

Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08] - adudley
http://blogs.computerworld.com/find_the_lowest_airfare_and_have_fun_doing_it

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jgrahamc
Hmm.

I don't think the natural language input is a very good idea. It's very error
prone and only works correctly if you actually know what language it supports.
I tried it and it got confused. Also it didn't correctly recognize a three
letter airport code that I used.

To be frank I've found that Kayak has the best interface for doing this and
there's no need to select which sites to search, etc. The interface here does
not seem like an improvement.

And maybe it's just me but when I hear 'peedo' I think paedophile and so this
company sounds like its name is 'try paedo' to me.

~~~
diN0bot
On the one hand I agree: I'd rather it popped up while I typed "Frankfurt,
Germany" to let me disambiguate HHN and FRA, rather than open 20 tabs that all
said "do not service that airport". I didn't realize HHN was the wrong code
until nothing was found, whereas other sites (eg Kayak) let me disambiguate
immediate.

On the other hand: not using a date picker is _awesome_. I've been using nl
date parsing on my own sites lately and it's The Best.

~~~
jsrn
ha! I just tried to find a flight from Frankfurt to Moscow and also wasn't
successful because of your software insisting on 'Frankfurt/Hahn(HHN)'. Please
fix this fast! I also tried 'From Frankfurt/Main' and 'From FRA' but wasn't
understood:-( Apart from that, I like the 'command line approach to finding
flights a lot. Suggestion: Why not open the third party travel sites (Orbitz
etc.) in a Javascript-Window (instead of a new browser window).

Then I tried to report the airport issue to you by clicking on the feedback
button on the right. After entering my feedback, upon clicking on 'Submit',
the feedback window showed me something like 'there was a problem sending your
message...' I tried again, to no avail - sadly, the feedback form didn't tell
me what went wrong or what to do next, it only offered me to add a 'sad'
emotion to my message. Which wasn't of much use, because the 'problem sending
the message' prevented me from showing you my sadness (Ironically, the third
party company that makes your feedback system has named itself
'getsatisfaction'). Well, I closed the feedback window and found another way
to post my feedback:
[http://getsatisfaction.com/wundrbar/topics/i_didnt_want_to_p...](http://getsatisfaction.com/wundrbar/topics/i_didnt_want_to_post_this_here_but_your_feedback_thing_on_the_right_continued_to_give_me_errors_there)

I only had to create an account, submit a fake email address, enter a new
password (twice) make up a new username and enter a captcha. After that, I had
to enter the password again (twice), because it has to be at least 6
characters long. And, of course, enter the captcha again. After that, I was
allowed to post my comment!

:-)

~~~
ngrandy
frankfurt/main is now the top match for 'frankfurt'. :)

the way to specify an airport if the top match is not right is just to keep
typing. eg: london => london all airports (lon); london gatw => london,
gatwick (lgw); lon hea => london, heathrow (lhr)

similarly: sa fr => san francisco; sa di => san diego

typing frankfurt/main didn't work because the slash was confusing the
interpreter. i'm fixing that right now.

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electromagnetic
I don't like the pop ups, I want comparable data not 20 different pages, all
of which I have to dig through before I get my information.

~~~
adudley
agreed-- but until airlines open up their fare data via APIs, users can only
truly get all data by actually searching individual sites. even meta-search
sites like Kayak don't have access to all fares, which is why results often
vary between the various sites. tripeedo is a step toward making that process
more simple.

~~~
Jasber
What about Open Travel (<http://www.opentravel.org/>)? Its a format being
supported by some of the major players in the travel industry:
<http://www.opentravel.org/Join/Members.aspx>

I am working in a startup that aggregates rental car rates, similar to
Tripeedo using OpenTravel. Its all XML based, and can be a PITA--but the
result are a better product and a better user experience.

