

Ask HN: What is broken in the online travel industry? - c1sc0

Yesterday I was trying to book a flight. It was an absolutely horrible user experience. Broken redirects from flight aggregators. Changing prices. A booking that failed mid-way but still billed me. Am I the only one who thinks the travel industry is broken? What can a startup improve in this field?
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hcho
A site that analyses flight price fluctuations would be awsome. Currently all
the online travel sites work on the assumption that your days are fixed and
gives you the prices around that date. A site that would tell me the cheapest
time of the year to visit Paris from London would be a lot more useful.

Slightly tangential, how do you access flight price data? Is there a company
providing the feeds? How much does it cost?

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fauigerzigerk
I believe farecast did something like this. They were bought by Microsoft.

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hcho
Thanks for that. I checked them on bing, the UI does not do their product
justice. It look like yet another cluttered travel web site.

Another thought, how hard is it for a travel website that I use frequently to
infer that I am from London. I booked lots of fligts in and out from this
city. Why not make it my default location after while? Cookies and data mining
anyone?

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fauigerzigerk
That's a good point. It shouldn't be hard for them to do that.

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frossie
The best site I have ever found for planning air travel is this:
<http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/prego>

I have been using them since before the web (seriously, you could telnet to
their system on a vt100).

Unfortunately you can't actually _buy_ a ticket from them! But it will spit
out the gobbledygook that a travel agent can use to book exactly that fare, or
once you have the specific flights you want to be on you can go through the
pain of trying to get the flights on a commercial site.

Of the commercial sites, I prefer orbitz as the least sucky of the lot.

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gaius
With who?

I must've been using Travelocity and Expedia for 10 years now (and easySABRE
while it still existed) and I have to say this industry was notable for being
ahead of the curve for high-value transactions on the Internet.

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c1sc0
I used Kayak & Opodo. The problems I experienced were mostly due to how they
connect/redirect to each airline's booking system. I was pining for the days
when I could call my travel agent and have an actual human take care of my
travel arrangements. Something like justbookmeabloodyflight.com: you give them
your CC info & a specific travel request. They then book it for you and ONLY
contact you if there is a problem.

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gaius
They still exist - if I want to speak to a human travel agent I call Amex.

