Adioso (YC W09), Flight Search For People Keeping Their Options Open

[CoreDumpling]

This is an excellent resource, especially for bargain-hunters like myself.

One question I have: how are you going about adding new flight information? Do you do them in an automated manner, using a web service, or perhaps by scraping? I'm primarily interested in flights between USA and East Asia, which as of now is still rather difficult to find with your site, but I'd be interested in hearing if that would be available before the end of the year.

BTW, I was a bit confused by the TechCrunch headline. To me, "keeping options open" means something like being allowed to change my mind at the last minute, for cancellations or rescheduling. I hope you don't adopt that as your byline, unless you plan to address that aspect of the flight search problem as well.

[kiwidrew]

Glad you're enjoying Adioso! We love traveling to Asia, and we're hoping to include flights from the USA in the next month or so. Stay tuned, there's plenty of good stuff coming up. :)

[mistermann]

I'd also love to know how you do it, have airlines opened up useful webservices to third parties finally?

[JangoSteve]

I clicked over to the site thinking, this could be cool, I wonder what I'll search for. The default search option was "Detroit to domestic for under USD200". DTW is 20 minutes away, and $200 is little enough I could just book something for the hell of it (and I just may). I just wanted to say, that was a killer default search.

[jlees]

I'm in SF and my default was San Francisco to Cologne. Nice subtle use of geoloc - it's the details that matter.

[joshd]

It would be nicer to see dates further in the future. The error message for exceeding the 4 month window is rubbish too: http://adioso.com/au/bne-to-dps-april-2011. By putting scare quotes around "April" in the underlined text it look like the natural language processing engine doesn't know what "April" means. Also, that error message shouldn't be a "Tip", as it's completely failed for that search.

It would be nice to have an optional advanced search form so I could see exactly what a parameters I can search for. Free form search just lets me try permutations of text until I find one that works.

Also, the related searches bar is really confusing. It looks like crumb trails. Turning the arrow into a magnifying glass could be a good way to fix that.

[tjmc]

Awesome site and fantastic to see another Aussie startup! Being in Perth, I'll definitely use it and I love that the founders have focussed on the low cost carriers first. Hope that they add a few of the high capacity international majors too though (the 2 UAE carriers come to mind) because reducing flight time and connections is usually at least as important to me than price.

[lachyg]

I am incredibly surprised there is another Perthian on HackersNews! :o

[robryan]

Congratulations to the guys. It may be true that the flight search market is saturated but I'm not so sure if that is the case in Australia, anecdotally when it comes to people booking flights here the first impulse seems to be to go to the carriers websites or webjet which is more big business and less useful.

[hartror]

It isn't just AU based flights (though I think that was their first revision given they're from AU themselves).

[weaksauce]

This might be a great opportunity to advertise regionally for travel. They can target google adwords on say "webjet.com" which will allow them to get some traffic off a mistaken url vs. address bar.

edit: or whatever the webjet website actually is seing how it is Australian.

[peng]

I've been using http://matrix2.itasoftware.com for flexible flight searching. From the few minutes I have been playing with Adioso, it seems even better.

[drtse4]

Thought the same thing here. Usually the process needed to find the cheapest flight is rather convoluted when you have few date constraints: 1-choose a date/2-[wait a lot]/3-check price/back to 1. But with this... easily accessible data via graph/table, 4-5 clicks and you are done.

[jasonkester]

I think I understand now why every other flight search engine has little "to" and "from" boxes. I got the "couldn't parse this" screen four times in a row trying to get from my house in Northern England to Kalymnos, Greece.

It finally gave me results when I tried "manchester to kos", with the minor problem that all the results started in Boston, 3000 miles from my house.

I like the idea. At the moment though the execution is simply not there.

[tyng]

I think the "natural language search" championed by Adioso is really cool, but the question I want to raise is whether the "natural" in our everyday speech is also "natural" in human-machine communication? i.e. could it be the case that people are so used to searching specific things online that a "natural language search" creates uncertainty about what to expect thus turning people away from the website?

[tyng]

Add to the point above - when I first checked out Adioso uncertainty was the first thing I felt. If I didn't read about Adioso in the first place I wouldn't know what to do with the website.

Perhaps get a few people who have never heard about Adioso to come in one day and observe how they interact with the website. There might be things you need to tweak to make it more intuitive

[ansonparker]

I think it's a tough one. If it works it's flippin' awesome, if it doesn't it can be a despairing experience.

I guess the safe bet is to have a fall back option for those that want it.

