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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

#211

Post by dbsmith83 »

HashThis wrote: post #210
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 amazing, because... Expedia bought up everything else. (Kayak, Orbitz, TripAdvisor, etc.) I've had Expedia do horrible things to me so I'm dedicated to use an alternative. It is needed to have Google Flights be a great competitor.

Expedia does not own Kayak or TripAdvisor. There is actually a lot of competition in the space. Last thing anyone needs is Google or Amazon stepping into yet another market.

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

#212

Post by aripickar »

sokoloff wrote: post #136
igrekel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be such a rookie mistake. Airlines don't do that, because 1) it creates bad habits with passengers 2) that's when the ticket has the highest value for customer who need to travel NOW 3) if they have remaining economy seats, a price drop 33 minutes before departure has little effect in stimulating demand for most destinations.

How many people are in a position to make a purchase decision, buy a ticket, and make the flight when the price drops 33 minutes before departure (13 minutes before boarding ends)? In June, I was literally in CVG airport (inside of security) when my Delta flight was delayed. I decided not to book a ticket on United that was leaving in ~35 minutes because I wasn't sure that I could get over to the other terminal befor…

Probably people that miss their flight and are either already in the terminal or past security would like to book it? That’s the only use case I can think of

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

#213

Post by guiambros »

CydeWeys wrote: post #172
guiambros wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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,…

Sounds like a P/NP-type problem. It's quite a hard problem to calculate all possible permutations of routings and schedules across 5 cities ("NP"), and United's system clearly isn't up to snuff for it, while Google's is. But validating and pricing any single itinerary is a trivially easy problem ("P"), so United can handle that no problem. It can't come up with the itinerary, but given a particular one, it will sell…

On multi-city trips, usually the UI allows the user to select each leg individually, so it is a very trivial problem (i.e., the same as 5 one way trips).

So no, there's no special magic here.

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

#214

Post by krn »

dbsmith83 wrote: post #211
HashThis wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Flights is amazing, because... Expedia bought up everything else. (Kayak, Orbitz, TripAdvisor, etc.) I've had Expedia do horrible things to me so I'm dedicated to use an alternative. It is needed to have Google Flights be a great competitor.

Expedia does not own Kayak or TripAdvisor. There is actually a lot of competition in the space. Last thing anyone needs is Google or Amazon stepping into yet another market.

> There is actually a lot of competition in the space.

Is there?

Expedia Group owns: Expedia, Ebookers, Orbitz, and Travelocity.

Booking Holdings owns: Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, Momondo, and Cheapflights.

Ctrip Group owns: Trip.com, and SkyScanner.

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

#215

Post by timdierks »

aclimatt wrote: post #152
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 amoun…

When this happens, go to https://matrix.itasoftware.com and find the specific itinerary you're looking for, which will give you the specific fare codes, etc. which you should use to book. I believe this ticket is available, it's just that the people you're speaking with can't find it in their system (that said, you don't say what fare you saw, so it's hard for me to be sure I see the same fare you do). Specifically, the bit under "Fare Construction".

Fare Construction (can be useful to travel agents) CPH SK X/MAN VS NYC 500.77HLHF06MN NUC 500.77 END ROE 6.637696 XT 161ZO 167UB 39YC 47XY 27XA 124US 646YQ

I wish that Google Flights would offer a way to get this info in the UI; it's not common but not greatly unusual to be in this position (where Flights can find the fare but the UIs available to consumers can't book it).

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

#216

Post by ehsankia »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #192
ehsankia wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could a Gmail add-on not do something similar? Of course you'd need to give it access to your emails. You could also use outlook, which I'm sure does similar things, maybe not as well though.

Unfortunately when you let people develop on your data, you get what happened with FB and Cambridge Analytica. You saw how FB got into trouble for literally no fault of theirs? The data was literally accessed using a legit API.

To be fair the biggest issue with CA was the "Friends of friends" data.
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