
Show HN: Cheaper flights when flying multiple destinations by route optimisation - danvass
https://skysave.co/
======
Sheepsteak
Really good idea!

But maybe think about replacing the 4MB background video with a static image
or something. It felt a bit overpowering for me (moves too fast) and it also
doesn't scale right with the viewport leaving white text on a white
background.

~~~
FlopV
Agreed about the video. To much going on and moving to fast. Slow it down.

~~~
pouetpouet
just fully remove the background video. I have a powerfull desktop and a good
internet connection, it feels really sluggish.

I just disabled autoplay (disable autoplay extension for chrome,
media.autoplay in about:config for firefox). What a pain.

~~~
0x6c6f6c
My work laptop with an i5, 8GB memory, and typed characters lagged 5-10
seconds behind. I did an "asdf" check and though the browser had completely
frozen it took so long to appear. The video is killing this site for me.

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hisem
Hi,

I tried : Lyon, France as Home (2017/05/02 as start date) Tokyo Narita, Japan
(7 days) Osaka Kansai International, Japan (14 days) Noumea Tontouta, New
Caledonia (14 days)

This told me that "Something went wrong! No valid route could be found for
these destinations, please try another destination"

I added Paris, France with "0 days" as it's a typical stop when flying
international from Lyon.

This gave me a result, but the first stop is Noumea and it says "$false -
BOOK". The other destinations have a real price.

My route is weird though, does not seem very optimized (I fly around the world
once, from France to New Caledonia and back, before going to Japan, which is
on the way), but I guess that's another problem!

~~~
kochb
Also received a $false - BOOK.

Screenshot: [http://imgur.com/a/SGSQu](http://imgur.com/a/SGSQu)

~~~
danvass
Thank you for that! I'll debug it now to see what's gone wrong, very strange.

~~~
JimDabell
I had this as well. The home airport was London Gatwick, and the other entries
were Bangkok, Khon Kaen, and Singapore.

It seemed to me that it couldn't find a route from London to Khon Kaen (Khon
Kaen isn't an international airport), but interpreted that as a zero cost
flight. The route it gave me was Gatwick -> Khon Kaen -> Bangkok -> Singapore
and the cost for the whole thing was a fraction of what it should have been.

The way to make that route work, by the way, is to go Gatwick -> Bangkok ->
Khon Kaen -> Bangkok -> Singapore (or throw Chiang Mai or Hat Yai into the
mix). You can only reach Khon Kaen by air through internal flights in
Thailand.

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whazor
I also built this! I'm using a crawler that searches prices on Google flights.
They provide a month overview for all flights prices.

Link:
[https://github.com/Whazor/Roundtrip](https://github.com/Whazor/Roundtrip)

~~~
maccam94
Oh wow! I was trying to write this myself last week, and got about halfway
done before I realized that my credit card rewards booking system gave me
different prices than Google :(

Major kudos on implementing the AirBNB search as well!

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penetrarthur
I had this other idea that if you want to get somewhere(B) and you don't mind
visiting other places if the flights are really cheap, you can get from A to B
spending couple of days in C and maybe even in D so that A -> C -> D -> B. It
is easy to pair these flights in Europe, so that every flight will be <2hours
and will cost 10-25$. I think I even started coding this, but ended up having
not enough time, and brute-forcing this problem is sort of hard. Maybe there
already is a ready app for that.

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devgutt
I don't understand why all this types of applications assume that a have a
destination and dates. I'm very flexible and I can work remotely. Surprise me
with the cheapest flight anywhere. Does this kind of app exist?

~~~
kvee
[https://www.wherefor.com/](https://www.wherefor.com/)

~~~
ColinWright
When asking that site for suggestions I say that I'm travelling from
Birming... and it suggests:

    
    
      Birmingham, Alabama, GB (BHX)
    

That doesn't fill me with confidence.

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amirhirsch
This system needs to take in more scheduling constraints like if I need to be
somewhere for specific dates, but am free to travel before and after.

I just booked a multi-city international trip like this a couple days ago and
did quite a bit of searching to get a conveniently timed, low cost, direct
flights. I was somewhat flexible about which cities I visited also.

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samdoidge
>Something went wrong! Please pick destinations from the auto-suggest by
clicking on the suggestion as you type.

I've entered London Heathrow, United Kingdom as my Home, and Wroclaw, Poland
as a destination, Number of days: 1, Start Date: 2017/05/02.

What am I doing wrong here?

