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Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

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Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company called ITA, now owned by Google. http://www.fastcompany.com/1666092/google-acquires-airline-d...

And where does ITA get it's data. I assume there must be a few competing standards, and the airlines use one of them to give their data to ITA. Why can't other companies get the data directly from the airlines?

ITA get its data from ATPCO (http://www.atpco.net/atpco/aboutatp.shtml) the clearinghouse for flight data.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#112
post #76
post #55

Kayak and Hipmunk get a lot of praise for their UI but if you want to use a hacker interface for finding flights, http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ is the way to go. It's not as pretty, but is incredibly feature-rich, not limited to the US and regularly finds me prices that are significantly cheaper than anyone else.

FYI - you can access most of ITA's routing language on Hipmunk, if you type :: after an airport code. The advantage of using us is we can make you a booking link to actually purchase the itinerary.

Nice. I wasn't aware that Hipmunk supported that. I just tried it and it even provides some helpful hints. sfo::ua+ atl::ua+

Good stuff. Saves me the time from matrix.itasoftware.com to go to the airline or booking site.

What about limiting it to fare basis? for example: sfo::/f bc=y atl::/f bc=y doesn't work. There another way?

Love what you guys do and will have to check on working there at some point.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#113
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can enter multiple airports (as long as they're in the same time zone). Just separate them with commas.

Have you considered watching to see if a user searches for, e.g., flights out of JFK immediately after an identical search for flights out of LGA, and then gently highlighting the feature?

There're a slew of new flight booking startups like http://wuhutravel.com and http://sillk.co that I believe are trying to entice younger travellers by apparently launching features like you just mentioned raldi (based on screenshots I've seen on dribbble from their designers)...

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any flight search tools track budget airlines?

Adioso was adding a lot of budget airlines up until recently. It's worth checking out.

Another site for budget airlines is travelfusion.com They also have an API

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that they predict the most common searches and constantly query and cash results for these searches, something I don't think Kayak or hipmunk does. I don't think you can launch a search product on google if it takes more than .xx seconds to return the result...

I'm not so sure, I looked for a few random flights. However, having built my own very rudimentary internal flight search tool from the global flight list, I can tell you there are roughly 7 million flights per month, a small data set by google standards.

It's not the size of the dataset that is relevant but more that this dataset changes in realtime : price + availability. These requests go through GDSs that are relatively slow, that's why so called real-time search engines like kayak are fairly slow. What do you exactly mean by 7M flights? Keep in mind that most search requests involve a combination of flights (leg), outbound, inbound and sometime multiple stops...

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that they predict the most common searches and constantly query and cash results for these searches, something I don't think Kayak or hipmunk does. I don't think you can launch a search product on google if it takes more than .xx seconds to return the result...

It could have something to do with the fact that Google owns ITA.

I think that owning ITA allows them to have more data to mine/predict and better access but it doesn't explain how fast the searches are. Most airfare searches still hit GDSs which are relatively slow to respond. The only way I can think of Google can deliver such a performance is by intelligently pre-caching airfare searches. Google?

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#119
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hipmunk has a much better interface, and considering it's also an aggregator, much better at helping me quickly find flights or hotels.

disagree. kayak provides filters in exactly the way that makes sense to me. i've tried hipmunk and google and always come back to kayak.

I find hipmunk better for optimizing schedule, kayak for optimizing price.

Re: Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

#120
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is always http://hipmunk.com , which I think has the best UX of any of them (although maybe it is lacking some features, but none I would use anyhow). Edit: Doh, fixed the link!

I'd recommend www.skyscanner.net, at least for the European users. Sure, they lack simplistic interfaces of Hipmunk or Kayak but when it comes to actually finding the cheapest tickets and best connections on the old contintent low fare airlines market they're, IMHO, the most reliable.

I'm a big fan of skyscanner. Being able to ask questions like 'what are the cheapest flight from my local airport over this weekend' make for fun trip planning.
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