101–110 of 110 posts
whoa - it'll be cheaper for me to fly to Moscow (from DC) and travel to Eastern Europe by rail than actually flying directly in -- by about $420. This is dead useful; thanks for the link!
Depending on how, if at all, you are getting around the region otherwise, eastern European railroad might not be something you want to add to your itinerary.
Copycats! We already had this feature on http://qfly.com/ (on http://qfly.nl to be precise) 10 months ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem you have is that flight data is incredibly fast-changing and computationally expensive to get. So in order to get enough data for this you need to do a lot of long queries very often. Companies that provide pricing information (like ITA, who Kayak uses) charge a lot for these resources, so it's not like the usual internet where your incremental cost per user or search is minimal: there's a real cost here.…
Yep, that's exactly right. Every metasearch site out there uses essentially the same interface: given an origin, destination, departure date, and arrival date, return a list of itineraries in order of increasing price. Needless to say, the number of combinations of these variables precludes doing any kind of exhaustive search (especially since you're being charged per query). And availability is constantly changing,…
Therefore, rather than only considering the single lowest-cost edge on the graph (that is, an A-to-B flight to an interesting place), you could consider lowest-cost paths, using a pathfinding algorithm (secondarily weighted by the popularity of intermediate cities/vertices as temporary destinations.) Thus, instead of going to city X, it would recommend going to Y, staying a month and taking in the local culture, and then finishing the trip to X with a short, local flight in the off-season (or any other method of travel—it could integrate with Google Maps to see if it would be cheaper to drive between each pair of intermediate nodes than fly.)
Finally! I've been waiting for something like this. I never care where I go. The more random the better. I wish they could just plan the full trip for me. Flight + hotel + (maybe) car.
Finally! I've been waiting for something like this. I never care where I go. The more random the better. I wish they could just plan the full trip for me. Flight + hotel + (maybe) car.
That might be a pretty cool app idea: random trip planning. As in: "I don't really care, I have $1200 to blow on a 5 day trip June 4th-9th. When do I show up for my flight?"
I bet too they'd do it better (within a given locus) than the computer, knowing things like that there was a carnival at such-a-place and that the vistas at t-time of year are magnificent, etc..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem you have is that flight data is incredibly fast-changing and computationally expensive to get. So in order to get enough data for this you need to do a lot of long queries very often. Companies that provide pricing information (like ITA, who Kayak uses) charge a lot for these resources, so it's not like the usual internet where your incremental cost per user or search is minimal: there's a real cost here.…
Yep, that's exactly right. Every metasearch site out there uses essentially the same interface: given an origin, destination, departure date, and arrival date, return a list of itineraries in order of increasing price. Needless to say, the number of combinations of these variables precludes doing any kind of exhaustive search (especially since you're being charged per query). And availability is constantly changing,…
I went back and forth with Bill O (at Kayak) while leveraging their API, and know the cost/query was fairly high a few years ago. I suspect it has decreased, but probably not to the point where the processing power needed for massive permutations and cost/query makes this any more feasible.
I set up a proof of concept in 2006/2007 that still works (most of the time). I ended up using Flash/Flex front-end to overcome the number of browser HTTP connections (and keep some of the processing on the client). I'm not sure this actually helped the server or not b/c I never did any testing. I also limited to "where can you go" (multiple city pairs) and "when should I go" (single city pair with multiple dates), but not a combination of both.
Feel free to take a look. It will shut down after the max number of queries/day is reached.
Adioso (YC W'09) does this too - See, for example: http://adioso.com/au/syd-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html http://adioso.com/us/jfk-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html
That is absolutely fucking awesome! http://adioso.com/se/stockholm-to-beach.html One thing I would love to see is adding larger/fuzzier destination areas such as "the tropics", "the carribean", "the mediterranean", "Africa", "South America", or "Mexico".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might be a pretty cool app idea: random trip planning. As in: "I don't really care, I have $1200 to blow on a 5 day trip June 4th-9th. When do I show up for my flight?"
This is the sort of thing I'd expect a good old-school human travel agent to do pretty well. I bet too they'd do it better (within a given locus) than the computer, knowing things like that there was a carnival at such-a-place and that the vistas at t-time of year are magnificent, etc..
Is there a contact link? This is neat but some obvious non-US improvements: Colour-coding the prices would make it a lot more intuitive to read/scan for deals. Detects me as being in New York (I'm in Switzerland) if I go to the base URL. Only offers Fahrenheit... and dollars I think.
I'm sure you've found that on your own already, but it answers the question.
I am curious why the submitted link wasn't truncated to /explore/, as it currently links a calgary based search.