~~~
potatolicious
I doubt this sort of scheme will gain real traction - much of the airline
industry's scheme involves building consumer loyalty (e.g. "I always fly with
XYZ Air, they have decent prices and I don't have to hunt around hard to use
websites"). An open API destroys this, and makes airfare even more of a
commodity than it already is. I've heard anecdotal stories about Kayak being
constantly blocked by the sites they scrape.

~~~
Jasber
Sites like Tripeedo are not geared towards loyal customers-they're geared
towards bargain shoppers.

OTA is gaining real traction. By my count about 1/3rd of the companies listed
on Tripeedo are _members_ of OTA, while many more unofficially support some
derivative of it. Most of these companies don't have open API's--they are very
private and require NDA's and partnership agreements.

There are systems in place to handle use-cases like this. API's are in place
for travel agents to search available rates and creating bookings. This is
essentially the same concept.

Kayak is justifiably being blocked because they're scraping sites. If they had
partnership agreements in place this wouldn't happen.

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utnick
I for one welcome our new meta meta meta travel search engine overlords. :)

It worked really well for me. I loved the natural language search, one of the
things that beats me down with travel search engines is having to select my
date on their little calenders and then figuring out the airport codes of the
airports I want to go into.

The 2 dozen browser tabs were pretty neat, on a low memory machine that might
get annoying, but for my pc it was smooth.

One recommendation I have on the natural language sort is to have it recognize
times of day i want to leave like morning, afternoon, etc

~~~
adudley
glad you like it, and thanks for the suggestion. time of day is a parameter
we'll definitely be adding soon. (it's actually one of the trickier ones to
implement).

------
sammyo
Also opening a couple dozen new browser windows is a good way to ensure your
site is only used once.

~~~
kirubakaran
Normally I'd agree, but in this case it is exactly what I wanted!

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jbrun
That is a great site, beats all others hands down. Pop-ups suck, but still
beats the other sites. I love entering the date in words.

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anthonyrubin
If you are going to create a new site in this space it has to be at least as
good as Kayak. Tripeedo fails horribly. As others have mentioned, a site that
simply opens numerous windows with the results from each site is not adequate.

~~~
briansmith
Tripeedo has two obvious advantages over Kayak:

(1) It can help you search discount airlines like JetBlue and Southwest.

(2) It will show you fairs that are exclusive to the airlines' websites. (I
don't think I've ever run into a situation where the airline's website had a
price significantly lower than what was on Kayak but I've heard rumblings that
it happens.)

~~~
jpwagner
I agree with both of these thoughts, but where is tripeedo when kayak partners
with all of these?

i recently went to hong kong and searched all of these engines and got
discouraging prices. I did one search on Cathay Pacific's website and saved
close to 40%. I'm almost positive you won't see this with domestic flights
(for now.)

~~~
potatolicious
They won't partner I don't think. Airlines dislike fare competition, it drives
profits down and worsens their already-bad financial situation. From the
couple guys I know who work in that industry, there is real push-back against
aggregation sites.

You also provided the evidence of this yourself - I too have had a lot of
trouble with Kayak recently, and it seems their ability to scrape accurate
fares is severely compromised, and I suspect that airlines have some hand in
this.

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anuraggoel
FF3 and IE7's pop up blockers prevent access to search results. This is
default browser behavior. How many people know or care about disabling pop up
blocking for individual sites (or changing any defaults, for that matter)?

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yef
I had a frustrating experience with the site. Took me longer to get what I
wanted than if I had gone to Kayak (the market leader) or Jetblue (that
normally runs my best fare).

What, if I may ask, was the vision and rationale behind this approach?

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prakash
once I selected all "travel sites" & all "airlines", i got a warning "you are
about to open 20 tabs" and I promptly closed the tab. I don't like the idea of
opening that many tabs or the fact that I need to select individual airlines
or sites. I rather get all the data in 1 page first and then filter by
removing airlines/ sites.

I really like the cleartrip guys when it comes to travel/ticket booking. It's
mostly India only but check out the UI & usability -- really nice.
<http://cleartrip.com>

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kin
Site works fine for me in Chrome.

A lot of travel agencies have systems that actually can check all airlines for
their flight information. I would suggest you look into that and run off of a
hybrid between server and queries instead of waiting for an API and in the
meantime tell people something is easy when in fact it really isn't. Most of
my queries return errors on the pop-ups.

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mcargian
Most meta travel sites like this get their commissions one of two ways, either
a commission for booking a flight, or a click through commission to the travel
site. It is in tripeedo's best interest to open as many popups as possible.