~~~
danvass
Make sure you remove the third field if you're not using it, fixing that now
:)

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whazor
Couple of hints:

\- consider the flight times (you don't want to arrive at your next location
on 23:00)

\- only search continental destinations, this does not work that well for many
destinations.

\- consider the distance from airport to city (airport of paris is 2 hours
traveling)

\- have a backup plan (rental car)

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tyingq
"Flying short" or "Hidden City" is another tactic. Airlines don't like it, but
it's not illegal. Can't check bags, and you may not want to associate your
frequent flyer account.

That is, sometimes it's cheaper to book a flight with a connection, say
LAX->ATL->MIA, and get off in ATL, than it is to pay for LAX->ATL.

I think skiplagged.com does this. Are you trying these as well?

~~~
nwatson
That works until your flight is overbooked or cancelled and you fly instead
LAX -> DEN -> MIA.

~~~
tyingq
That's a good point. Skiplagged has an FAQ with other potential issues:
[https://skiplagged.com/faq](https://skiplagged.com/faq)

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singingfish
my dad has been working out, and using the cheapest flight from A to B for
over 50 years. And he's still very good at it. If you gave him an option to
say "I want to get from A to B for the best price, I don't care much about the
route, and I want it to take X days, suggest something to me" I'm sure he
would be interested.

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jlebrech
I thought of an airline that just flies you past the city you want to go to
and you just jump when it's your stop.

~~~
tome
How do you get back home?

~~~
et-al
Skyhook / Fulton extract: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-
air_recovery...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-
air_recovery_system)

Needless to say, there are extra fees for carry-on bags.

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malikNF
Great idea, but that background video is just really annoying, a simple
background color would have made the site feel so much more cleaner.

~~~
danvass
We're making some changes on this, thank you for the feedback!

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brianbreslin
Is this using skyscanner API? I got a $false result when putting Miami origin
and Osaka, tokyo, lax (no direct flights).

~~~
danvass
It is using Skyscanner. As for $false, that's some strange bug. I'll debug it
now and push out a fix soon.

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yedpodtrzitko
I was curious how does it compare with results from kiwi.com. I tried to fill
in a few destinations (London -> Bangkok -> Seoul) and... it gave me no
result. So I guess the need to fill in a precise date/number of days is a bit
killer here. Having an interval ranges (or a tolerance +-one day) would make a
difference.

~~~
danvass
SkySave finds you the cheapest route when visiting multiple destinations. So
if you want to visit LA, New York and Miami and you're in London it'll tell
you the cheapest route (ie. go from London to LA then NY then Miami and then
back to London) and if you tried going first to NY and then LA etc. it could
be a lot more expensive. You need to pick a result from the auto-suggestion
dropdown and you just need to say how many days you want to stay at each
place. We will be adding in tolerance though! Nice suggestion

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greatNespresso
Just made a quick try, and booy what such a good idea ! Question : I am
french, and so filled Home with Paris, and destination with Los Angeles. I am
getting fantastic prices, but only in the sense US -> FR. The service is only
available for the US then ?

~~~
danvass
Thanks for trying it out and the feedback! It's available for any destination
in the world. 'Home' is just the airport that you're starting out from and
returning to. So for example, if you're in Paris and want to visit LA, New
York and Miami it'll find the best way to go from Paris -> LA -> NY -> Miami
-> Paris. Where LA, NY, Miami will be in the cheapest order. Or you could
enter for destinations like, Beijing, Bangkok and Singapore.

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threeio
You should let me specify only airport codes and you do the translation in the
background... I went in and did SFO, IAD, LHR, DBX and assumed any travel site
would understand where I wanted to go without clicking the dropdown entries

~~~
danvass
Used to handle that, not sure why not anymore. I'll definitely fix it up. I'm
planning on making it so that it tries to guess what you mean (essentially
first auto-suggestion) if you don't click on it.

~~~
woodson
It also makes it hard to disambiguate cities/airports. Entering "Portland"
brings up two entries named "Portland, United States" (presumably Oregon and
Maine) along with "Portland, Australia", but no way of telling which Portland
in the U.S. is which.

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Markoff
site is unusable on mobile (Brave browser)

i see white text with shadows on white background and there are three
identical fields for Days, no idea what is their meaning, i guess duration of
trip, but not sure why there are three of them

~~~
danvass
Try it now! We put out an update that makes it A LOT better.

