This is great — SkyScanner (which I almost never hear about, even though it's fantastic) has similar functionality, but definitely not the ability to search for "somewhere warm". I like that.
But what's up with travel startups not allowing remote workers? I'm looking for work right now, including at a travel startup, and that's just baffling to me.
Some of them offer an enhanced vacation "perk", but that sort of misses the point — I (and probably a lot of people who are passionate about travel) am more put off by having to be in the same place 48-52 weeks out of the year than I would be having to carry a laptop to wheverer it is I feel like being in the world.
A feature I miss with Skyscanner is to search for flights leaving say in the evening (e.g. Wednesday after work), and returning in the afternoon (e.g. Sunday afternoon). I normally have to search for the days I want (Wednesday to Sunday) and then use the sliders to get flights for the time of day that I want. However, this really throws off the part where they sort destination by price, since the time of day I want to depart seriously affects the price.
Very cool, could definitely use something like this! Has always bothered me that travel sites always want to know things in such absolute terms, when most people are searching speculatively before they know anything about specific dates etc.
Another feature from skyscanner that I'd love to see: being able to set "from" as any airport in the country. For example, the UK is small enough that traveling to any airport is completely feasible. So I don't really care where I'm flying from (though it's advantageous if it's close to me), I just want the best price/distance ratio.
Very cool! Your jobs page made me think otherwise:
"You're interested in travel (and have ideally done a lot of it) but you're also adventurous enough to pack your bags and join us in San Francisco or Melbourne, Australia. (We'll be happy with a remote working arrangement initially, but we're after people with a willingness to relocate eventually if things work out.)" (emphasis mine)
But in that case you'll be hearing from me shortly :)
Very impressive indeed... one point to consider though - a perfectly reasonable follow up query to "somewhere warm" is a query like "somewhere warm in the usa".. this doesn't quite seem to be in place yet with the result redirecting to "somewhere warm"
I've been running searches like this using http://matrix.itasoftware.com for years but I've built up my own lists of what constitutes "Eastern Europe" and "US West Coast". ITA provides software for the airline industry so has high-speed connections - anyone know what system they're using to get the flight data?
This could be a great tool that allows people to do powerful, meaningful searches that have been limited to more technical folk. The business model is there, the big question is whether the queries are allowed to run long enough to find the best results.
They are the system for the flight data. The airlines submit their routing information to ITA and ITA provides the search functionality for most of the travel websites and agencies you use.
As others have said, they don't have every airline, and there are other route search companies, but they are one of the biggest.
As for the queries, airline routes and their pricing is extremely complicated. Their matrix software has been getting better over the years, and it does add new features every once in a while. But as for it being "a great tool... with a [potential] business model", that's what they're doing at ITA. If you've got some great query ideas, go see them. They're always hiring, their recruitment ads are all over boston.
Given that skyscanner doesn't find easyjet results for me, nor does it find ryanair I'm going to guess that they don't let these services pull in their data to consumers. I am guessing this is an ownership issue, and that they want to process customers themselves, rather than through resellers.
Note that sometimes you have to click the "show all" link at the top of the search results to get low-cost airline results to appear. (This is possibly revenue-related.)
Skyscanner shows budget airlines (including both Ryanair and easyJet) along with 'traditional' airlines (BA, KLM, Virgin etc etc). In fact we show almost every airline in the world.
If you are searching for a route which you know Ryanair/easyJet to fly but we are not showing it, please do contact our customer feedback team (http://www.skyscanner.net/contactus.aspx) with the details and we'll investigate immediately.
Most low cost carriers aren't willing to pay to be listed in Global Distribution Systems. Kayak is linked to Amadeus and Matrix to ITA, so unless extra development is done, they will only list flights from GDS-listed companies
This site is the maximum you should pay, as its what travel agents & aggragators pull data from. I've regular found cheaper flights from onetravel.com, but I use the Matrix site to find flights (for years now), as all available flights & code-shares are usually on there. Some rare exceptions. I normally flight to/from or in Asia and any airline I care to fly, except for a few that only sell on their own website, are listed on the Matrix site.
Some more feedback: If I do a search for direct, one-way flights from Tallinn to anywhere next month, the experience is awful.
