Wow, that was annoying. Opening two dozen browser windows without warning, half of which contain errors? Not cool.
we try to warn (in 2 ways on the homepage) that popups will be opened. how could we make it more clear in a user-friendly way?
Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
41–50 of 50 posts
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#42Is the parsing algorithm for the location and date proprietary or is it based on something existing? If so, what?
it's custom built. the site is rails hosted on heroku. ruby already had some decent time/date parsing, and there is a great natural language time/date library called chronic that helps out too. but otherwise it's custom-built.
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#43i need tehcnical support: on firefox 3 it first blocked pop-ups, so i enabled and got a spew of opened tabs with no search results found (see my other comment). when i tried to search again ff keeps blocking the pop-ups, even though i keep enabling them. !!! nuts, i really want to buy cheap plane tickets :P i'll keep trying.
this sounds like a firefox issue. if you choose to enable popups for tripeedo.com, then firefox should remember that choice. let me know if you find otherwise...
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#44Earlier 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.
Can you do it in a bunch of iframes on one long page?
yeah, that's one option we're thinking about. we went with popups initially because 1) it's simpler and 2) it wasn't clear that loading up 10 windows in iframes would necessarily be a better user experience. it's something we're going to look at more closely. our approach to tripeedo has definitely been to try to keep things as simple as possible.
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#45Earlier 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…
frankfurt/main is now the top match for 'frankfurt'. :)
the way to specify an airport if the top match is not right is just to keep typing. eg: london => london all airports (lon); london gatw => london, gatwick (lgw); lon hea => london, heathrow (lhr)
similarly: sa fr => san francisco; sa di => san diego
typing frankfurt/main didn't work because the slash was confusing the interpreter. i'm fixing that right now.
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#46Site works fine for me in Chrome.
A lot of travel agencies have systems that actually can check all airlines for their flight information. I would suggest you look into that and run off of a hybrid between server and queries instead of waiting for an API and in the meantime tell people something is easy when in fact it really isn't. Most of my queries return errors on the pop-ups.
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#47First we had aggregators like Kayak, Expedia and Farecast. That's clearly too much work, so now with Tripeedo we have aggregators for the aggregators!
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#48Seriously, I love the pop ups. I believe you have to respect the boundaries of different companies (jetblue, southwest, etc). The amount of time that this saves on my flight purchasing is huge. Well done!
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you do it in a bunch of iframes on one long page?
yeah, that's one option we're thinking about. we went with popups initially because 1) it's simpler and 2) it wasn't clear that loading up 10 windows in iframes would necessarily be a better user experience. it's something we're going to look at more closely. our approach to tripeedo has definitely been to try to keep things as simple as possible.
[deleted]
Re: Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
#50Yikes, 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?
Most critical to me was that most of the airlines displayed there were not relevant to me. I usually use about 5 airlines (and I think most people do so also), and I KNOW the airlines that I use. They are Air France, KLM, Lufthansa, Turkish Airlines and EasyJet. Your site would be VERY useful if it would send queries to those particular airlines and open tabs after running a correct search on all those airlines.
But your site is useless with the America-Centric airlines you have there.
My suggestion would be to also add a natual language processor where I can type in the airlines I fly with, and this this info is immediately saved in a cookie for the next time I use the site. Also, when I start the search, an account should immediately be created for me.