121–130 of 135 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I've been missing is not so much finding the best routes between two airports, but finding the best (ie. least expensive) route from a bunch of departure airports to a number of destination airports. If I'm in Antwerp, I really don't care much if I have to depart from/return to Brussels Zaventem, Charleroi or Eindhoven, it just doesn't matter. And if the fare is sufficiently cheaper, then Amsterdam, Düsseldorf,…
azair.eu does it.
Off-topic but related: https://scottscheapflights.com is _amazing_. The Premium sub is worth every penny...my wife and I will be doing a ton more overseas travel in 2019 purely because of the deals this site finds.
I got into churning airline miles then manufactured spending (generating spend on credit card to earn miles) and now have over 10 million miles. I also heard one of the biggest groups of manufactured spend are developers within Google. I belong to a private slack with over 80 folks doing this as a hobby so we can do first class/business class international travel and hotel stays for free. If anyone is into it as as w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only airlines I know of running their own PSS are Emirates and Turkish. Ryanair are using Navitaire (Amadeus' low-cost subsidiary). To be honest, the cost structure is the same whether you're running it yourself or outsourcing - you don't want an absurdly high look to book ratio, or else you're just wasting server costs
What is PSS here? I'm not familiar with this acronym.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many moons ago, I worked in the travel industry. Most airlines aren't running their own technology stack -- they are paying someone else $/search to drive their webpage. In a market of razor thin margins, paying per search for you to crawl their flight catalog is a big problem -- thus the arms race. The only way to win at this is to own the catalog, this is why Google bought ITA. Ryanair is the kind of airline that I…
>"In a market of razor thin margins, paying per search for you to crawl their flight catalog is a big problem ..." Can you say how access to an airline's flight catalog works and what that business model looks like? Is it pay per search for these third party search engines?
Now the pricing can be complex, a good first order approximation is that you pay a fee for access to the GDS, that varies depending on how many queries you are doing. For a traditional travel agency this fee will be very low, obviously for a major OLTA it will be big. However, for every booking that you perform, the GDS will give back a sizable amount of the distribution fee that it took (we are talking several euros per flight here). So as long as your "look to book" ratio is reasonable, the access costs will be small compared to the incentives you make.
Edit: Why are airlines pushing for the "direct" channels? Because it means they can cut out the middleman of course, the GDS. The problem is that this makes it hard for a travel agency to connect to every airline - the fixed costs of setting up pipes to every airline would be astronomical. And there will be an incentive for agencies to negotiate preferential deals with certain airlines. Both of these factors are obviously negative for the end user, travelers. It's a similar question to the whole net neutrality thing
Off-topic but related: https://scottscheapflights.com is _amazing_. The Premium sub is worth every penny...my wife and I will be doing a ton more overseas travel in 2019 purely because of the deals this site finds.
I got into churning airline miles then manufactured spending (generating spend on credit card to earn miles) and now have over 10 million miles. I also heard one of the biggest groups of manufactured spend are developers within Google. I belong to a private slack with over 80 folks doing this as a hobby so we can do first class/business class international travel and hotel stays for free. If anyone is into it as as w…
Off-topic but related: https://scottscheapflights.com is _amazing_. The Premium sub is worth every penny...my wife and I will be doing a ton more overseas travel in 2019 purely because of the deals this site finds.
I got into churning airline miles then manufactured spending (generating spend on credit card to earn miles) and now have over 10 million miles. I also heard one of the biggest groups of manufactured spend are developers within Google. I belong to a private slack with over 80 folks doing this as a hobby so we can do first class/business class international travel and hotel stays for free. If anyone is into it as as w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"In a market of razor thin margins, paying per search for you to crawl their flight catalog is a big problem ..." Can you say how access to an airline's flight catalog works and what that business model looks like? Is it pay per search for these third party search engines?
There are two different ways to connect to an airline inventory system (what you call the catalog). Either direct, by signing a contract with the airline, and building the necessary "pipe" (IATA are pushing for a standardisation of this, called NDC). Or through a global distribution system (GDS) - which is a fancy name for what used to be called computer reservation systems. There are three major systems, by decreasi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two different ways to connect to an airline inventory system (what you call the catalog). Either direct, by signing a contract with the airline, and building the necessary "pipe" (IATA are pushing for a standardisation of this, called NDC). Or through a global distribution system (GDS) - which is a fancy name for what used to be called computer reservation systems. There are three major systems, by decreasi…
Thank you for the wonderfully detailed response I really appreciate it. I have one follow up question to your reply which is who maintains Amadeus, Sabre and Travleport? Are these consortiums similar to MasterCard and Visa then? I'm guessing these are all big mainframe operations?
Sabre for example was originally American Airlines' system, and Amadeus was initially created by a consortium of european airlines in reaction to the threat of american hegemony on this market. They are now far more profitable than their parents :)
They were all originally heavy mainframe operations (IBM TPF - which was quite an impressive system... in the 80s), but there is a transition to modern architectures. Amadeus have completed the transition to Linux boxes, Sabre are still ongoing. They both have some of the biggest civilian data centres in the world
We (me and friend) are working on the same problem, however we are stuck at the next step. Namely the user interface: how do you let the user search through all the possibilities. We created some data structures that allow almost instant searching of such routes and we have scrapers running regularly on Ryanair, easyJet, wizzair, and Transavia. You can query the algorithm here: https://algo.tripchemy.com/routes/TSF?y…
What I've been missing is not so much finding the best routes between two airports, but finding the best (ie. least expensive) route from a bunch of departure airports to a number of destination airports. If I'm in Antwerp, I really don't care much if I have to depart from/return to Brussels Zaventem, Charleroi or Eindhoven, it just doesn't matter. And if the fare is sufficiently cheaper, then Amsterdam, Düsseldorf,…
Why is there no interface that allows searching for flights without specifying exact dates? All I want to do is fly from A to B to A. Maybe stay a week, maybe two. I'm flexible - it doesnt have to be exactly N days starting on the M'th. Even services that "allegedly" advertise they have that, still require manually clicking every day combination. I'd fly more often if it was easy . The few times I tried, it would be…
We are building our search engine (focus on EU low-cost mainly) which allow what you looking for (even if you want to search this) for example: A -> B [stay 2-6] -> C [stay 10-12] -> A