
You're Invited to Test My Flight Booking Engine - kxter
Decided to build a new flight booking engine using some AI to weed out the garbage flights the airlines and meta-sites throw at us.<p>Wanna help me test it? Put your name in the Google Doc below and I&#x27;ll let you know when I put it into production.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forms.gle&#x2F;SWQbEqmpEw83ehgv7<p>Cheers,
Thomas
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moftz
What would your application offer that Google Flights can't do? I have a
pretty good experience using Google for researching and either booking or
being linked to a booking site. I can bypass Priceline (and it's child
companies) and get linked directly to the airline I need. Only times I have a
bad experience is when the price on Google Flights doesn't match the actual
price that the airline shows on their site but this is rare.

Not seeing Southwest flights is a downside but everyone is at this
disadvantage from what I can tell. It's not a huge deal; if Southwest doesn't
fly directly between the two cities, you are better off finding another
airline.

Something I do want to see is something that combines Google Flights results
and tools (flexible airports and dates) along with Skiplag's results. Google
has a nice interface and great tools but Skiplag has that extra intelligence
that helps you with one-way tickets.

I recently booked some flights to Europe to meet up with friends. I didn't
want to fly their itinerary since it had gone up in price by a lot so I used
Google Flights to find other European cities I could fly to and then fly from
to meet up with my friends. My dates were flexible and both my origin and
destination were flexible. I just needed to get to Europe as cheap as possible
(getting around Europe is relatively cheap) and be in the right city on a
certain day. One feature that would be good to have is a way to create a
larger itinerary that involves round-trip tickets. Google Flights does all
one-way tickets when you try to do a multi-city trip.

One interesting thing to have would be some sort of metric on how well the
airline is performing. I originally booked a flight to Brussels on Wow
Airlines. Imagine my surprise when they went out of business a week later and
weren't offering refunds to Americans. Being able to see a small red flag that
says "Hey, this airline is going bankrupt" would be pretty handy.

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rutledjw
If you booked via credit card, protest. you have a 90-day window. You should
get your cash back. Doesn't matter what the airline says. This is part of the
agreement between Merchants - Banks - Visa/MC.

You'll get that $ back, granted, you still have to buy a more expensive
ticket. Still, it's something

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moftz
I did do a chargeback with my venture card and thankfully got it all back.
Luckily I found flights to an even better destination on Air Italy for cheaper
than what Wow Air ended up being. The starting price for Wow Air was pretty
cheap but after you pay for all the extras, it cost more than other flights
that include all of those features.

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rutledjw
Ha. The irony of the ultra-LCC carriers. #eyeroll

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metanoia
The distribution problem has been solved for many years - travel agents were
disrupted in the first wave of the web. Hipmunk tried to create a friendlier
UX than what Kayak, Expedia, et. al were trying to provide, but it wasn't a
step change.

I think RouteHappy was the last travel startup that caught my attention. In
fact, I was thinking of doing the same thing, but they beat me to it :) They
brought visibility to data about the flights such as seat width, pitch,
inflight entertainment/connectivity, inflight power, etc. that had been hiding
in other places (SeatGuru, various travel review and business travel interest
sites such as TPG).

But, they were acquired, which meant that they were more a feature than an
independent distribution channel.

I'd love to see what this person is doing but as a viable business, based on
current travel-agency-commission business models, I can't imagine anything
that couldn't be copied by the big travel companies in an instant.

We need new business models here, or at least a strong incentive to go back to
fee-for-service travel agents...

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metanoia
Out of interest: What's your data source for this? The GDSs have most things
locked down unless you are a huge customer, and Google/ITA seems super
expensive.

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notoriousjpg
Yeah i'm curious too. Seems way too good to be true.

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throw03172019
What is a garbage flight?

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quickthrower2
"I can sell a rock on a Palo Alto street corner for $5,000". ...yeah maybe I
could but I'm not a drug dealer.

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deepwell
Why is AI needed to weed out "garbage flights"?

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toomuchtodo
How does this compare to Hipmunk?

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70122-_6
Thank-you Mr Thomas Mhk.