They are adding little to no value on the flight pricing. Thumbs down.

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jsdalton
What I was really _hoping_ to find here was a travel search site that let me
find cheap fares without necessarily having firm dates in mind. To me,
Tripeedo just puts the functionality of kayak in a slightly different UI, as
opposed to offering a new way to interact with the data itself.

~~~
ngrandy
increasingly, travel sites are letting people do those kind of flexible dates
search, which is a promising trend. you're right, for the time being tripeedo
is primarily a different UI (though one we feel is more user-friendly), along
with the benefit of only entering trip details once.

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khangtoh
Disappointing .. Doesn't really work with all the airline sites that it has on
main page.

~~~
ngrandy
yeah, we need to fix or warn about that better. the reason that the airline
searches don't work reliably is that most airlines only serve a few airports,
and if you search for airports they don't serve, the result is not always
handled gracefully. some airlines prompt for a known airport - some just give
up and display an error. to counter this, we would need to maintain a list of
all airports served by each airline, and only let users launch valid searches
to the airline sites. i think that is good from a usability perspective, and
it's definitely doable, but maintaining it is time-consuming. that's why we
haven't done it yet. but, we may well get to it soon.

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utefan001
Seriously, I love the pop ups. I believe you have to respect the boundaries of
different companies (jetblue, southwest, etc). The amount of time that this
saves on my flight purchasing is huge. Well done!

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markessien
Yikes, that was an awful experience. I didn't know it would open tabs, so I
selected all items. And of all the tabs it opened, almost none gave me any
useful information.

~~~
ngrandy
sorry about that - we try to make it clear that new windows open, by saying so
in the instructions on the left, and also displaying a message when more than
5 airfare providers are selected. how could we make it more clear in a user-
friendly way?

~~~
markessien
Most critical to me was that most of the airlines displayed there were not
relevant to me. I usually use about 5 airlines (and I think most people do so
also), and I KNOW the airlines that I use. They are Air France, KLM,
Lufthansa, Turkish Airlines and EasyJet. Your site would be VERY useful if it
would send queries to those particular airlines and open tabs after running a
correct search on all those airlines.

But your site is useless with the America-Centric airlines you have there.

My suggestion would be to also add a natual language processor where I can
type in the airlines I fly with, and this this info is immediately saved in a
cookie for the next time I use the site. Also, when I start the search, an
account should immediately be created for me.

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aneesh
First we had aggregators like Kayak, Expedia and Farecast. That's clearly too
much work, so now with Tripeedo we have aggregators for the aggregators!

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pogos
I'd never thought someone would compete with Orbitz.

~~~
smanek
Orbitz, et. al don't actually do their own search. They outsource all the real
work to ITA Software in Cambridge, MA - who actually run all the searches on a
large cluster of servers running Common Lisp.

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jncraton
This site doesn't load in Chrome for me (aw snap error). Is anyone else
getting that?

I'm running Chrome 2 on Windows 7.

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diN0bot
i need tehcnical support: on firefox 3 it first blocked pop-ups, so i enabled
and got a spew of opened tabs with no search results found (see my other
comment). when i tried to search again ff keeps blocking the pop-ups, even
though i keep enabling them. !!! nuts, i really want to buy cheap plane
tickets :P i'll keep trying.

~~~
ngrandy
this sounds like a firefox issue. if you choose to enable popups for
tripeedo.com, then firefox should remember that choice. let me know if you
find otherwise...

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gamble
Wow, that was annoying. Opening two dozen browser windows without warning,
half of which contain errors? Not cool.

~~~
ngrandy
we try to warn (in 2 ways on the homepage) that popups will be opened. how
could we make it more clear in a user-friendly way?

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jbrun
Is the parsing algorithm for the location and date proprietary or is it based
on something existing? If so, what?

~~~
ngrandy
it's custom built. the site is rails hosted on heroku. ruby already had some
decent time/date parsing, and there is a great natural language time/date
library called chronic that helps out too. but otherwise it's custom-built.

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kirubakaran
Awesome UI. I'm blown away.

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kevTheDev
i don't seem to get the popups :(

