

Adioso (YC W09), Flight Search For People Keeping Their Options Open - px
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/adioso/

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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.

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

~~~
christonog
Aside from RSS feeds, I personally haven't found an affordable (ie free)
option. Looks like screen scraping has been the MO of many travel sites (mine
included).

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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.

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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.

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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

~~~
tjmc
Oh there's a few of us... <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528106>

~~~
lachyg
This... is amazing.

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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).

~~~
robryan
Yeah I know, just pointing out their may be more of a market gap in Australia.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

~~~
jasonkester
When you say that name out loud to somebody who doesn't speak Spanish, it
sounds like it should be spelled "audioso". Try Googling that (noticing that
you don't show up at all) and then estimate how many potential users you're
losing each day.

The standard way around this issue is to register every possible misspelling
of your name and repoint it to the site. As an example, try typing tiddla.com
or twidla.com into a browser and see where you end up. When I do that for your
most obvious misspelling, I see a godaddy parking page. The clear course of
action from here is to simply buy the domain and turn all those lost users
into customers.

~~~
nedwin
What country are you from? I'm trying to think of an accent that would make it
sound like "audioso"...

~~~
jasonkester
USA. People here pronounce Adios like Audio, but with an S at the end. So the
common misspelling is to add that U in the middle.

~~~
bmelton
For what it's worth, I typically pronounce is as 'add e ose', though in
hearing you say that, I think that 'ah dee ose' does sound more ... authentic.

~~~
detst
'ah dee ose' is the correct pronunciation but I don't think that makes it
sound like 'audio' (unless, perhaps, you're from certain places on the east
coast).

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

~~~
davidw
I really love the idea of being able to say "I want to go sometime in October,
give me a list of options", so I think you're on the right track, and I'll be
checking back from time to time. Good luck!

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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 :)

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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.

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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?

~~~
tomhoward
It's a shame I was the only one credited, merely for being the one that
arranged the interview and received the call.

Fenn's role in conceiving and engineering Adioso has been far more substantial
than mine, as has that of our more recent addition Andrew Tipton -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kiwidrew>), who is now an equal co-
founder.

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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!

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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.

~~~
Locke1689
Well, that's better, but she still could have read her link. It's pretty clear
the feature she's describing doesn't have anything to do with TSP.

What feature does, btw? Did you solve P?=NP? ;)

~~~
tomhoward
We've built a shortest-path routing engine. Do a few searches from US cities
to Europe or Australia/NZ. In many cases the prices won't be that great due to
the limited inventory we currently have, but you'll be able to see the routing
functionality in action.

It's explained with examples about half way into this post:
<http://blog.adioso.com/adioso-a-new-beginning>

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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.

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herdrick
I used this as my primary travel site in Australia and really liked it.

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ft5
Congrats Tom and Fenn!

