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Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

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Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#101

Post by kylec »

thezilch wrote: post #66
antoko wrote: post #10

Kayak is great (was?) but Hipmunk is more than up to the task of filling the void if Priceline ruin Kayak. Congrats to the Kayak folks I guess, when they got into the industry they really raised the bar. Before Kayak I remember having to use Expedia and Orbitz and just having to accept their crappy UI because there simply were no alternatives.

http://www.google.com/flights/?hl=en&gl=us#search;f=LAX;... versus http://www.hipmunk.com/flights/LAX-to-SFO#!dates=Nov09,Nov16... I respect what Hipmunk is trying to do, but I really doubt they are filling voids outside of "this" community. I find it much harder to scan, slower to load, and having lower quality tools for finding alternate (or cheaper) fares.

There's also:

http://www.tripadvisor.com/CheapFlights?geo=1&travelers=...

More Kayak-like in terms of the results list. Cheapest rates match Hipmunk, though curiously for different flights.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#102

Post by ciniglio »

koeselitz wrote: post #65
casca wrote: post #55

Kayak and Hipmunk get a lot of praise for their UI but if you want to use a hacker interface for finding flights, http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ is the way to go. It's not as pretty, but is incredibly feature-rich, not limited to the US and regularly finds me prices that are significantly cheaper than anyone else.

Kayak, Hipmunk, Google Flights, Orbitz, and almost every other aggregator licenses ITA Software's system, actually. And most major airlines use it internally. It's good enough that it's pretty much the de facto standard and framework.

Maybe not Google anymore, since Google acquired ITA :-). But obviously they still use it

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#103

Post by baltcode »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #52
_casperc wrote: post #51

This may not be the place or time to ask this but here goes anyway: How do the travel indexing sites like Kayak get their data? Surely they don't index or consume APIs from the travel companies individually?

A company called ITA, now owned by Google. http://www.fastcompany.com/1666092/google-acquires-airline-d...

And where does ITA get it's data. I assume there must be a few competing standards, and the airlines use one of them to give their data to ITA. Why can't other companies get the data directly from the airlines?

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#104

Post by cshesse »

edouard1234567 wrote: post #96
brianbreslin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow google flights is super fast!

My guess is that they predict the most common searches and constantly query and cash results for these searches, something I don't think Kayak or hipmunk does. I don't think you can launch a search product on google if it takes more than .xx seconds to return the result...

It could have something to do with the fact that Google owns ITA.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#105

Post by Shinkei »

lacker wrote: post #91
oh_sigh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's completely idiotic, and I hope you feel ashamed of what you wrote. The problem isn't more or less information, it's that insider trading creates two classes of people: Those select few "in the know" who can reap massive profits by getting an illegal phone call, and the suckers.

This ad hominem comment is inappropriate. It is certainly not "completely idiotic". There is a lot of intelligent discussion on the issue in some places. For example: http://www.fff.org/comment/com0306f.asp .

This is not an "intelligent discussion." Did you read this article? He sets up a straw man by comparing specialized knowledge to facts in his first argument. Everyone can know the odds in Blackjack by card-counting, but no one should know the next card in the deck. This is a better comparison of insider trading because using statistics and predictions of market activities based on 'guesses' is perfectly fair, but actually knowing materially negative news that is confidential puts you at an unfair advantage in a market system. I mean, how far would you take the argument... so can the CEO sell his shares before the news? What about the FDA committee chair? How about if a scientist shorted shares before rendering his judgement that the drug should not be approved?

Insider trading is just another way for the privileged and wealthy to get richer and small investors and pensions to get robbed.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#106

Post by baby »

scotth wrote: post #59
casca wrote: post #55

Kayak and Hipmunk get a lot of praise for their UI but if you want to use a hacker interface for finding flights, http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ is the way to go. It's not as pretty, but is incredibly feature-rich, not limited to the US and regularly finds me prices that are significantly cheaper than anyone else.

Have you tried out Google Flights? I've been told it's based on this same technology, and has a much better UI. And be sure to click around. It has some interesting tools, like prices for flights to your destination flown out of nearby airports.

not working in Europe. God damn!

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#107

Post by brianbreslin »

edouard1234567 wrote: post #96
brianbreslin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow google flights is super fast!

My guess is that they predict the most common searches and constantly query and cash results for these searches, something I don't think Kayak or hipmunk does. I don't think you can launch a search product on google if it takes more than .xx seconds to return the result...

I'm not so sure, I looked for a few random flights. However, having built my own very rudimentary internal flight search tool from the global flight list, I can tell you there are roughly 7 million flights per month, a small data set by google standards.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#108

Post by dantheman »

Shinkei wrote: post #105
lacker wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ad hominem comment is inappropriate. It is certainly not "completely idiotic". There is a lot of intelligent discussion on the issue in some places. For example: http://www.fff.org/comment/com0306f.asp .

This is not an "intelligent discussion." Did you read this article? He sets up a straw man by comparing specialized knowledge to facts in his first argument. Everyone can know the odds in Blackjack by card-counting, but no one should know the next card in the deck. This is a better comparison of insider trading because using statistics and predictions of market activities based on 'guesses' is perfectly fair, but act…

You have to ask yourself, what is the point of the market? I'd say to efficiently allocate resources, in order to do that one should be able to use any and all knowledge they have available to them -- it allows the market to find the appropriate price quicker. If small investors and pensions get "robbed" then they'll adapt or leave the market.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#109

Post by calbear81 »

yawgmoth wrote: post #50

Since everyone seems to be putting in their 0.02$ on which sites they use for booking, bing.com/travel is also very good. The buy-wait prediction is fantastic.

It's good to see people still using Farecast! Most of the original team is now working on other startups including Decide.com, Medify.com, and Room77.com.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#110

Post by raldi »

goldfish wrote: post #97
casca wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, that's interesting. The issue for me is that Hipmunk only serves the US market and won't let me enter multiple airports as source or destination. My best results have started with a list of 20 possible sources and destinations which is unfeasible to search with any other publicly available service.

You can enter multiple airports (as long as they're in the same time zone). Just separate them with commas.

Have you considered watching to see if a user searches for, e.g., flights out of JFK immediately after an identical search for flights out of LGA, and then gently highlighting the feature?
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