
Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase - jonbaer
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/17/google-flights-will-now-tell-you-when-fares-will-increase-help-you-find-cheaper-tickets/
======
karakal
I'm curious, how does one gain access to flight schedules/fares? Is this
something that anyone can get their hands on and create a service (complexity
aside), or do you need some sort of license that costs thousands of dollars?

Does each airline have their own way of exporting this data? Is there a single
entity that aggregates from all of them? How does the actual data look like?
(Is it a dump every X hours, or something more modern like a stream you can
subscribe to?).

~~~
dmbaggett
Fares and rules come from ATPCO ([http://atpco.net](http://atpco.net)).
Flights come from OAG ([http://www.oag.com](http://www.oag.com)). Seat
availability requires data directly from the carrier, usually via a live query
to the carrier's reservation system.

The GDS companies get this data from these sources and then in turn provide
(crappy) APIs for customers to use to query it.

In general, if you're doing bookings you can get small amounts of the data (a
query at a time) from a GDS. Otherwise you're looking at millions of dollars
per year. And then you need to write code to parse it and price tickets using
it (approximately 1M LoC if you're terse about it -- more like 30M if you're a
GDS).

(I know all this because I co-founded ITA Software, whose software now powers
Google Flights.)

~~~
solaarphunk
Thank you for building ITA Matrix - it is amazing tool and I don't know what I
would do without it.

~~~
wfunction
> Thank you for building ITA Matrix - it is amazing tool and I don't know what
> I would do without it.

Honest question (I swear I'm not trying to troll): what do you actually do
with it that you can't do (or do as well as) with Google Flights or Kayak or
some other site like that?

I ask because I've used ITA Matrix and never managed to find a cheaper flight
than I can through "normal" means... but I rarely fly multi-destination (and
basically never do more complicated stuff) so I'm not sure if the use case is
beyond mine or if I just don't know how to utilize it in a useful manner.

~~~
Veratyr
\- Time bars (incredibly handy for optimising for things like tight
connections, which can be essential when flying international and missing a
connection means being stranded for a day):
[https://i.imgur.com/RteViUF.png](https://i.imgur.com/RteViUF.png)

\- Multiple departure/destination airports (you can search SFO,SJC,OAK to
LGB,LAX,SNA and back in a single search). To be fair Google supports this on
desktop too (but doesn't on mobile).

\- Better search for return flights with variable stay lengths (Google only
does a 5x5 matrix, ITA Matrix does a full month).

However, perhaps the biggest downside is that you can't actually book through
ITA Matrix. It only finds the fare, you have to find it elsewhere to actually
buy it (although Hipmunk takes routing codes, which makes it easier)

------
lmkg
Bing Travel had predictions for fare fluctuations for air tickets back in
2009. It was pretty awesome back when I flied a lot, but they apparently
killed the feature in 2014. Now Google's bringing it back, two years later.

I don't understand the future sometimes. ¯\\(°_o)/¯

~~~
jmarbach
Similarly, the article mentions that Google Flights is now more closely
competing with Hopper, a mobile app for finding flights. Hopper already offers
this price prediction service, and it is powered by Sabre's price prediction
API:
[https://developer.sabre.com/docs/read/rest_apis/air/intellig...](https://developer.sabre.com/docs/read/rest_apis/air/intelligence/low_fare_forecast)

Disclosure: I own another competing flight search tool,
[https://concorde.io](https://concorde.io)

~~~
lavezzi
Well from what I have seen this only says when prices are going up, not down -
so it's not that close.

~~~
jmarbach
From the first sentence of the API docs:

> _The Low Fare Forecast (beta) API forecasts whether the lowest published
> fare will rise, fall or stay the same within the next 7 days._

------
forgotpwtomain
I almost never use anything other google flights when searching for a ticket.
The UI is just so much better and easier to use than the ridiculous bloated
crap that most travel sites are (especially when they are trying to shove car-
rental and hotel deals in your face).

The one drawback is sometimes they are missing local / smaller airlines from
their list of flights (which can be a major price difference from the major
ones) on short flights.

~~~
ryandrake
Almost all flight searching / pricing tools have comically bad user
interfaces. It's as if the product designers at these companies deliberately
went out of their way to limit my options and make me search over and over and
over and over.

When's a cheap day to fly to and return from Las Vegas? Sorry. Can't answer
that, you need to specify the exact day you want to depart and the exact day
you want to come back, and we might let you look at results + or - 3 days,
unless you don't specify the exact departure airport.

