Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 170 posts

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#121

Post by wfunction »

solaarphunk wrote: post #61
dmbaggett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fares and rules come from ATPCO ( http://atpco.net ). Flights come from OAG ( http://www.oag.com ). Seat availability requires data directly from the carrier, usually via a live query to the carrier's reservation system. The GDS companies get this data from these sources and then in turn provide (crappy) APIs for customers to use to query it. In general, if you're doing bookings you can get small amounts of the data…

Thank you for building ITA Matrix - it is amazing tool and I don't know what I would do without it.

> Thank you for building ITA Matrix - it is amazing tool and I don't know what I would do without it.

Honest question (I swear I'm not trying to troll): what do you actually do with it that you can't do (or do as well as) with Google Flights or Kayak or some other site like that?

I ask because I've used ITA Matrix and never managed to find a cheaper flight than I can through "normal" means... but I rarely fly multi-destination (and basically never do more complicated stuff) so I'm not sure if the use case is beyond mine or if I just don't know how to utilize it in a useful manner.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#122

Post by komali2 »

dorianm wrote: post #16
forgotpwtomain wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the experience of switching from a localized google to google.com/ncr and had ticket prices drop ~4X. I think airlines already try to game the system based on country of origin.

+1 for https://google.com/ncr is the first thing I do on any browser. - Latest version of Google Images - Better Google Search results - etc. etc.

What does /ncr do? I'm having a hilariously difficult time googling for it because I usually google straight from the omni bar.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#123

Post by daviross »

komali2 wrote: post #122
dorianm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for https://google.com/ncr is the first thing I do on any browser. - Latest version of Google Images - Better Google Search results - etc. etc.

What does /ncr do? I'm having a hilariously difficult time googling for it because I usually google straight from the omni bar.

"No Country Redirect", I believe. Specifies to avoid geolocation

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#124

Post by tonfa »

twentythree wrote: post #30
yalogin wrote: post #10

Almost every site offers this. Isn't this unhelpful in the last ng run? Consumer behavior will change and the price will smooth out or the window of lower prices will be gone or the percentage of change will become smaller.

It might be unhelpful to the users who know how to take advantage of the current system, but hopefully the net impact will be greater price transparency, which helps consumers in the long run; people will pay more for things which cost the airline more, but not for arbitrary reasons like booking too early. In general, flight pricing seems rather opaque; I'm always confused by flights from city A to city B that are mo…

> In general, flight pricing seems rather opaque; I'm always confused by flights from city A to city B that are more expensive than flights from city A to city C with a layover in city B.

That example is pretty simple. If you consider a non stop flight as a different product than one with layover, non stop has less competition, people who don't mind a layover are more price sensitive and if there's a layover the airline will compete with all the other airlines trying to fill their hubs.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#125

Post by cheiVia0 »

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #2

I almost never use anything other google flights when searching for a ticket. The UI is just so much better and easier to use than the ridiculous bloated crap that most travel sites are (especially when they are trying to shove car-rental and hotel deals in your face). The one drawback is sometimes they are missing local / smaller airlines from their list of flights (which can be a major price difference from the maj…

I like rome2rio.com for their ability to search more than just flights.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#126

Post by toddkazakov »

skybrian wrote: post #32
karakal wrote: post #23

I'm curious, how does one gain access to flight schedules/fares? Is this something that anyone can get their hands on and create a service (complexity aside), or do you need some sort of license that costs thousands of dollars? Does each airline have their own way of exporting this data? Is there a single entity that aggregates from all of them? How does the actual data look like? (Is it a dump every X hours, or some…

In Google's case it comes from an acquisition [1]. Not all airlines share data. For example, you won't find Southwest fares except on their own website. [1] http://www.itasoftware.com/about/

> For example, you won't find Southwest fares except on their own website.

Wrong example. I have worked on the Southwest Project when I was at Amadeus.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#127

Post by enobrev »

wfunction wrote: post #121
solaarphunk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for building ITA Matrix - it is amazing tool and I don't know what I would do without it.

> Thank you for building ITA Matrix - it is amazing tool and I don't know what I would do without it. Honest question (I swear I'm not trying to troll): what do you actually do with it that you can't do (or do as well as) with Google Flights or Kayak or some other site like that? I ask because I've used ITA Matrix and never managed to find a cheaper flight than I can through "normal" means... but I rarely fly multi-d…

ITA Matrix Powers Google Flights and Kayak, or at least parts therein.

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#128

Post by breakds »

auvi wrote: post #90
dmbaggett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fares and rules come from ATPCO ( http://atpco.net ). Flights come from OAG ( http://www.oag.com ). Seat availability requires data directly from the carrier, usually via a live query to the carrier's reservation system. The GDS companies get this data from these sources and then in turn provide (crappy) APIs for customers to use to query it. In general, if you're doing bookings you can get small amounts of the data…

If you don't mind sharing, does ITA/Google Flights still use Common Lisp for the backend?

Yes. The core of the backend is still in Common Lisp (and C++). Many ITA hackers are still contributing to the Common Lisp community :)

Re: Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

#129

Post by dmbaggett »

akavel wrote: post #115
dmbaggett wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It requires a lot of code because the rules that govern the use of fares on a ticket are insanely complicated -- literally beyond anything you could possibly imagine a priori. There are dozens of rule "categories", each larded up with tons of complexity. There's even "Rule Category 25: Fare By Rule" which is essentially a complete macro facility for fares, allowing carriers to literally take an arbitrary fare's rules…

Also people at Sabre (worked there) and I presume Amadeus (those are two main players - surprised you seemed to "forget" to mention them?). As to the "categories", people at Sabre working with them used to say in some cases you can not even be sure if the calculation (of a ticket price - "fare") will end in finite time, so the "macro language" is apparently Turing-complete!

I wasn't meaning to slight either Amadeus or Sabre, and indeed they have most of the other half of the people who understand this stuff between them. The others are at various airlines around the world and at ATPCO.

I've written elsewhere that I personally think the original Sabre system was/is one of the most impressive accomplishments in the history of computing. Using modern tools made things easier for us at ITA, though we compensated for that by trying to compute the entire (very large) solution space for every query, where prior systems used heuristics.

Post reply on HN