"anywhere" appears to search a list of cities in sequence, not in parallel.
The top city on the list is Beijing (I doubt Tallinn-Beijing has ever existed or ever will); Dubai, Shanghai and Incheon are also in the first ten. Combine this with the server speed, and you have me staring at a throbber for far, far too long for searches that I know won't succeed and should have been trivially filtered out.
If I repeat the search, the same 48 cities are shown in the same order. Please stop trying to get me to go to Beijing. Consider a longer list, randomising the order and searching in parallel.
Your search results show no direct flights from Tallinn to London or Paris next month. This appears to miss results from RyanAir, EasyJet and Estonian Air. (Of these, your coverage page only claims to support EasyJet.)
On a side note, why would you buy a one-way ticket? Every time I've ever checked it's cheaper to buy a two-way ticket and then just not use the return flight.
That has not been my experience at all. I just checked a flight from Gothenburg to Amsterdam leaving in three weeks time(a random example), and a one-way ticket was almost exactly half the price of a return flight. In fact it's been a long time since I've seen too significant a discount for a return flight vs two single flights.
Have enjoyed watching Adioso develop and evolve over time, continuing to improve. Good job team. But, for me, the lack of additional airline data renders it completely unusable still, to have so many missing - I just can't get the whole picture price OR schedule-wise.
I always felt that travel search was a big pain point that I was invested in solving. It also has some very obnoxious data lockdowns after scale. Anyone here have a ready blueprint for some great resources to test and hack around different travel search and booking engines with helpful APIs? I know some offer odds and ends...
Everything is running extremely sluggishly for me right now - including the wingtip time reported on the page? - dunno if HN is a contributor but FYI! Totally unusable even vs. doing month-wide ITA Matrix searches.
It seems as if they only search Expedia, judging by the graph's label at the top. Even still, it's missing many cheap and budget airlines.
Whilst I commend them for letting me search over a period of time using natural language, I'd rather spend the time searching individual days on a search engine that has more sources.
+1 for Ryanair (even though they are an awful company). You are also missing norwegian which pretty much is the go-to budget airline for anyone living in the Nordics/Scandanvaia (& Baltics).
Whoa. I am super impressed. I thought the title was a bit grandiose, but the ability to perform advanced almost natural like sentence searches that were showcased in the blog post is phenomenal. Expect these guys to get snapped up by the likes of Google or Facebook sometime soon. It looks like 2013 is shaping up to be the year of search especially with the release of Facebook's Open Graph search which operates basically the same.
I am only assuming that's what will happen. If you're innovating in the search space like Google have been doing so for a long time now and of late, Facebook then you're going to attract attention of the bigger players who are trying to gain bigger footholds in a particular niche.
Hopefully they don't get acquired and are super successful. Time will tell.
The design is good but the implementation is very slow (for me at least) and the kind of natural language they are processing is trivial. Driverless cars are 'phenomenal'. Regular expressions, not so much.
I LOVE your product but I consistently get way-slower-than-it-should-be load times on all your pages and searches. Just now I got a 502 Bad Gateway. Looks like you have some growing pains, which is great, but I highly recommend investing in a cloud server :)
The pages are also too wide. Having to do both horizontal and vertical scrolling is severe usability setback.
(I do not run my browser maximized, because too many other sites (e.g. HN) would use up the whole window, making text hard to read. Text is much easier to read when the lines are reasonably short than when they extend across the whole monitor width. And besides, I want to see other windows on my desktop than just my browser.)
I've been doing some work with AWS/Heroku recently - just interested in if you're using a cloud service, VPS or physical servers, and what kind of tech powers the site.
I'm looking forward to reading more posts and using the service when it's a bit snappier!
Yes, the search is very, very slow. Here from Japan it took at least one minute to get the results of a search. That's "fail" for a service like that. Too bad since the options for search are interesting, but it's way too slow for me to consider it usable.
As a long term user with no vested interest in Adioso, it's normally fairly quick (ie. a few seconds at most).
It's a great website - i've used it for a few years now - I think almost since day 1 :)
I'm a big fan of the Adioso story, and have learnt so much from their experience (even though our Australian-based travel businesses are only superficially similar).