~~~
Markoff
it's displayed properly now, though still don't understand purpose of that
horrible quality top background image

also does my home take into consideration nearby airports, because i was not
offered options about it, being too strict about it it's not good choice if i
can just take train 2-3 hours away and have much more or cheaper options and i
can enter multiple home airports it should be filled in home filed before
entering any text there in background as example

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ColinWright
No idea what I'm doing wrong, but I consistently get:

    
    
        Something went wrong!
    
        No valid route could be found
        for these destinations, please
        try another destination.

~~~
danvass
You need to make sure you pick a destination from the suggestion box (click on
it), enter the number of days for each destination and click the '-' button if
you're not using one of the destination fields. Sorry if that's a bit
confusing, currently improving that so it's a little bit more lenient :)

EDIT: We're pushing out a fix now that should resolve this, you can now have
empty fields for destinations and it'll just include the filled out ones.

~~~
ColinWright
I did pick destination boxes from the drop down each time, and I entered the
number of days each time.

As a side question, what happens if I want to start in one place, and finish
somewhere else? Suppose, for example, I want Paris -> Atlanta -> Sydney ->
London : is that possible?

If this works properly and well I can see that I would not only use it, but
would pay money for it, but at the moment, for me, it doesn't seem to be
working.

FWIW, I'm well-known in my companies for breaking anything that people think
is ready to go and suitable for deployment to muggles, so these teething
problems are to be expected.

~~~
danvass
That's very bizarre that you got an error then! Could you try it again please,
oh and make sure to set a date a bit into the future as otherwise might not
have as many flights available.

Wonderful suggestion :) I'll make it so you can input a different final stop
to you're starting point. We want to keep it free and potentially monetise via
affiliate sales and show people how much we've saved them, perhaps some would
be generous to donate 1% of the amount they saved? Who knows!

We'll definitely be fixing it up though, still a bit rough around the edges
haha.

~~~
danvass
Thanks Colin, we have a chat support on there too so we can see what's going
on but definitely working now :)

~~~
ColinWright
The other question is:

What does this do that Google Flights doesn't do?

I haven't yet seen what it is that makes this different - I feel like I'm
missing something.

~~~
danvass
If you're flying to multiple destinations it matters which destination you
visit first, which one second and so forth. SkySave tells you which route is
the cheapest. For example, it can be a lot cheaper to fly London -> New York
-> Miami -> Los Angeles -> London than if you were to go to LA first and then
Miami. Does that make more sense?

~~~
ColinWright
OK, that really wasn't clear, so here are some specific suggestions:

The video under the white text often makes it difficult to read the
catchphrase. I'd suggest editing the video to reduce the brightness by 60% (No
doubt others will disagree);

The text at the top does not, to me, communicate this idea that you are
choosing multiple destinations, and that the site will try all the orderings
to find the optimal itinerary;

It says:

 _Discover the cheapest route to fly for your next holiday_

You are using the word "route" in a way that doesn't communicate to me the
idea you've mentioned above;

It says:

 _If you 're visiting multiple destinations it can be on average 30% cheaper
to fly a specific route as opposed to others_

Again, you're using the word "route" in a very odd way.

So, concrete suggestion to highlight the problem, I'd say something like:

 _You choose the places to visit - we 'll arrange your itinerary to minimise
the costs._

~~~
danvass
I found it hard to put it succinctly but I quite like your description. Might
use that instead!

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kk_cz
looks like a nice project. If I can have one suggestion: offer the option to
enter a fixed date for one of the destinations (instead of the start date ).

Use case: If I am flying for a business trip to a given destination, the dates
are pretty much set there. There is another place close by that I would like
to visit and I don't care too much if it will be before or after the business
trip, but the business trip needs to happen on selected dates.

~~~
danvass
Thanks, I'll put it on the feature list.

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bespoke_engnr
Is it safe to have that apiKey parameter in your 'book' links? That just
jumped out at me. It looks like a cool project; good luck!

~~~
danvass
That's a 'short' API key, it's not the full one. It's their public variant.
Thank you though!

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wheelerwj
Anyone want the over over/under on how long it takes for United Airlines to
sue this guy?

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mbrookes
The "something went wrong" if you don't delete the empty fields is
confusing...

~~~
danvass
I've fixed it now, shouldn't happen anymore!

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Nicholas_C
How is this different than selecting multiple destinations on Expedia?

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c0achmcguirk
I wonder if this is using Dijkstra's Algorithm [1] as it seems a great
application for it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm)

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anorphirith
the video background is making me nervous, I'd increase the frame rate to
20fps at least

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iamiam
skiplagged.com is really cool too.