Personally, with travel bookings I'd happily never look at a 3-part date drop-down again, even if the price is the odd clarification/re-phrasing.

[jasonkester]

Amazing they made it this far with that terrible name. I googled my best attempt to spell it from memory (5 seconds after reading a whole article that mentioned the name a dozen times), and their site didn't show up anywhere in the results.

  - Memorable
  - Spellable
  - Readable over a phone

It's really not rocket science.

[tomhoward]

You'd reject the names of many very successful companies on those grounds.

I didn't think it was a winner when it was first suggested. We used it as a working title, and it stuck. It taught me that a company can grow into its name and make it feel very right.

Had someone told me 4 years ago we'd still be using it, and frequently being complimented on it by investors and users, I'd have been amazed too.

[brianlash]

I had exactly the opposite reaction. It's just adios with an "o." I think it reads and spells fine and (IMHO) it's consistent with the language of the people most likely to use the service. "Alright dudes I'm adioso."

Again it's just my opinion but I rather like the name.

[lazyant]

It's almost "hateful" ("odioso") in Spanish

[arethuza]

Goes to show - I think that's quite a nice name and easy to spell.

[KateKendall]

Congratulations to Tom, Fenn and Andrew on AV3. Great to see an offering like this coming out of Melbourne's startup ecosystem!

[mcdowall]

I wish the guys good luck, but personally I find Kayak Explore a more than efficient and accurate tool for this type of search.

I found it returned rather erroneous results, "London to Asia next month" returned flights for mainly Eastern European destinations, I started to try different variables... "southampton to edinburgh next month" and it returned results for London Gatwick to Edinburgh.

Flight search is a very competitive online service, accuracy of results is key. The everyday user who receives poor results just simply wont bother returning.

[mcantelon]

There is a note on the site (at some point) that says they're in beta. Hopefully the results will improve.

[hbana]

Try East Asia instead of Asia - it is hit and miss with some keywords but I am sure the guys are onto it.

[carnevalem]

You should add the feature of search for multiple cities at once. For example depending on the price I have flown out of the Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Indianapolis airports. Believe it or not, it takes me about the same amount of time to get to each.

EDIT: It appears you include nearby airports as well in your search, but I would still like to be able to chose which are included. Dayton is included in Cincinnati searches and Indianapolis is included in Columbus searches, but I can't search for all four.

[davidw]

I tried to find something from Venice to Portland, Oregon. It doesn't seem to do PDX, so I tried with SFO instead. It gives me VCE to Gatwick, England, then to Basel, Switzerland, then Dusseldorf, Germany, and then on to San Francisco. Yeah it's cheap, but that sounds like an awful, awful day of traveling.

[tomhoward]

Sure, we understand it might not be to your taste; a route like that won't be appealing to many people.

But the main point is that some people want to be able to use low-cost airlines to take long-haul trips like this, and in fact are doing so already but doing the planning manually (very slowly and sub-optimally) as there is nothing to automate the process.

When we cover more airlines we'll be able to return more palatable options to the average traveller, but we think just offering travellers the ability to take trips like these if they choose to is a step in the right direction.

[eterps]

It would be nice if it understands continents. For example from Amsterdam to South America late december.

[Fenn]

We've actually just recently added that exact feature (though we're short on South American inventory at the moment): http://adioso.com/nl/amsterdam-to-north-america

Looks like we need to tighten up our geo-constraints a little, not quite sure how Istanbul snuck in there :)

[Huppie]

The last time I checked (mid-june) it didn't get very far from the netherlands (we wanted to go to north africa or the middle east), but it only showed up with some trips to the UK and Italy. Bummer.

Still, the idea of Adioso is really attractive.

[keyle]

Did Tom move from Australia to the US to be accepted by YC?

Crunchbase has him as a cofounder, who is the other one? US based founder?

cheers.

[keyle]

Actually I found him http://twitter.com/fennb from Melbourne as well. Glad to see some ozzies kicking!!

Any word on their experience in the US?

[ecoffey]

The site definitely feels snappier than earlier versions!

I'm excited to be able to this for more US domestic flights. Keep up the good work!

[Locke1689]

Well, I guess it's good to know Alexia Tsotsis has no idea what the travelling salesman problem is. Almost like she didn't read her own link.

[tomhoward]

In her defence, we did mention TSP, though in the context of a feature that is not mentioned in the article. She just got mixed up.

[hartror]

As the author points out it is great when you have no firm dates in mind, perfect for planning holidays etc.

[weaksauce]

This is exactly the type of flight search that I was looking for! The competition is terrible in this regard.