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Google Flights

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101–110 of 128 posts

Re: Google Flights

#101

Post by euccastro »

Harj wrote: post #100

This year I left booking my tickets back to the UK for the holidays until the last minute. The cheapest fare I could find myself, after what I considered to be extensive searching, was $1800. I ran a contest on Flightfox ( http://flightfox.com ) and offered a $49 finders fee. Someone found me a fare for $1000 with only one stop (vs two on the fare I found).

Totally besides the point, but why $49? I thought the point of ending prices with 9 was to make them look lower. You wanted the opposite, so perhaps $50 would have worked better?

Re: Google Flights

#102

Post by cloudwalking »

asdkl234890 wrote: post #83

A few days ago my gf tried to book a flight. Like most people, she starts with googleing flight tickets. And sees Google flights for the first time and starts using it. Gets to the point where Google kicks you off to the airline's own page, and that's where the trouble starts. She is forced to pick seats but can't, because the only ones available require being a specially background checked and known passenger. Event…

I'm confused. In your second paragraph you say the airline page won't let your gf book the flight, but in your third paragraph you blame it on Google.

Sounds to me that the airline webpage has additional (read: useless?) security features that Expedia doesn't have.

Re: Google Flights

#103

Post by easytiger »

asdkl234890 wrote: post #83

A few days ago my gf tried to book a flight. Like most people, she starts with googleing flight tickets. And sees Google flights for the first time and starts using it. Gets to the point where Google kicks you off to the airline's own page, and that's where the trouble starts. She is forced to pick seats but can't, because the only ones available require being a specially background checked and known passenger. Event…

that doesn't make sense.

Re: Google Flights

#104

Post by MertsA »

sareon wrote: post #91
mda wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask which feature in Matrix you like is not available in Google Flights?

I like being able to select a number of possible departure airports (Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Detroit) and then my days I like being able to say +/- 2 days.

You can do a lot more than that in Google Flights, just hit the plus sign on the right side of the departure box and you can add as many airports as you want, ditto for the arrival airport. Also, for the plus or minus 2 days just click on the little bar graph at the top right of the page instead of map view and it will show you months on either side. That feature is probably one of the best, there is a huge difference in prices depending on the date.

Re: Google Flights

#105

Post by fastball »

pretoriusB wrote: post #73
fastball wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the US only for now. I don't think that should warrant a 1/10...

Well, maybe a 2/10. It's 2012. A US-only service when there are TONS of international alternatives?

I don't think that "this is bad software because I am not yet the target audience" is a good metric for measuring the worth of a product.

Re: Google Flights

#107

Post by Evbn »

mwexler wrote: post #76
downey wrote: post #3

It's okay, but it's no Hipmunk.

There's presenting the existing data well (Google) and there is adding value to existing to make it more useful (Hipmunk). I find that Google's innovation for almost every one of their products is in saying "we have oodles of data, how can we display it effectively"? They have done well at collecting and quickly accessing large amounts of data, linking loosely coupled sets, and in some cases, adding meaning (image se…

ITA licensed their engine to the whole industry, instead of competing against it. So they focused on what they did well and let Orbitz et all work on UI and customer service.

Re: Google Flights

#108

Post by gwillen »

gwillen wrote: post #4

I don't use it because, last I checked, it's unable to handle what I think of as basic corner cases, like booking a roundtrip going out from one airport in a metro area and coming back to a different one.

Replying to myself since I can't edit: I see two replies suggesting that what I want is a multi-city trip, but that's not the same thing. Flights will happily let me do the same search I can do on Orbitz, with my start/end city being "SF metro area, any airport". But unlike Orbitz, when I use that I can't book an itinerary that goes SFO-BOS-SJC, for example. (I don't want to search it as multi-city, because then I have to _manually_ try every combination of SFO/SJC/OAK until I find what's cheapest.)

Re: Google Flights

#109

Post by gwillen »

alec wrote: post #5
gwillen wrote: post #4

I don't use it because, last I checked, it's unable to handle what I think of as basic corner cases, like booking a roundtrip going out from one airport in a metro area and coming back to a different one.

It does that now - click on the button that says 'round trip' and choose 'multi city'.

See my self-reply.

Re: Google Flights

#110

Post by gwillen »

ketralnis wrote: post #92
rabble wrote: post #80

So sad to see matrix.itasoftware.com's amazing search engine get most of it's features ripped out and replaced with a pretty UI that does so little. For folks who like hipmonk? Do you really travel? Their search engine also fails to find most good fares. Pretty but useless. Most people who are serious use expertflyer.com and matrix.itasoftware.com to find fares. Yes you have to learn a bit about how air fares are con…

> Their search engine also fails to find most good fares Do you have an example of this? We get our data from the same place that Matrix does

Is there some way I can contact you directly the next time I find an example of this? I'm happy to send you all the diagnostic data your heart desires.

I suspect in some cases it may be due to timeouts or row count limits. I tend to do very broad searches, and then narrow the results with filters. This works great in Matrix, but with Orbitz (which uses the same data source), I tend to hit invisible limits where I can see that some of the rows have just been cut off from the results. (E.g. I can book flights A or B for leg 1, and flights C or D for leg 2, but for the combination I can only book (A,C), (A,D), and (B,C). The B-D trip is in Matrix results but not Orbitz, and this kind of truncation only happens when I have lots of results.

I don't know for sure that Hipmunk follows the same pattern, because I haven't used it in quite some time, but I'm happy to send bug reports IF AND ONLY IF I can have confidence that a real human is reading them.

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