These sites all seem to be geared toward business travelers who must travel on
particular days from and to particular airports. Anything off that beaten path
is an exercise in frustration.

~~~
ghaff
>These sites all seem to be geared toward business travelers who must travel
on particular days from and to particular airports.

Yep. They're pretty clearly designed for the 99% or so case and just
(ungracefully) throw their hands in the air for the other 1% or so.

As you say, it's hard to really make the system do the work around finding a
cheap flight within a set of parameters.

I've also spent hours booking complicated multi-destination flights,
especially in Asia when you need to use multiple carriers. Simply booking as a
series of one-way flights can end up costing thousands of dollars more than
something more optimized. So you need to end up manually trying various
combinations of one-way and round-trip flights and then piecing together the
separate itineraries at the end.

~~~
massysett
That's the exact sort of scenario you would want a travel agent for--if you
can trust the agent to get a good fare.

~~~
ghaff
Yeah. I actually have broken down and used our company travel service for
this. Then at least it's out of my hands. But usually I have too much sunk
cost :-) and have sufficient preferences that I just motor through on my own.

------
bluetidepro
I've searched with Google Flights a few times, but they are consistently more
expensive than the flights I find with other services (Hipmunk, specifically).
Has anyone else noticed this before, too?

Does anyone know why the prices would be that much different? For the searches
I've done, Google Flights is close to $150 more than what Hipmunk shows. Does
Hipmunk maybe just have some sort of promo or lower price that Google Flights
can't offer?

EDIT: This curiosity also relates to what "karakal" is asking in their
comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12736433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12736433)
\- Like is this data just universal or do some services get better deals than
others?

~~~
cbr
Are you finding the same specific flights have different prices on the two
services, or are you finding that Hipmunk is able to find flights that Google
doesn't?

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on an unrelated project.)

~~~
bluetidepro
Good question. I haven't gone as far as seeing if a specific flight has a
different price or not. It is, however, from the same airline that Hipmunk has
a lower price for. I do know that. I'm not sure if it's the same specific
flight or not, though. I can look into it more...

In general, I based my original comment on what Google Flights show as the
"Best Price" vs what Hipmunk is showing as "Best Price." And there isn't any
filters on either platform that would be quick to explain why the huge price
difference.

------
whitej125
Will Google Flights tell you if prices are going to decrease in the near
future too? You would generally think if they can predict one direction, then
they can predict the opposite. However, telling someone that a cheaper flight
may exist in the future is going to convince them to leave the site and
possibly not come back.

------
samfisher83
Doesn't Kayak do they same thing? They have the wait buy stuff too.

However my favorite site now days skiplagged. The site united try to sue.

------
JonoBB
I love the interface of Google flights, but I can usually find cheaper tickets
elsewhere (usually on skyscanner). I've no idea how ticket pricing works and
why one site can be so much cheaper than others, but skyscanner is usually
15-20% cheaper on international flights for me.

~~~
komali2
Skyscanner also has more airlines than google flights, if I remember
correctly. I don't think google flights shows southwest flights, but
skyscanner does. I have no idea why.

------
Zenst
I take it they do not factor in currency, which would be factor if paying via
credit card and exchange rates change if paying in another currency than home.

That would be I feel very dynamic in part, though still something that plays
more of a factor in price than other aspects.

I'm not sure how much Airlines adjust for that and given all fuel is ties tot
he USD($) then more a factor for non USD pricing with the exchange rate of the
USD.

Now a feature that monitored that and fuel cost changes could potentially give
people a heads up before the airlines adjust and might be a good feature.

Though I can count the number of flights I have taken on my hands, so not that
afay with the dynamics Airlines use to adjust prices and the frequency.

------
yalogin
Almost every site offers this. Isn't this unhelpful in the last ng run?
Consumer behavior will change and the price will smooth out or the window of
lower prices will be gone or the percentage of change will become smaller.

~~~
twentythree
It might be unhelpful to the users who know how to take advantage of the
current system, but hopefully the net impact will be greater price
transparency, which helps consumers in the long run; people will pay more for
things which cost the airline more, but not for arbitrary reasons like booking
too early.

In general, flight pricing seems rather opaque; I'm always confused by flights
from city A to city B that are more expensive than flights from city A to city
C with a layover in city B. I'm all for more transparency of the air travel
market.