I think it will take some time for people to realise that the geography of their real world travel conversations ("ever done South-East Asia?", "I'd love to see Eastern Europe!") can be used in travel searches where traditionally we've had to restrict ourselves to countries, or even cities.
As that transition is made, it will open up a whole wonderful world of experiences for people - and hopefully with the corresponding business success for Adioso.
As someone who ran a travel startup in mainland China for a few years, forgive me for being unimpressed. Here's what happened. I loaded the page and consistently expected to see something impressive to justify the title, but only got:
- Source/Destination detection
- (DateJS style...) natural language temporal specification
What is so impressive about that? It's not even multilingual. Does it do typo detection? Does it do non-airline routes? Does it do passport/visa law interpretation? Embassy/agent/border point locations, open times and fees/currencies for visa acquisition? Black market vs. theoretical currency conversions? Credit card acceptance? Processing times? Time-of-day detection and night-time travel warnings?
You could hire me as a once off or occasional consultant for some more cheap ideas and reality-checks (full stack engineer from AU, previously lived US, so not ignorant of performance issues or your team cultures, either) or you could continue retreading old ground. Either way, there's a lot of the latter left to do before impressive happens.
Oh yeah... and the slow thing really is a problem. All I can think is that you are scraping data from many sources, because for the query I ran, there is exactly 1 (one) carrier, and a fixed schedule, with exactly 1 (one) price per standard, linear fare-period. There is no excuse for a non-instant response, unless your architecture is somehow borked.
> flexibility on dates ("mid July for 10 to 15 days")
Leave and return date flexibility exists within sites like Kayak, I use it all the time. Though it would be nice to make it more flexible, I agree, but this is not a new or killer feature.
> - broadness on destinations ("Southeast Asia", "Western Europe", "California")
Many people have this, usually powered by iffy geonames databases that are monolingual, out of date, or just plain wrong. These existing systems work fine for major destinations though. Best of luck doing the smaller ones and/or other languages better.
> - non-geographic searches ("Somewhere warm")
Iffy. Looks cute on advertising, but of dubious value given that everyone's definition is different. Example: Warm for a northern European or Canadian might be southern France in the European winter. At the same time, even further south and where it may be warmer in northern Africa, someone from LA or Sydney would not find it 'warm'.
> no-one else has succeeded in building a product like this
Major travel aggregators such as Qunar.com and Kayak.com are pretty ballpark. While you can definitely top their UIs in numerous small ways, you will have to make the net UI change valued enough to sway and keep users. Good luck with that.
I would go back to your target market and their use cases ... look at what they value ... un-tech-bias your judgements .. re-align your USP. (Suggestion: consider a range of 'cheapstake' to 'livin it fine' budget per day in a city/country and refocus on helping people to find new and innovative destinations they might like to visit but have never considered, by helping them to find destinations that meet their budget requirements. I know this is really a strong potential selling point for loads of weather-dissatisfied Londoners, and South America and Asia are strong potential regions for north Americans. Ditto south&SEA for Chinese, who are cashed to the hilt right now.)
> While you can definitely top their UIs in numerous small ways, you will have to make the net UI change valued enough to sway and keep users.
... also, complex enough to implement that the existing players can't just immediately emulate your changes (simultaneously letting all their users know about their great, new 'innovation', thus killing your only USP) should you actually gain any traction.
I've been using Google Flights (http://google.com/flights) lately, which lets you graph prices depending on departure date and length of stay. Click "flexible dates" in the date-picker. Extremely useful and fast.
Seems like adioso is trying to do something similar. Really well designed, but it seems like your servers are stressed with the load right now. I'm looking forward to trying it for my next trip :)
I rarely say "Wow." I just shared this with 5 people in less than 2 minutes. This is EXACTLY how travel search should be. EXACTLY. I hate the rigidity of having to select days. And then mess with 2/3 day flexible windows on both ends to find cheaper fares. "Travel to Brazil next month for 14 days" is exactly how my vacation planning works, so that's how I want to search it.
I have a lot of praise. Only negative is the site is really slow (at least right now).
Yea, what would be really great would be to be able to put in a total budget for flight plus hotel. I'd love to be able to search for flight to large European city sometime in September with 4 nights at a central 3-5 star hotel for a total of less than $X. That would be a killer feature.
