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Crowd-Sourced Flight Search

flightfox.com

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Re: Crowd-Sourced Flight Search

#31

Post by housewife »

montitro wrote: post #24

May I suggest adding more flexible options? I often find myself wanting to plan a vacation but not knowing where or when I want to go - on traditional travel sites, this is a problem, because everything has to be run through an algorithm, but as a crowdsourcer, you might be able to get away with saying 'two week trip, sometime between August and November', and just give me good options.

Hm, to do this though, you'd need to have a lot more qualifying questions. I have been a travel agent for 10 years, and it is difficult to find the "right" holiday for someone without a lot of information (ie budget, what they like to do, where they have been/stayed before and what they liked/didn't like, etc). That said, and even as a competitor, it is a really cool idea!

Re: Crowd-Sourced Flight Search

#32

Post by bullseye »

I think this seems like a fantastic idea. I really hope it continues to expand.

I am taking the family on a US domestic trip in a few months and have already started the process of flight-searching. I'd be willing to try out something like this, even just for the novelty. However, with so many international flights, the list inadvertently seemed to alienate simple domestic flights.

I wanted to see more examples of my type of trip (business class, simple domestic flight), but wasn't really sure how to do that. I searched through the first 3-4 pages before deciding I would have liked some filter controls on the list. I wanted to see what kind of savings people were finding and what types of trips were being posted. Basically, a way to determine if my trip met the right criteria for a contest and if it was feasible to use the service.

That said, I understand my trip may not be the immediate target market. Nevertheless, I'm going to keep watching this because I really like the concept.

Re: Crowd-Sourced Flight Search

#33

Post by geoka9 »

drags wrote: post #5

My first thought was: what's to stop someone from waiting for some responses and then running over to Kayak to book once they know the best dates/airlines. But it looks like they take the finder's fee upfront. It would be nice if there were an option to only pay the finder's fee if someone significantly beats the best price you were able to find. Everyone does at least an _initial_ search to get an idea of price when…

I think so too. I have a flight coming up and was actually willing to try the service and pay the fee if the price found would be less than I usually pay for the trip. I went as far as entering the details and providing my email address. But as soon as I saw the request to pay, I closed the page. I have reasons to believe that the option I already have (and have used in the past) would be hard to beat. So I'm not willing to pay upfront.

Just my 2 cents.

UPDATE: I think an ideal solution would be if you at least could quote a price before I had to choose whether to pay or not.

Re: Crowd-Sourced Flight Search

#35

Post by saucerful »

Everyone here seems so satisfied, but to be honest I am still skeptical. It would be nice in the "browse flights wanted" screen you showed some baseline price for the requested flight (e.g. automated kayak search, though i'm guessing that is in violation of their TOS. perhaps you can just have a link to the query) so that potential customers could see some samples of the kind of savings to expect.

Re: Crowd-Sourced Flight Search

#36

Post by todsul »

saucerful wrote: post #35

Everyone here seems so satisfied, but to be honest I am still skeptical. It would be nice in the "browse flights wanted" screen you showed some baseline price for the requested flight (e.g. automated kayak search, though i'm guessing that is in violation of their TOS. perhaps you can just have a link to the query) so that potential customers could see some samples of the kind of savings to expect.

Hi saucerful,

We used to do this, but there was too much contention around the base price. Imagine if we showed a base price of $1000 and on your favourite search engine you saw $950. This created an adversarial situation with our flyers.

Then we had the issue of a specific requirement in the comments (e.g. I'm relocating to another country with my two pets). The experts would put up the full cost of flying with the pets, but then our base price would undercut them because no flight API handles pets.

Then we used virtual assistants to find the base prices considering the comments, but of course they couldn't interpret the comments properly. E.g. someone said they didn't want red-eye flights, but the VA didn't understand what that meant and gave a red-eye price that was hundreds below the expert prices.

Sorry for the long reply, but would love to hear any suggestions around this. At the moment we're trying to create a better flyer-expert relationship.

Re: Crowd-Sourced Flight Search

#37

Post by todsul »

mistermann wrote: post #26

Extremely interesting.....a few questions that come to mind for me: 1. Is it worthwhile using for simple flights? Ie: Toronto to las Vegas, direct? 2. Can it handle extremely complex (maybe even almost freeform) scenarios beyond the displayed +\- x days, such as: I have 14 days available (but would settle for an 11 day trip), and I can take travel any time between these dates, and I am willing to travel to a, b, or c…

Hi mistermann,

1. Depends on your expectations. If the absolute lowest price is found on Kayak.com, then that's the price you'll get. We can't change that, but we can save you lots of time by making sure that's the lowest price. Of course, we do save a lot of people money on short trips, but the longer the better.

2. Yes, absolutely. Just describe your requirements in the comments section and make sure you work with the experts to keep them on the right track. This is really where we can save the most for you.

3. No, not at all. This is a global service. It works best when you're flying to lesser know places because our experts may have local knowledge that helps get better prices than you know.

4. Only a very small percentage of winning flights use loopholes. But yes, they can and do disappear. Luckily, because we're "human-powered" and because these loopholes are discovered by humans, it's more likely you'll get access to loophole savings on Flightfox.

5. Yes, maybe, probably, not sure :)

6. We need to reach critical mass to really leverage the power of frequent flyer points. We'll get there soon :)

7. At this stage, it's all human powered. We're only a few weeks old, so we hope to evolve. Some of our experts claim to use custom software. There are definitely lots of manual tricks and tips too.

All the best and thanks for the kind words.

Re: Crowd-Sourced Flight Search

#39

Post by joshwa »

As a potential expert/buyer, I'd love to see what the results look like (and the comments on the entries as well), but it looks like those can only be viewed by the contest owner. Any way to post some examples?

(and who is this MrHyde fellow who wins everything?)

Re: Crowd-Sourced Flight Search

#40

Post by montitro »

housewife wrote: post #31
montitro wrote: post #24

May I suggest adding more flexible options? I often find myself wanting to plan a vacation but not knowing where or when I want to go - on traditional travel sites, this is a problem, because everything has to be run through an algorithm, but as a crowdsourcer, you might be able to get away with saying 'two week trip, sometime between August and November', and just give me good options.

Hm, to do this though, you'd need to have a lot more qualifying questions. I have been a travel agent for 10 years, and it is difficult to find the "right" holiday for someone without a lot of information (ie budget, what they like to do, where they have been/stayed before and what they liked/didn't like, etc). That said, and even as a competitor, it is a really cool idea!

Mmm, that's true. Even if it was just a list of countries, though, I don't think the flight info has to be more detailed than that; you're generally going to be flying into a city anyways, so it's not like knowing that someone likes hiking will help too much. I'd be happy to have someone find me a cheap flight to somewhere-in-south-america-really-I-don't-care-where-or-when.
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