131–140 of 153 posts
(I'm also both an oldtimer and newtimer to HN; long time lurker, and I opened an account ages ago, but sorry I've not been active here before!)
I've been using Google Flights since the middle of last year and love it. However, as a frequent traveler for business/conferences, I think there are some things people should be aware of: * Google's data seems to be not as fresh as Kayak or Hipmunk's is. There have been multiple times when I've tried to book a flight via GF only to be told that there were no seats left when I arrive on the airline's page. I suspect…
I've had nearly the identical experience with it on all counts. By and large, I am a huge and loyal user of it as well. It seems I've had the most changes in fare price or availability when identifying flights on United specifically, more so than any other airline, in my experience. That being said, it's still pretty infrequent given the volume of airfare we've booked through it for our people over the last 2 years o…
Short answer re price discrepancies: it's complicated. It's absolutely in our interest and the airlines' interest to get pricing 100% right, and we do work really hard to eval and improve on this.
One situation that can happen is that an airline has, say, 3 seats remaining at one fare and 1 seat remaining at a cheaper fare; when you selected the flights or immediately before, that 1 seat was still available, but by the time you click through, it's not, so you get the pricing for the fare with 3 seats left.
One of the things that's amazed me in my flights education after joining the team is just how super-dynamic pricing is.
No, to my knowledge it's not based on your referrer or cookies or anything like that ;). I'm just talking -- person-independent -- pricing from hour to hour.
On a related note, I used to think that airline pricing was pretty capricious and random; now I realize that the airlines hire some of the smartest folks to develop pricing strategies, and nothing is left to chance ;).
I've been using Google Flights since the middle of last year and love it. However, as a frequent traveler for business/conferences, I think there are some things people should be aware of: * Google's data seems to be not as fresh as Kayak or Hipmunk's is. There have been multiple times when I've tried to book a flight via GF only to be told that there were no seats left when I arrive on the airline's page. I suspect…
Which VPN gets you the best deals? Also, do you book on Tuesdays?
And no, don't bother trying to time your bookings. It's kinda like the stock market; trying to beat the market, er, optimize your flights purchase time is likely to lead to sorrow and regret. From the research our Google Flights team did recently, we found that if you wait a week, on average you're gonna pay more for the same flight.
And no, we didn't see any universal discount on Tuesdays, either ;)
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…
The best thing about Google Flights is how fast it is. The +/- 3 days (or whatever) options are never really exactly what you want, and while Google Flights also doesn't let you execute really powerful searches, you can at least manually search at a rapid pace ( 10 seconds on other sites).
re searches... it's our hope that -- for most folks and most cases -- our filters + our tips will suffice. But if there are specific power features you're looking for, let us know via the Feedback option and I'll do what I can to bribe, er, win over my teammates :p
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which VPN gets you the best deals? Also, do you book on Tuesdays?
Assuming you're on google.com/flights, I'm fairly sure that using a VPN, changing your IP, flushing your cookies... none of that should change the availability and pricing you see on Flights. And no, don't bother trying to time your bookings. It's kinda like the stock market; trying to beat the market, er, optimize your flights purchase time is likely to lead to sorrow and regret. From the research our Google Flights…
I've been using Google Flights since the middle of last year and love it. However, as a frequent traveler for business/conferences, I think there are some things people should be aware of: * Google's data seems to be not as fresh as Kayak or Hipmunk's is. There have been multiple times when I've tried to book a flight via GF only to be told that there were no seats left when I arrive on the airline's page. I suspect…
Booked all flights incorrectly :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just tried SFO to Mexico City. $447 on Google ($427 with a 12 hour layover), vs $352 on Kayak, and $338 on priceline.
That's very interesting to me. Either they're getting data from the same place and marking the price up differently or they're getting data from separate places that are marking the prices up differently.
"Flights with Google? Get Away!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is terrible engineering design IMHO. The providers should just provide some kind of firehose of updates to the booking websites which can then cache the data appropriately. Also they should fix their cache implementations. I've had countless times on the AA website where it says a ticket is available; then when I try to book it it says it's not available; then when I go back to the home page and search aga…
A firehose of updates? Updates to what? There are basically an unlimited number of world wide routes - a mind blowingly dizzying number of permutations to get from A to B. Before you try to say "well travellers won't want routes with feature X" to cut down on the volume of data travellers want all sorts of contradictory things. Some a vastly price sensitive, some hate a particular airline, some love that same airline…
Yes, but I don't think that's what most people desire to enumerate (or what the parent of your post had in mind). A simple enumeration of the flights available and their one-way prices would be a start. My understanding (from a link in another post) is that this would be ~(1 flight) * (average number of changes to a flight's data between birth and flight) updates per second, which I think is within reason.
My understanding is that airlines frustrate this by not pricing just individual flights, but giving odd discounts on round-trips and other odd combinations (such as A→B C→A) of flights, meaning you need more than just one-way prices. (There's also the fact that some airlines have like 5 or 6 different prices for a seat all on the same flight, depending on where in the plane the seat is.)