My wife and I are at a point where we want to do some travel this year, are not picky where we go, don't mind spending money, but don't want to waste money (read: find good bargains).
This type of search is really what I'm looking for. I love that you can type in "somewhere warm" and give general time frames. I don't know if something this flexible has been implemented elsewhere (maybe without the natural language search) but I haven't seen something this flexible before.
I'll have to try this out a few times along with my standard travel search to see how the results quality compares but I'm hoping this provides insights into deals and locations that were previously much harder to find.
Blame the US Department of Transportation for flexible date searches going away; DOT was requiring headline prices to include all taxes and fees included, but you need to know the full route details to calculate those; and flexible date search was based on fare rules. I hope these guys don't get caught up in that, because flexible searches are awesome.
I'm currently searching for the cheapest way, I dont care how long it takes, to get from Guatemala City to as close as I can get to Santiago, Chile.
After a number of Adioso searches I found that it would be much cheaper for me to fly - Guatemala - Miami - Lima, saving me around $400 per person (flying with my gf).
A feature I would love would be a reverse search. Searching by destination with an open ended departure location. I'd love to put in Departure: North America Destination:Santiago, Chile and find the cheapest option.
I think it is great what you are doing. Of course, this is what travel search should be like. Though, I'm genuinely curious, what are you really trying to achieve? Sure, more flexible nice is great. But it is definitely not a killer feature. Low price seems to be key when it comes to mass air travel. As far as I can tell from the responses, all you do is show fares from airline aggregators (I also got a timeout when I tried). Is this really a viable business model? I'm sure they will eventually come around to offer the same search features that you have. In the meantime, there are already many competitors that offer improved search interfaces (e.g. skyscanner.net, which I have used for my last trip). How are you differentiating yourself from these services? Also, while I think that improved search is needed, I would suggest reconsidering which aggregators you include. For my last trip, I found a great fare on cheapoair.com (through skyscanner), but at the last moment, I was having second thoughts, and decided to google them. Well, to say the least, they do not appear to have a very good reputation. Similar with edreams. But I never booked with them, so perhaps, they are not as bad as some of the online reviews suggest. However, one thing that's pretty vexing is that they often will advertise a fare, but then when you go to there site, and try to book it, it is no longer available. I know that you're just providing their data, but as far as I'm concerned this is a major annoyance. Just yet another reason that makes me doubt your current business model is viable. Not to mention that you are up against sites like travelocity, which is essentially owned by the airlines themselves...would love to hear your side of the story, though!
I'm pretty sure that the 88 people [1] who want to go from "MEL to Perth UK" actually want to go the other Perth. Interestingly only 3 have signed up for "MEL to Perth AU" - perhaps you could add some heuristics to your autocomplete?
Similarly for "Auckland NZ to Christchurch UK" - people might be getting more than they bargained for there. :)
You should down-prioritize airport codes in the search, especially since it's natural language search. I searched for a flight to Goa, and got "GOA (Genoua)". I could then correct it to a bunch of other airports, several in India but only one with "Goa" in its name. What I was looking for was flights to any airport in Goa, India.
I think your iconography is backwards: mobile phones have taught people that a target cursor means "I am here." You should use that for the From, and perhaps the Place icon you're currently using for From instead for To.
Also, your filters should be smart enough to enforce their own constraints. I should never have to wait until the results page to get this:
"Please reduce the range of trip lengths you are searching for, and we'll be able to find you results."
For the record, I got a 502 Bad Gateway nginx on one search results page, but it went away on refresh.
I like the ideas you guys are bringing to the table (and the personality of your announcement). Not only are the searches you've demoed here clever, but the filters (afternoon flights shorter than N hours) are nicely integrated. Scrolling feels a bit janky though.
Thanks for the feedback. I wrestled with the iconography for a while. I know the instance your talking about (old google maps mobile used it for 'I am here') and was wondering if anyone was still conditioned to that. I'm not sure who else uses a crosshair icon to good effect.
Please make it more clear whether the results are round trip or not. The best way to do this is to put a big ROUND TRIP right next to the price, instead of making us guess. I understand the price is shown in a box that encompasses two flights, but I don't know if this is a design mistake, trickery, or an actual RT price. It's good to be more clear than you think you need to be, when it comes to stuff like showing prices to fickle comparison shoppers.
