201–210 of 216 posts
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Do you know what they are using under the hood?
Here’s an interesting podcast ep about flight data: https://www.kassenzone.de/2019/08/04/wer-gewinnt-bei-flugsuc... Intro text is German, audio and transcription are English
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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 amoun…
This is actually very difficult. The data has to be sourced from somewhere, which would be the airlines. The airlines have fragile backends that cannot handle much load. As a result, Google has to be very selective in their query volume, so they try to cache intelligently. The result is that sometimes the information they display can be out of sync with airlines. You should notice this issue more on rarer flight rout…
Such nonsense.
Pretty much all airlines don't own/run the source of truth for their flights and haven't for decades. They outsource that to GDS[1] such as Sabre and Amadeus. Their backends are not fragile.
You just have to pay for every query thus the caching.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system
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…
Have you tried Kiwi.com? I think they are still superior in some aspects of UI/UX than the competition. They allow you for example to select a range of dates for your departure/arrival instead of single date. They also give you ability to choose multiple departure/arrival points. And these points can be cities, regions or countries. I have not seen other websites that give you that kind of flexibility.
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> 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.
I'm always curious about where these sites source their prices from. Do the airlines provide a backend with real-time prices? Are they scraped from the frontend? Do these sites sell at a loss sometimes in "guaranteeing" a lower price?
Iirc I stumbled upon one of the flight tracking services by pure chance.
Having said that, I feel like Skyscanner at the very least has their own systems in place. There have been times where I've chosen a ticket, have gone through to the website that sells the ticket at the price, and just before it goes through, Skyscanner validates that the price still exists, and then bails saying the price has increased or decreased. Usually it's not by a lot, but it has happened.
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Google flights charges no middleman fee. It definitely would have added a carry on. you can easily remove it
I don't know why they wouldn't start charging a middleman fee someday. What other value would they get from building Google Flights?
Flight prices shown in India by Google are always been higher than other booking sites. Never heard of anyone around booking flights through Google here.
How often do prices actually drop? I fly pretty often and I can't remember the last time I encountered a price drop on a flight over time.
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…