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 something more modern like a stream you can subscribe to?).
Bing Travel had predictions for fare fluctuations for air tickets back in 2009. It was pretty awesome back when I flied a lot, but they apparently killed the feature in 2014. Now Google's bringing it back, two years later.
I don't understand the future sometimes. ¯\(°_o)/¯
Similarly, the article mentions that Google Flights is now more closely competing with Hopper, a mobile app for finding flights. Hopper already offers this price prediction service, and it is powered by Sabre's price prediction API: https://developer.sabre.com/docs/read/rest_apis/air/intellig...
The original service was called Farecast before Microsoft bought them. It used to be very good, but the prediction info gradually became marginalized. We may never know the truth, but it feels as if Microsoft caved to pressure from the airlines.
I think they said they killed it because they said they could no longer be accurate with the rate predictions because airlines started limiting data access and it requiring more staff than it was worth. I used it all the time and was sad when they killed it off. I'm sure Google will abandon this project too in 2-3 years like they do everything else that turns out to not be profitable.
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 major ones) on short flights.
>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
Funny, I was just thinking of how dissapointing the Google UI was: it took me three clicks and two page loads to see where and for how long a layover was. Have you tried Hipmunk[0]? Their interface for flight listings is the best I've ever used.
> 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 major ones) on short flights.
Not to mention they're missing Southwest, but that's Southwest's fault -- they seem to have some sort of policy against allowing any third parties to list their flights. In addition to being really annoying since I have to make two searches rather than one every time I want to book a domestic flight due to a lone holdout, it also makes zero sense to me. How could not having all that free advertising from flight search engines possibly be a good thing for Southwest? I care enough to go to the trouble of searching in two places, but I doubt most people do.
Almost all flight searching / pricing tools have comically bad user interfaces. It's as if the product designers at these companies deliberately went out of their way to limit my options and make me search over and over and over and over.
When's a cheap day to fly to and return from Las Vegas? Sorry. Can't answer that, you need to specify the exact day you want to depart and the exact day you want to come back, and we might let you look at results + or - 3 days, unless you don't specify the exact departure airport.
These sites all seem to be geared toward business travelers who must travel on particular days from and to particular airports. Anything off that beaten path is an exercise in frustration.
I always use SkyScanner - similar UI with options for "find the cheapest flight in a month," but usually way cheaper prices. Also includes Southwest, which Google Flights is missing, if I remember correctly.
I just gave it a try because of this comment. Found the UI rather confusing actually. It only showed me one flight? And, that was almost double the price of what I booked yesterday (and found via http://hipmunk.com which is my personal favorite tool that I think has an excellent interface)
I've searched with Google Flights a few times, but they are consistently more expensive than the flights I find with other services (Hipmunk, specifically). Has anyone else noticed this before, too?
Does anyone know why the prices would be that much different? For the searches I've done, Google Flights is close to $150 more than what Hipmunk shows. Does Hipmunk maybe just have some sort of promo or lower price that Google Flights can't offer?
EDIT: This curiosity also relates to what "karakal" is asking in their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12736433 - Like is this data just universal or do some services get better deals than others?
My experience is completely different. I've been using Google flights for 2 years now, it always shows me the best price compared to cheapoair/hipmunk. Also I love the clean UI :)
Are you finding the same specific flights have different prices on the two services, or are you finding that Hipmunk is able to find flights that Google doesn't?
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on an unrelated project.)
I try to compare Kayak skyscanner and google flights every time I search for a flight. Mixed results, but anyway after finding a low price, go to the airline site to check.
Will Google Flights tell you if prices are going to decrease in the near future too? You would generally think if they can predict one direction, then they can predict the opposite. However, telling someone that a cheaper flight may exist in the future is going to convince them to leave the site and possibly not come back.
I love the interface of Google flights, but I can usually find cheaper tickets elsewhere (usually on skyscanner). I've no idea how ticket pricing works and why one site can be so much cheaper than others, but skyscanner is usually 15-20% cheaper on international flights for me.
I take it they do not factor in currency, which would be factor if paying via credit card and exchange rates change if paying in another currency than home.
That would be I feel very dynamic in part, though still something that plays more of a factor in price than other aspects.
I'm not sure how much Airlines adjust for that and given all fuel is ties tot he USD($) then more a factor for non USD pricing with the exchange rate of the USD.
Now a feature that monitored that and fuel cost changes could potentially give people a heads up before the airlines adjust and might be a good feature.
Though I can count the number of flights I have taken on my hands, so not that afay with the dynamics Airlines use to adjust prices and the frequency.
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 more expensive than flights from city A to city C with a layover in city B. I'm all for more transparency of the air travel market.
Carriers have fleets of yield management analysts whose entire job is to keep the ticket prices from being the fair market price. Don't worry, prices will avoid settling on a steady state.
It will remain helpful because not everyone will use the tool or follow its advice.
It's like coupons. In theory, coupons are pointless because the coupon price just becomes "the price." In practice, a lot of people can't be bothered to deal with coupons.
Like coupons, this becomes another mechanism for price discrimination. People who really want to pay a lower price will use tools like this to accomplish it. People who don't care as much won't bother and will likely pay more.
yes there will be some amount of correction, but keep in mind that some travel behaviors are not modifiable. E.g, christmas, winter/summer vacations, etc.
I wish the time horizon on this matched the time horizon on which tickets are available. It seems to be about a month short when I compare to directly shopping for flights on airline websites.
Granted that shouldn't matter quite as much for the "when will fares increase" question, since they have to have a baseline to evaluate the increase magnitude, but it sure matters simply for the "I'm planning to fly in for a popular event a year from now and I know tickets are being snapped up so I want to compare fares for flights as soon as they become orderable" scenario.
