Get away with Google Flights • Hacker News Board

Re: Get away with Google Flights

#21

Post by salimmadjd » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 3:23 PM UTC

The UI/UX on this product is not that great. Google is offering a similar solution as Kayak. But I'm not sure why they just didn't fully copy Kayak. It feels to me, 1 - google thinks they are smarter than Kayak, 2 - they didn't want to show they are copying Kayak.

For example, kayak does a great job of displaying all the options on the left column. Google is hiding everything in drop downs. So then they need to have a blog post to explain how their UI works where kayaks is just intuitive.

The same with bar chart pricing (which I like) why hide it behind a silly icon like that. Now they have to educate their users what that icon means. Call it "best days to fly" or even better show that at the bottom of the page.

Re: Get away with Google Flights

#22

Post by simonebrunozzi » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 3:24 PM UTC

gringocl wrote: post #17

tarp wrote: post #10

ITA Software was acquired by Google awhile back. https://matrix.itasoftware.com/

This is an awesome platform, if only you could purchase through this!

Their plan is probably to enable it at some point.

Re: Get away with Google Flights

#23

Post by mcdowall » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 3:25 PM UTC

I've been using Momondo recently, which has all of these tools and a much better UX. This just feels like a re skin of the ITA site and a bit of a poor effort at that.

Re: Get away with Google Flights

#24

Post by wiradikusuma » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 3:46 PM UTC

Tangentially related, does anyone know of any provider where you can e.g. make your own Hipmunk?

Re: Get away with Google Flights

#25

Post by samstave » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 3:46 PM UTC

bemmu wrote: post #18

I love the flexibility this has and after giving it a serious go I never went back to Kayak. If you know exactly when and where to fly, Kayak is great. But with any uncertainty, Google Flights is better for exploring. Maybe you know when to fly, but not when you want to come back. Or maybe you don't even know where you want to fly, in which case you can get destination suggestions. It's also a lot snappier. Now with…

It would be interesting for a travel engine to list the alternate routes and options and let people vote ion each option to provide weighting to each one based on peoples preference for each.

Unless they already do this?

Re: Get away with Google Flights

#26

Post by smackfu » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 3:47 PM UTC

giarc wrote: post #19

tarp wrote: post #10

ITA Software was acquired by Google awhile back. https://matrix.itasoftware.com/

This site allows users to search for hidden city ticketing. There are some good instruction pages out there. I've never personally used it since I live in Canada and spoke and hub isn't really a thing up here.

All sorts of fun games on ITA. Another good one is to set very long connection times, to get a 23 hour stopover in an interesting city for free.

Re: Get away with Google Flights

#27

Post by sq1020 » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 3:49 PM UTC

It's super fast which certainly cannot be said about other similar services.

Re: Get away with Google Flights

#28

Post by kremi » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 3:49 PM UTC

bemmu wrote: post #18

I love the flexibility this has and after giving it a serious go I never went back to Kayak. If you know exactly when and where to fly, Kayak is great. But with any uncertainty, Google Flights is better for exploring. Maybe you know when to fly, but not when you want to come back. Or maybe you don't even know where you want to fly, in which case you can get destination suggestions. It's also a lot snappier. Now with…

Kayak's explore is pretty nice when you have uncertainty: http://www.kayak.com/explore/BER/

Although unlike Google Flights, it doesn't let you search for specific dates.

Re: Get away with Google Flights

#29

Post by jessegavin » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 3:49 PM UTC

salimmadjd wrote: post #21

The UI/UX on this product is not that great. Google is offering a similar solution as Kayak. But I'm not sure why they just didn't fully copy Kayak. It feels to me, 1 - google thinks they are smarter than Kayak, 2 - they didn't want to show they are copying Kayak. For example, kayak does a great job of displaying all the options on the left column. Google is hiding everything in drop downs. So then they need to have…

I disagree. I spent nearly a year as a UI designer/engineer for a flight search/booking tool and evaluated all the major interfaces. The #1 killer feature google flights has which kills all other flight search tools (I have seen) is speed. They bought a company (ITA) for something close to a billion dollars which provides near realtime search results for flights.

Kayak (and others) do a good job of streaming search results, but you still have to wait seconds before you're able to make decisions.

Re: Get away with Google Flights

#30

Post by peterwwillis » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 3:51 PM UTC

I used Google Flights back in November to plan a 10-day getaway during December. BWI->MIA, MIA->LAX, SFO->BWI. Total airfare cost: $420. It was far easier to do this with GF than with Hipmunk or any other website i'd tried.