Nice stuff though! I look forward to using it when the load isn't so heavy as it seems to be right now. And please don't sell out to someone (cough, Yahoo!) who has a history of cutting the features that users love.
This is fantastic. As a college instructor, I have flexible schedule options, but I can't afford to pay too much. I also hate trying to pen-test the normal airline reservation system for the cheapest flight days/times/etc.
Very cool looking, but it does not return the best prices for the searches. I compared to hipmunk (which doesn't always have the best prices itself) and found significantly lower fares. Keep at it, guys!
One thing that seems to missing from most travel sites is the ability to compose a travel consisting of several legs.
For instance, this spring I am going to India with work, after which I want to travel to somewhere in southeast asia, probably with one or two stops, and then home to copenhagen.
It should be possible to have an overview over my entire travel, not just the one leg or a simple return trip as my travels are rarely just that.
(looks good though, I am definitely going to try it)
Travelling in Kathmandu right now on a slow connection and haven't managed to load the page after 2 minutes. I guess the target market isn't already traveling...
Do people actually need these kind of searches when they book travel? I don't know about anybody else but my life is pretty scheduled and the dates I can go on holiday are fairly fixed and planned months in advance. Research of where to go is done with my wife on tripadvisor and looking through brochues.
Ebookers / Expedia search is pretty easy - pick the dates, pick the location, compare prices.
I just don't see the need for these kind of searches
I am self employed and thus I can more or less travel at any time I want. I can easily trade flexibility against money if this allows me to travel more.
"I just don't see the need for these kind of searches" seems a bit strong. Other people might have slightly less restrictive employment situations.
Anyway - avoiding fixed date searches is only one part of this. Even if your dates are fixed it's nice to see non-fixed destination searches. (I already know about Skyscanner)
Disclosure: Shameless plug from a team member of yet another travel search Startup 90di (which mainly searches for flights, trains, buses in India). *
Seeing what Adioso has done, and also that there is a good deal of overlap. Could not resist, telling about our Startup.
We do what we call as 'free text search'. Its customized for searches in India, like you can do something like:
'Bangalore to Kanpur by train via Delhi'.
Or you can just search by a train name, or number, or flight number or by Airline name and many other things.
Some more examples of free text searches possible are at:
Was skeptical from the hyperbolic headline, but wow. This is a clear solution to an overlooked Job To Be Done and I applaud the team and service. I plan on using them next time I conduct travel plans.
We didn't make out that we could accept any time string - yet; the power is in the ability to handle flexibility of dates and destinations.
But yes, among many things we need to improve, the search parser needs to be more capable, and we'll be improving that as soon as we can find the time.
I look forward to the improvements. Beware the effect of being 'nearly there' with the natural language stuff though. Failures on queries that feel like they 'should work' can get annoying very quickly.
This is really fantastic... every times when i need to search a flight to go from my city in a cheap way around europe i had to do a lot of researches.... this is a really useful service!
Cool stuff but maybe not as revolutionary as the title claims it to be. Minus the NLP most of these searches have been possible for years at my favourite swedish travel aggregator site.
Doesn't seem to be localizing prices to local currency? For travel search, it's really important to localize prices if you want to get some of that outside USA business.
Very impressive, but searching for Stockholm to "Somewhere warm", "any friday" gave me a list of cities and images but "no flights". Why? Is Stockholm not yet supported?
I'm really excited about trying this after all the positive feedback listed here, but I've only had 504 errors and result pages containing "Damn We've had an an error."
ITA is by aviation geeks for aviation geeks. Now I'm totally happy to punch in "MEL LHR EK+ X:KUL", but most normal humans would prefer "Melbourne to London on Emirates with stopover in Kuala Lumpur". Also, ITA has zero support for more open-ended queries beyond limited date ranges, which is what Adioso is focusing on.
But what's up with travel startups not allowing remote workers? I'm looking for work right now, including at a travel startup, and that's just baffling to me.
Some of them offer an enhanced vacation "perk", but that sort of misses the point — I (and probably a lot of people who are passionate about travel) am more put off by having to be in the same place 48-52 weeks out of the year than I would be having to carry a laptop to wheverer it is I feel like being in the world.