). Many ITA hackers are still contributing to the Common Lisp community :)
Interesting -- didn't Google use to be super strict on the languages/runtimes they use in production? Did they make an exception for ITA?
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#153I have time series data from over a thousand gas stations. How can I forecast the price of gas?
If that is all you have then you can't. (Unless you want to try seasonal forecasting, which seems like a bad idea in this case)
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for building ITA Matrix - it is amazing tool and I don't know what I would do without it.
> Thank you for building ITA Matrix - it is amazing tool and I don't know what I would do without it. Honest question (I swear I'm not trying to troll): what do you actually do with it that you can't do (or do as well as) with Google Flights or Kayak or some other site like that? I ask because I've used ITA Matrix and never managed to find a cheaper flight than I can through "normal" means... but I rarely fly multi-d…
1. there's minconnect -- I can structure flights so I have time to sleep while in transit. You will never find those in a normal search engine, they try to achieve minimal time. There's also padconnect, if you don't like booking right on MCT -- which is often wise! -- then, as the name suggests, this will add N minutes to the prescribed minimal connection time.
2. As recently revealed by the company http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/27265924-post483.html you can avoid connections in certain countries which can be beneficial for visa purposes or certain personal privacy requirements ( I know a German physics professor who refuses to go to the US because of the fingerprinting. )
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#155I'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…
You should first start reading these great slides from Carl de Macken (ITA Software co-founder, the thing that now powers Google Flights) http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com... …and then decide if you still want to pursue this.
Great read! Incredibly thorough modelling of all components of the flight ticketing problem space, and of the computational complexities involved. Sets a high bar as an example of how to thoroughly model any search-related problem.
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#156I'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…
Is momondo under one of those? At least where I live it is the biggest by far and I always thought it was globally in the top.
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Momondo also let's you sort by "best", which is a combination of price and time.
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#158I'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…
It is very expensive to get our hands on the technology components that power the core of such applications. [1]
If an airline sells seats, bags, and other ancillary services, why aren't they trying to find more sales channels, to sell more?
I believe that airlines haven't been pushing for innovation, and rather, have been slowed down by their very own current third party providers, or "core business partners".
Travelling technology applications or reservation systems, first appeared a long time ago [2] and because at that time, they were innovations, some airlines signed up for them, to make more sales by globally or regionally distributing all of their flight related information (seat or ancillary availability, fares, code share agreements, etc.). For this reason, we can consider reservation systems as the very first technological airline business partners.
Typically, the reservation systems provided innovation on a distribution factor, which is the travel agency distribution factor. Travel agencies could, and have been connecting to reservation systems and making purchases that increase the number of airline sales, resulting in a win-win, for both agencies and airlines. [3] Reservation systems have other goals, such as flight code share agreements, but these are out of scope. [5]
Today, these third party business organisations do not want to lose market share, so they make things expensive or maintain the old prices, and open very little doors on the borders of their systems.
Therefore, only typical rich individuals or companies can afford to purchase and maintain the costs of direct connections to these providers, which is a win-loss, win for the reservation systems, and loss for airlines.
Fortunately, companies such as Google (with QPX), perform a re-engineering of what these big reservation systems players do, and make it much more affordable and simple to implement [4], and with that, not only they improve the understanding effort of the whole business, but also, provide more sales leads to the airlines, and better user and developing experiences.
The future should be standardised, airlines should distant themselves from the reservation systems (if these do not innovate), and open the doors of their businesses, by creating booking process APIs, that allow, developers and startups, to create powerful and innovative applications, that bring sales.
[1] https://www.tnooz.com/article/why-is-the-travel-industry-so-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_agency [4] https://developers.google.com/qpx-express/v1/pricing [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codeshare_agreement
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#159I wonder if the airlines will start gaming thing. Seeing what people are being told and doing the opposite to catch them off guard.
British Airlines is already f#cking with Google Flights - looked up a round-trip transatlantic flight, got a quote, proceeded to booking, got "oy vey, so sorry, price changed a bit" and served 2x the quote. It was 100% reproducible in a scope of several days.
Are you sure it was BA's decision? Seems rather unlikely to me, as no-one is going to continue to book a flight when the price has just doubled, especially when you've just come from a price comparison site and one press of the back button will show all the competitors.
Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase
#160I'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…
What is your specific use case? I used to work managing API's for one of the GDS companies
For screen scraping, there are a number of companies that do this already for multiple carriers. I'd suggest making use of one of these rather than reinventing the wheel. Example: http://xmldocs.travelfusion.com