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Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

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Re: Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

#151

Post by guiambros »

listenallyall wrote: post #141

Say what you want about Google/Alphabet as a whole, but Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability. Kayak, Hipmunk, Orbitz, Skyscanner were all my go-to's at one point but G.Flights is far superior in so many ways. It actually remembers your airline preference between searches. You don't have to beg or change settings to…

(disclaimer: I work at Google, but no relationship with the Flights team other than as an individual user)

Funny story: just last week I was booking a complicated multi-city trip with 5 legs, multiple countries, etc. I tried several times via united.com, and it wasn't showing me any flights available in one of the legs (which I knew they had a codeshare agreement).

I went back to Google Flights, chose all my flights, selected "Book with United", and was able to finish the reservation on united.com (!), with all the flights properly populated, including codeshares.

It's remarkable that the integration between Google Flights and the airlines is better than even the airlines' websites themselves.

Re: Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

#152

Post by aclimatt »

listenallyall wrote: post #141

Say what you want about Google/Alphabet as a whole, but Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability. Kayak, Hipmunk, Orbitz, Skyscanner were all my go-to's at one point but G.Flights is far superior in so many ways. It actually remembers your airline preference between searches. You don't have to beg or change settings to…

I agree that its real-time inventory and pricing availability has been a total game changer in the UX department. Presumably their acquisition of ITA gave them the ability to respond to queries in real-time which enabled all of the (quite excellent) features you pointed out above.

There's just one problem -- because a ton of the data is cached, or precomputed, or however it's done, a substantial and frustrating amount of the data is simply wrong. As in, an unbookable flight. I spend probably an unreasonable amount of time searching for flights, and anecdotally I'd say about 5-10% of the results I get (not even for complex itineraries) either have a completely incorrect price, or are wholly unbookable on any website. Calling the airline doesn't count, because if their website doesn't have it, 99% chance neither will the call center.

For example, one from a few hours ago: https://www.google.com/flights/?f=0#f=0&flt=/m/01lfy./m/02_2...

Re: Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

#153

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

listenallyall wrote: post #141

Say what you want about Google/Alphabet as a whole, but Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability. Kayak, Hipmunk, Orbitz, Skyscanner were all my go-to's at one point but G.Flights is far superior in so many ways. It actually remembers your airline preference between searches. You don't have to beg or change settings to…

Ditto. GFlights is the best flight planner, especially if you're flexible and want the cheapest day to fly in/out.

Re: Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

#154

Post by scrollaway »

listenallyall wrote: post #141

Say what you want about Google/Alphabet as a whole, but Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability. Kayak, Hipmunk, Orbitz, Skyscanner were all my go-to's at one point but G.Flights is far superior in so many ways. It actually remembers your airline preference between searches. You don't have to beg or change settings to…

I love Google Flights as well, though I wish they had something like Kayak Trips. My understanding is they kind of do have that with automatic flight booking scanning in gmail, but it's impossible to add information manually in there. A lot of stuff is missing for me at least.

Re: Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

#155

Post by dastx »

listenallyall wrote: post #141

Say what you want about Google/Alphabet as a whole, but Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability. Kayak, Hipmunk, Orbitz, Skyscanner were all my go-to's at one point but G.Flights is far superior in so many ways. It actually remembers your airline preference between searches. You don't have to beg or change settings to…

> Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability.

Really? I've yet to see a flight be cheaper or close to what the likes of Kayak and Skyscanner have provided.

Re: Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

#156

Post by jen729w »

laurex wrote: post #100
daddypro wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use TripIt ever since Trips was shutdown. While it doesn't do everything, it does quite a lot (have all reservations etc in one place).

Based on this recommendation, I signed up, but gracious, the UI is bad.

Ah yah it’s a flashback and not in a good way.

I use and love TripIt but only like this:

0. Subscribe to my personal TripIt calendar feed.

1. Book flight, car, hotel, whatever.

2. Forward booking confirmation to plans@tripit.com.

3. Now all those details are in my calendar.

What’s particularly useful is how it handles time zones. Flights seem to ‘just work’, and in the notes for any appointment it’ll tell you the local arrival & departure times anyway.

Re: Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

#157

Post by jboydyhacker »

listenallyall wrote: post #141

Say what you want about Google/Alphabet as a whole, but Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability. Kayak, Hipmunk, Orbitz, Skyscanner were all my go-to's at one point but G.Flights is far superior in so many ways. It actually remembers your airline preference between searches. You don't have to beg or change settings to…

It's actually not that amazing- they bought out ITA Matrix and just iterated on top of it.

Re: Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

#158

Post by squeaky-clean »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #149
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is likely that simply by observing their pricing over time a sophisticated Google algorithm has "learned" the airline's less sophisticated ones Simple systems acting in concert are devilishly complex. (Former algorithmic trader.) Counterparties' systems fail. They misfire. They get confused by the weather and interns punching in parameters wrong. Internal dynamics, like someone stretching to hit a goal or gettin…

Does anyone know enough about airline pricing to deconstruct the risk here? Are providers like Google required to disclose the underlying airline price, so Google is absorbing your risk of regret on that? If not, and Google has discretion in what to quote, isn't this guarantee really just a promise not to offer you a better price later?

I work with airline pricing but I'm no expert on that (this vertical is ridiculously complex. Half for necessary reasons and half because of 70 years of technical baggage), and I'm also no legal expert. So take everything here with a million grains of salt.

But I do not believe so. From my experience airlines are extremely strict about their partners displaying correct pricing. I've been told displaying a price lower than what is available is illegal / a liability and work under that assumption but I'm not the person who knows the specifics. However displaying a price higher than the lowest available will also get us in big trouble with the airlines. Maybe my work is biased since I deal with promotional campaigns and ads, but the general reason for a complaint will be something like (just making up fake examples) the airline having a 24-hour sale, and because we our systems didn't pick up on that for 2 hours so that's 1/12 their marketing budget thrown away.

Furthermore, many airlines don't directly manage their own booking and pricing and instead have it managed by a third party. So aside from legality and conditions from the airline, you can also be bound to conditions by your reservation system. There are plenty of them, but if you want one to Google for your curiosity Sabre Corporation is the largest.

Re: Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

#159

Post by grecy »

listenallyall wrote: post #141

Say what you want about Google/Alphabet as a whole, but Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability. Kayak, Hipmunk, Orbitz, Skyscanner were all my go-to's at one point but G.Flights is far superior in so many ways. It actually remembers your airline preference between searches. You don't have to beg or change settings to…

It's funny, I've had exactly the opposite experience.

Multiple times flying from random places in Africa to Australia return, and Australia to Canada, GFlights was at least $1k more than the cheapest on kayak or orbitz.

Maybe GFlights just doesn't show overly cheap options..?

Re: Google to Offer a Best Price Guarantee on Certain Flights

#160

Post by stefco_ »

jboydyhacker wrote: post #157
listenallyall wrote: post #141

Say what you want about Google/Alphabet as a whole, but Google Flights is incredible. It's absolutely amazing how quickly and largely that Google crushed all its competitors in terms of usability. Kayak, Hipmunk, Orbitz, Skyscanner were all my go-to's at one point but G.Flights is far superior in so many ways. It actually remembers your airline preference between searches. You don't have to beg or change settings to…

It's actually not that amazing- they bought out ITA Matrix and just iterated on top of it.

They added the last important missing feature from ITAMatrix, which was a direct link to a prefilled checkout page. That part is nice.
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