~~~
Kliment
The problem is that there is no single price at which you can fill the plane
enough and cover expenses. Set the price too low and your plane fills up but
your costs are not covered. Set your price too high and you have so many empty
seats that even with the handful of people paying outrageous prices you can't
cover the cost of crew, fuel, and ground services. This means you have to sell
some tickets at low prices, to attract the masses, and some tickets at high
prices, to cover expenses. But now you have the problem of trying to prevent
the people who can afford and are willing to buy expensive tickets from using
the cheap fares. This is what leads to all the obscure rules about saturday
night stays and layover impact and time of booking and whatnot. For a lot more
info on this, see [http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-
com...](http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-
complexity/ITA-software-travel-complexity.pdf)

Interestingly, low-fare airlines have tried working around the problem by
setting prices super low, such that they lose money on each flight by default,
but making it up in auxiliary services - either selling addons that cost them
nothing on margin to implement (priority boarding, early checkin, seat
selection), upselling external high-margin services (car rental, hotel
bookings, airport transfer services, insurance, phone cards) or directly
extracting money from customers (obtrusive advertising, in-flight sales
pitches, extremely punitive charges for baggage/airport checkin/over-weight
fees/not following obscure rules). This seems more sustainable than the
traditional approach of customer price segmentation if price transparency
increases over time.

------
patja
I wish the time horizon on this matched the time horizon on which tickets are
available. It seems to be about a month short when I compare to directly
shopping for flights on airline websites.

Granted that shouldn't matter quite as much for the "when will fares increase"
question, since they have to have a baseline to evaluate the increase
magnitude, but it sure matters simply for the "I'm planning to fly in for a
popular event a year from now and I know tickets are being snapped up so I
want to compare fares for flights as soon as they become orderable" scenario.

------
adrianratnapala
Is this actual new information it is revealing, or just a way of presenting
what had been available in the form of the time vs. price bar-graph that it
has had since ancient times.

The bar-graph had been hidden from the usual UI by decree of UX designers
(Maths is hard!), but was always available as a kind of easter-egg.

Perhaps this feature is the compromise?

------
triangleman
Speaking of fares going up, has anyone else noticed fares going up on Google
Flights, soon after searching for them?

------
philfrasty
Fun fact: its search for railway-connections in Germany is by far better than
the original site (Deutsche Bahn).

------
netfire
The title is a little misleading. The screenshot shows that Google is showing
that "prices will likely increase" which is different than the "fares will
increase" in the title. "fares might increase" would be more appropriate here.

~~~
cbr
Are you trying to draw a distinction between "prices" and "fares", or just
"will likely" vs "will"?

~~~
netfire
"will likely" vs "will"

------
mcfunk
As a once frequent Farecast user I was initially excited about this, but
realized that for the most part airfarewatchdog has completely replaced this
use case in my life.

------
pkaye
I wonder if the airlines will start gaming thing. Seeing what people are being
told and doing the opposite to catch them off guard.

~~~
forgotpwtomain
I've had the experience of switching from a localized google to google.com/ncr
and had ticket prices drop ~4X. I think airlines already try to game the
system based on country of origin.

~~~
dorianm
+1 for [https://google.com/ncr](https://google.com/ncr) is the first thing I
do on any browser.

\- Latest version of Google Images

\- Better Google Search results

\- etc. etc.

~~~
komali2
What does /ncr do? I'm having a hilariously difficult time googling for it
because I usually google straight from the omni bar.

~~~
daviross
"No Country Redirect", I believe. Specifies to avoid geolocation

------
flashman
I have time series data from over a thousand gas stations. How can I forecast
the price of gas?

~~~
hyperion2010
If that is all you have then you can't. (Unless you want to try seasonal
forecasting, which seems like a bad idea in this case)

~~~
flashman
This is the average price from my city, which moves in cycles:
[https://www.accc.gov.au/sites/default/files/fuelwatch/sydney...](https://www.accc.gov.au/sites/default/files/fuelwatch/sydney-e10.png)

The baseline price is also related to the wholesale price of fuel, which is
publically available.

It seems like it should be possible to forecast prices.

------
losteverything
Will it help predict when mistakes are most likely to occur? The $30 RT EWR to
HNL?

------
kp9092
How hard is it to create a website like Kayak.com?

------
ausjke
been using google flights for 1+ years now, it's great! beat all other
alternatives for me.

------
jsprogrammer
flights.google.com has been doing it for at least a week or two already.

I haven't seen it, but I hope that it also tells you 'when fares will
decrease'.

------
cft
I wish they released a native app. A web app is great in concept, but for the
actual research and actually _committing_ to buying the tickets a native app
is preferable.

~~~
zepolen
Why?

