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Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

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Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#121

Post by bgruber »

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.

i'd like to reiterate that hipmunk should make it clearer that multiple airports is supported now. It used to not work, and therefore I used Kayak.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#123

Post by tommyd »

brianbreslin wrote: post #72
TillE wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Hipmunk still doesn't track budget airlines in Europe (eg, EasyJet). Which makes it fairly useless to me, and absolutely not a replacement for Kayak.

Do any flight search tools track budget airlines?

skyscanner.net does (or has done in the past anyway!)

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#124

Post by bradleyland »

FaceKicker wrote: post #87
calbear81 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Southwest does not believe in distributing their fares through the metasearch or OTA channel. They want to own the customer and make sure there's only one destination to book Southwest fares and that is Southwest.com and it's worked out pretty well for them. The hard part for scraping is that it's both against their TOS and you wouldn't be able to have accurate availability and price information through manual data e…

> The hard part for scraping is that it's both against their TOS and you wouldn't be able to have accurate availability and price information through manual data entry. The nature of how frequent price changes and the number of possible combinations of fare types/routes/availability is what gave rise to companies like ITA. Anecdotally, whenever I've checked Southwest prices multiple days in a row they usually stay th…

Yes, but if you're a website serving millions of customers per day, you need a contractual arrangement to A) have up to the moment pricing, and B) agreement that the airline will honor the prices published on your site.

Because airfare prices follow an upward trend as flight time approaches (although they sometimes taper as the flight date gets really close), you'd inevitably publish prices that are out of date and lower than the actual fare. This is unavoidable because you're relying on scraping, which involves polling, in which there is always a delay due to polling intervals. You'd stand to lose millions of dollars every time a price increase occurred between the time that a customer decides to book a ticket at one price, and the time your polling system picks up the increase.

Circumventing Southwest's desire to avoid this channel is not a good business model.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#125

Post by jonknee »

newhouseb wrote: post #27
bradleyjg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree their UI is somewhat nicer, but they don't have all the features. In particular they don't have one way.

They do, you just leave the return date blank.

Not great UX on a site priding themselves on UI.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#126

Post by hatter10_6 »

photorized wrote: post #93
muratmutlu wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great, what's your traffic like? Where did you get your data from?

Thank you, I just "launched" the site a couple of days ago, so nobody knows about it except my FB friends. Airport data is open-source, although it needed some cleaning (to filter out things like railroad stations etc), weather forecasts are from Wunderground, but the main asset is Destinations. They've been hand-picked (a la Mechanical Turk), although the list is growing. Mainly focusing on ski destinations now, so…

This is awesome! I noticed that the "Search for the Lowest Air Fares" page seems different in design from the other pages. Are the forms embedded from another site? Which site did you use?

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#128

Post by nazgulnarsil »

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…

The purpose of markets is not to provide a casino. The purpose is the efficient allocation of resources. Don't know anything about sector X? Why the hell are you entitled to a fair shot at gambling in sector X?

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#129

Post by nazgulnarsil »

robryan wrote: post #118
dantheman wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or use whatever advantage you can get to dump the shares in the greater fool. Having an elite crowd with an unfair advantage is going to make it hard to get future IPOs or companies issuing more stock to generate much interest in their offerings.

So the market will become more conservative in cases with low transparency? Good.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#130

Post by oh_sigh »

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 .

You don't understand what an "ad homnimem" is. Simply insulting someone for saying something stupid is not an ad hominem. My argument would need to be of the form "That person is , therefore he is wrong in his argument".

That is not what I did, therefore it was not an ad hominem.

Please learn the definitions of phrases before you use them in conversation.

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