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Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

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Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#111

Post by jgab »

micahgoulart wrote: post #46
crikli wrote: post #4

Off-topic but related: https://scottscheapflights.com is _amazing_. The Premium sub is worth every penny...my wife and I will be doing a ton more overseas travel in 2019 purely because of the deals this site finds.

I got into churning airline miles then manufactured spending (generating spend on credit card to earn miles) and now have over 10 million miles. I also heard one of the biggest groups of manufactured spend are developers within Google. I belong to a private slack with over 80 folks doing this as a hobby so we can do first class/business class international travel and hotel stays for free. If anyone is into it as as w…

I'm interested as well -> one23johnson at gmail

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#112

Post by bogomipz »

namdnay wrote: post #31
toast0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many moons ago, I worked in the travel industry. Most airlines aren't running their own technology stack -- they are paying someone else $/search to drive their webpage. In a market of razor thin margins, paying per search for you to crawl their flight catalog is a big problem -- thus the arms race. The only way to win at this is to own the catalog, this is why Google bought ITA. Ryanair is the kind of airline that I…

The only airlines I know of running their own PSS are Emirates and Turkish. Ryanair are using Navitaire (Amadeus' low-cost subsidiary). To be honest, the cost structure is the same whether you're running it yourself or outsourcing - you don't want an absurdly high look to book ratio, or else you're just wasting server costs

What is PSS here? I'm not familiar with this acronym.

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#113

Post by bogomipz »

micahgoulart wrote: post #46
crikli wrote: post #4

Off-topic but related: https://scottscheapflights.com is _amazing_. The Premium sub is worth every penny...my wife and I will be doing a ton more overseas travel in 2019 purely because of the deals this site finds.

I got into churning airline miles then manufactured spending (generating spend on credit card to earn miles) and now have over 10 million miles. I also heard one of the biggest groups of manufactured spend are developers within Google. I belong to a private slack with over 80 folks doing this as a hobby so we can do first class/business class international travel and hotel stays for free. If anyone is into it as as w…

Can you say what is churning? How does it differ from manufactured spending?

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#114

Post by bogomipz »

jnurmine wrote: post #20
catchmeifyoucan wrote: post #2

Great work, this is really cool! For multi city flights, I've found Google flights does things really well from a UX standpoint, and I believe they support Ryanair.

Google Flights is generally fine. But sometimes it figures out quite fringe stuff like Stockholm-Dublin roundtrip with a 17 hour layover in Dubai. It was not cheap either. Sounded like something like a global minima.

>"Google Flights is generally fine. But sometimes it figures out quite fringe stuff like Stockholm-Dublin roundtrip with a 17 hour layover in Dubai."

Honestly I regularly see these type of ridiculous options on all of the major travel sights as well as stuff like 3 and 4 layovers. Do you have any insight on why this happens or what such absurd results are even presented? I regularly see things like 54 hour travel time for for international flights.

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#115

Post by kevin_b_er »

Robelius wrote: post #107
kevin_b_er wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A market of razor thin margins? I think not. US airlines are swimming in cash 2017: * American Airlines profit: 7.6 Billion USD * United profit: 7.1 Billion USD * Delta Airlines profit: 4.7 Billion USD * Southwest: 2.2 Billion USD

Looking at AA 2017 earnings Total operating revenues: 42.2B Net income: 1.90B For a profit of 4.5%. Where are you getting your numbers from? https://americanairlines.gcs-web.com/static-files/17cae9f4-5...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_airlines#By_...

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#116

Post by toast0 »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #101
toast0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many moons ago, I worked in the travel industry. Most airlines aren't running their own technology stack -- they are paying someone else $/search to drive their webpage. In a market of razor thin margins, paying per search for you to crawl their flight catalog is a big problem -- thus the arms race. The only way to win at this is to own the catalog, this is why Google bought ITA. Ryanair is the kind of airline that I…

A market of razor thin margins? I think not. US airlines are swimming in cash 2017: * American Airlines profit: 7.6 Billion USD * United profit: 7.1 Billion USD * Delta Airlines profit: 4.7 Billion USD * Southwest: 2.2 Billion USD

In my defense, I left the industry in 2011, back when American lost $2B, and half of the major airlines were in bankruptcy proceedings. It looks like they found some margin in the past few years.

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#117

Post by GFischer »

smartbit wrote: post #15

Hacking PNR https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme... at time of the talk (2 years ago) used/discussed these sites: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ to get detailed fare rules & restrictions https://www.expertflyer.com & https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/seat-alerts/id533533342 https://www.checkmytrip.com/ allows entering name & booking-reference and gives all detail https://www.viewtrip.com/ https…

If you're interested, these slides are a cool introduction to the complexity of air travel:

http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf

Edit: I missed that someone had already linked to them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18531203

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#118

Post by aagha »

chasefoto wrote: post #11
brianbreslin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also off-topic, I would pay a premium for the deals to be pre-searched for my specific cities/dates. I already pay for scotts premium. But would pay even more if I was able to actually have it look at my calendar and see when I could go on these trips. I miss out on too many due to not being quick enough.

I've had the same issue and have been building a tool to further filter and curate flight deals. Right now you can select departure airports and airlines. Date filtering will be coming next in the next 5-7 days if not sooner. https://producthunt.com/posts/altitude

I hope you don't mind the feedback: There's no way I'm signing up for a service that I don't get to try first. See what Scott's is doing: You get a 1/3 of the deals--this whets the appetite.

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#120

Post by hoschicz »

crazygringo wrote: post #72
kasparsklavins wrote: post #69

Why is there no interface that allows searching for flights without specifying exact dates? All I want to do is fly from A to B to A. Maybe stay a week, maybe two. I'm flexible - it doesnt have to be exactly N days starting on the M'th. Even services that "allegedly" advertise they have that, still require manually clicking every day combination. I'd fly more often if it was easy . The few times I tried, it would be…

Have you seen a site that does that really well, UX-wise? I'd assume it's two reasons: first that it's hard to get the UX right. There are going to wind up being so many combinations of possibilities that I'm not sure how you'd even sort them in a meaningful way. (E.g. it's unlikely price from lowest to highest will be the most meaningful, the lowest price alone might wind up having 100 different date combinations, s…

Kiwi.com does this really well.
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