Is this actual new information it is revealing, or just a way of presenting what had been available in the form of the time vs. price bar-graph that it has had since ancient times.
The bar-graph had been hidden from the usual UI by decree of UX designers (Maths is hard!), but was always available as a kind of easter-egg.
The title is a little misleading. The screenshot shows that Google is showing that "prices will likely increase" which is different than the "fares will increase" in the title. "fares might increase" would be more appropriate here.
As a once frequent Farecast user I was initially excited about this, but realized that for the most part airfarewatchdog has completely replaced this use case in my life.
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.
British Airlines is already f#cking with Google Flights - looked up a round-trip transatlantic flight, got a quote, proceeded to booking, got "oy vey, so sorry, price changed a bit" and served 2x the quote. It was 100% reproducible in a scope of several days.
[+] [-] karakal|9 years ago|reply
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 something more modern like a stream you can subscribe to?).
[+] [-] lmkg|9 years ago|reply
I don't understand the future sometimes. ¯\(°_o)/¯
[+] [-] jmarbach|9 years ago|reply
Disclosure: I own another competing flight search tool, https://concorde.io
[+] [-] bimr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ojbyrne|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unfletch|9 years ago|reply
Edit: Memory served: https://web.archive.org/web/20060630050308/http://farecast.c...
[+] [-] arjie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8ytecoder|9 years ago|reply
[1]https://www.hopper.com/
[+] [-] balls187|9 years ago|reply
The farecast team left and formed Decide, a way predict prices for electronics and other goods. Eventually purchased by ebay.
Bing also had a fantastic thing that let you earn points when shopping through Bing Shopping. That was quickly discontinued as well.
[+] [-] cloudjacker|9 years ago|reply
nothing novel has happened since then
web services are just easier to use
[+] [-] partiallypro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neves|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgotpwtomain|9 years ago|reply
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 major ones) on short flights.
[+] [-] dice|9 years ago|reply
Funny, I was just thinking of how dissapointing the Google UI was: it took me three clicks and two page loads to see where and for how long a layover was. Have you tried Hipmunk[0]? Their interface for flight listings is the best I've ever used.
0: https://www.hipmunk.com
[+] [-] throwaway287391|9 years ago|reply
Not to mention they're missing Southwest, but that's Southwest's fault -- they seem to have some sort of policy against allowing any third parties to list their flights. In addition to being really annoying since I have to make two searches rather than one every time I want to book a domestic flight due to a lone holdout, it also makes zero sense to me. How could not having all that free advertising from flight search engines possibly be a good thing for Southwest? I care enough to go to the trouble of searching in two places, but I doubt most people do.
[+] [-] ryandrake|9 years ago|reply
When's a cheap day to fly to and return from Las Vegas? Sorry. Can't answer that, you need to specify the exact day you want to depart and the exact day you want to come back, and we might let you look at results + or - 3 days, unless you don't specify the exact departure airport.
These sites all seem to be geared toward business travelers who must travel on particular days from and to particular airports. Anything off that beaten path is an exercise in frustration.
[+] [-] komali2|9 years ago|reply
https://www.skyscanner.com/
[+] [-] icebraining|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheiVia0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] udfalkso|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluetidepro|9 years ago|reply
Does anyone know why the prices would be that much different? For the searches I've done, Google Flights is close to $150 more than what Hipmunk shows. Does Hipmunk maybe just have some sort of promo or lower price that Google Flights can't offer?
EDIT: This curiosity also relates to what "karakal" is asking in their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12736433 - Like is this data just universal or do some services get better deals than others?
[+] [-] vthallam|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbr|9 years ago|reply
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on an unrelated project.)
[+] [-] leojg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scelerat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whitej125|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samfisher83|9 years ago|reply
However my favorite site now days skiplagged. The site united try to sue.
[+] [-] JonoBB|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zenst|9 years ago|reply
That would be I feel very dynamic in part, though still something that plays more of a factor in price than other aspects.
I'm not sure how much Airlines adjust for that and given all fuel is ties tot he USD($) then more a factor for non USD pricing with the exchange rate of the USD.
Now a feature that monitored that and fuel cost changes could potentially give people a heads up before the airlines adjust and might be a good feature.
Though I can count the number of flights I have taken on my hands, so not that afay with the dynamics Airlines use to adjust prices and the frequency.
[+] [-] yalogin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twentythree|9 years ago|reply
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. I'm all for more transparency of the air travel market.
[+] [-] falsedan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|9 years ago|reply
It's like coupons. In theory, coupons are pointless because the coupon price just becomes "the price." In practice, a lot of people can't be bothered to deal with coupons.
Like coupons, this becomes another mechanism for price discrimination. People who really want to pay a lower price will use tools like this to accomplish it. People who don't care as much won't bother and will likely pay more.
[+] [-] dajohnson89|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patja|9 years ago|reply
Granted that shouldn't matter quite as much for the "when will fares increase" question, since they have to have a baseline to evaluate the increase magnitude, but it sure matters simply for the "I'm planning to fly in for a popular event a year from now and I know tickets are being snapped up so I want to compare fares for flights as soon as they become orderable" scenario.
[+] [-] adrianratnapala|9 years ago|reply
The bar-graph had been hidden from the usual UI by decree of UX designers (Maths is hard!), but was always available as a kind of easter-egg.
Perhaps this feature is the compromise?
[+] [-] triangleman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philfrasty|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netfire|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcfunk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkaye|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgotpwtomain|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eps|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nattaylor|9 years ago|reply
This is the daily price graph for a recent flight I was watching. Often the price was changing hugely multiple times per day.
http://imgur.com/a/qaxrX
[+] [-] flashman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperion2010|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] losteverything|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kp9092|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|9 years ago|reply