Wow, that was annoying. Opening two dozen browser windows without warning, half of which contain errors? Not cool.
Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
31–40 of 50 posts
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#32Most meta travel sites like this get their commissions one of two ways, either a commission for booking a flight, or a click through commission to the travel site. It is in tripeedo's best interest to open as many popups as possible.
They are adding little to no value on the flight pricing. Thumbs down.
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
agreed-- but until airlines open up their fare data via APIs, users can only truly get all data by actually searching individual sites. even meta-search sites like Kayak don't have access to all fares, which is why results often vary between the various sites. tripeedo is a step toward making that process more simple.
What about Open Travel ( http://www.opentravel.org/ )? Its a format being supported by some of the major players in the travel industry: http://www.opentravel.org/Join/Members.aspx I am working in a startup that aggregates rental car rates, similar to Tripeedo using OpenTravel. Its all XML based, and can be a PITA--but the result are a better product and a better user experience.
I doubt this sort of scheme will gain real traction - much of the airline industry's scheme involves building consumer loyalty (e.g. "I always fly with XYZ Air, they have decent prices and I don't have to hunt around hard to use websites"). An open API destroys this, and makes airfare even more of a commodity than it already is. I've heard anecdotal stories about Kayak being constantly blocked by the sites they scrape.
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tripeedo has two obvious advantages over Kayak: (1) It can help you search discount airlines like JetBlue and Southwest. (2) It will show you fairs that are exclusive to the airlines' websites. (I don't think I've ever run into a situation where the airline's website had a price significantly lower than what was on Kayak but I've heard rumblings that it happens.)
I agree with both of these thoughts, but where is tripeedo when kayak partners with all of these? i recently went to hong kong and searched all of these engines and got discouraging prices. I did one search on Cathay Pacific's website and saved close to 40%. I'm almost positive you won't see this with domestic flights (for now.)
They won't partner I don't think. Airlines dislike fare competition, it drives profits down and worsens their already-bad financial situation. From the couple guys I know who work in that industry, there is real push-back against aggregation sites.
You also provided the evidence of this yourself - I too have had a lot of trouble with Kayak recently, and it seems their ability to scrape accurate fares is severely compromised, and I suspect that airlines have some hand in this.
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Open Travel ( http://www.opentravel.org/ )? Its a format being supported by some of the major players in the travel industry: http://www.opentravel.org/Join/Members.aspx I am working in a startup that aggregates rental car rates, similar to Tripeedo using OpenTravel. Its all XML based, and can be a PITA--but the result are a better product and a better user experience.
I doubt this sort of scheme will gain real traction - much of the airline industry's scheme involves building consumer loyalty (e.g. "I always fly with XYZ Air, they have decent prices and I don't have to hunt around hard to use websites"). An open API destroys this, and makes airfare even more of a commodity than it already is. I've heard anecdotal stories about Kayak being constantly blocked by the sites they scrap…
Sites like Tripeedo are not geared towards loyal customers-they're geared towards bargain shoppers.
OTA is gaining real traction. By my count about 1/3rd of the companies listed on Tripeedo are members of OTA, while many more unofficially support some derivative of it. Most of these companies don't have open API's--they are very private and require NDA's and partnership agreements.
There are systems in place to handle use-cases like this. API's are in place for travel agents to search available rates and creating bookings. This is essentially the same concept.
Kayak is justifiably being blocked because they're scraping sites. If they had partnership agreements in place this wouldn't happen.
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#36Yikes, that was an awful experience. I didn't know it would open tabs, so I selected all items. And of all the tabs it opened, almost none gave me any useful information.
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the one hand I agree: I'd rather it popped up while I typed "Frankfurt, Germany" to let me disambiguate HHN and FRA, rather than open 20 tabs that all said "do not service that airport". I didn't realize HHN was the wrong code until nothing was found, whereas other sites (eg Kayak) let me disambiguate immediate. On the other hand: not using a date picker is awesome . I've been using nl date parsing on my own sites…
ha! I just tried to find a flight from Frankfurt to Moscow and also wasn't successful because of your software insisting on 'Frankfurt/Hahn(HHN)'. Please fix this fast! I also tried 'From Frankfurt/Main' and 'From FRA' but wasn't understood:-( Apart from that, I like the 'command line approach to finding flights a lot. Suggestion: Why not open the third party travel sites (Orbitz etc.) in a Javascript-Window (instead…
sorry you had such a hard time leaving feedback. we've been having sporadic issues with getsatisfaction lately. feel free to email any feedback directly to us at info[at]tripeedo[dot]com.
we'll also fix the frankfurt issue. thanks for the tip. :)
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#38Disappointing .. Doesn't really work with all the airline sites that it has on main page.
yeah, we need to fix or warn about that better. the reason that the airline searches don't work reliably is that most airlines only serve a few airports, and if you search for airports they don't serve, the result is not always handled gracefully. some airlines prompt for a known airport - some just give up and display an error. to counter this, we would need to maintain a list of all airports served by each airline, and only let users launch valid searches to the airline sites. i think that is good from a usability perspective, and it's definitely doable, but maintaining it is time-consuming. that's why we haven't done it yet. but, we may well get to it soon.
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#39What I was really hoping to find here was a travel search site that let me find cheap fares without necessarily having firm dates in mind. To me, Tripeedo just puts the functionality of kayak in a slightly different UI, as opposed to offering a new way to interact with the data itself.
increasingly, travel sites are letting people do those kind of flexible dates search, which is a promising trend. you're right, for the time being tripeedo is primarily a different UI (though one we feel is more user-friendly), along with the benefit of only entering trip details once.
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#40Yikes, that was an awful experience. I didn't know it would open tabs, so I selected all items. And of all the tabs it opened, almost none gave me any useful information.
sorry about that - we try to make it clear that new windows open, by saying so in the instructions on the left, and also displaying a message when more than 5 airfare providers are selected. how could we make it more clear in a user-friendly way?