

Where can I fly for how much? - sublemonic
http://www.kayak.com/explore/?airport=YYC#/YYC?a=any&d=any&fb=200,2730&l=any&ll=0.175781,-0.175781&ns=n&s=0&t=0,100&z=3

======
martythemaniak
OMG, I've been waiting for someone to build something like this forever.

I've always hated the fact that all major travel sites work based on the
assumption that you already know exactly when and where you're going, rather
than at least giving you the option to explore your options.

~~~
bkrausz
The problem you have is that flight data is incredibly fast-changing and
computationally expensive to get. So in order to get enough data for this you
need to do a lot of long queries very often. Companies that provide pricing
information (like ITA, who Kayak uses) charge a lot for these resources, so
it's not like the usual internet where your incremental cost per user or
search is minimal: there's a real cost here. The entire architecture was build
on one-off "price from X to Y on this day", building a layer of generality to
that is fairly difficult.

Full disclosure: I used to work at TripAdvisor on flights.

~~~
kiwidrew
Yep, that's exactly right. Every metasearch site out there uses essentially
the same interface: given an origin, destination, departure date, and arrival
date, return a list of itineraries in order of increasing price.

Needless to say, the number of combinations of these variables precludes doing
any kind of exhaustive search (especially since you're being charged per
query). And availability is constantly changing, so your results are
potentially out-of-date the instant you receive them.

Given these restrictions, the only way to support such broad-ranging queries
as "where can I go for less than $1000?" is to cache results from previous
searches and attempt to guess at the answer. Which is why, when you start
narrowing down date ranges and choosing more obscure airports, the results
quickly become so sparse as to be useless.

~~~
jka
Broadly agree with this and the parent - but there's an interesting
alternative way to look at travel metasearch.

If you think of obtaining prices as being akin to 'indexing', then what
metasearch engines are doing is building up a search index for flights. And
not all price sources necessarily charge for data (do Google pay to index
Hacker News?)

Flight prices become stale as do indexed web pages - and as long as the _user_
doesn't pay a transaction price for any search activity, then you can re-check
pages based on user activity - in the case of travel, re-check the price once
the user nears the booking phase of the funnel.

As noted though, sparseness of travel queries is certainly tricky! The 80/20
rule applies to some extent, and popular routes will be the ones which have
the best price cache.

Another disclosure: I work for Skyscanner (our core is a flexible travel
search engine)

------
hugh3
Now that's just plain neat. And useful, since I'm currently considering where
to go on summer holidays.

I do notice that it doesn't add extra destinations as you zoom in, though. For
instance I can zoom in on Colorado as much as I like and it won't tell me that
I can fly to Denver (even though there's probably twenty flights a day). Nor
will it give me a price for Paris, but Nadi, Chennai and Oaxaca are much
higher priorities.

~~~
krschultz
That depends on your starting location, from Newark it shows Denver just fine.

~~~
lftl
Yeah... it also changes the destinations based on which timeframe you choose
up top. I'm willing to bet that Kayak is for the most part simply caching the
results that other people have recently searched for on the site and showing
those when available.

------
bryanh
Wow, talk about impressive. Just curious about the tech behind this. Do they
just cache a bunch of average prices together between major airports and just
set a max limit? Surely it can't do fully comprehensive search at the speed it
runs at.

~~~
tomhoward
Their database only contains cached results from previous searches. Kayak
doesn't store the entire population of flights themselves - they forward
users' queries onto a 3rd party flight inventory provider (ITA Software), then
cache the results to power services like these.

This means that results are likely to be current and complete on popular
routes, but far less so on the long tail.

~~~
jojopotato
If I had to guess, they probably cache as aggressively as their contract with
ITA allows because Kayak gets charged per search by ITA.

*edit: From the two ITA contract that I know/have heard about anyways.

~~~
ojbyrne
And from what I know, ITA doesn't allow you to cache at all.

------
jlangenauer
Adioso (YC W'09) does this too - See, for example:

<http://adioso.com/au/syd-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html>
<http://adioso.com/us/jfk-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html>

~~~
henrikschroder
That is absolutely fucking awesome!

<http://adioso.com/se/stockholm-to-beach.html>

One thing I would love to see is adding larger/fuzzier destination areas such
as "the tropics", "the carribean", "the mediterranean", "Africa", "South
America", or "Mexico".

~~~
tomhoward
It's coming :)

------
iamcalledrob
We built a similar proof of concept just this weekend, at London Startup
Weekend. <http://london.startupweekend.org/>

It doesn't contain any real information, and is targeted at people who want to
take holidays, instead of just flights, but is the same concept.

It'll also do some analysis of your facebook profile to automatically sort
results so you instantly get relevant places to go.

It's still purely a proof of concept, and a bit crashy on Heroku because of a
bug in the facebooker ruby gem (don't facebook connect right now!), but that
should be fixed when we have more time to work on it.

<http://www.zolidays.com/> "Have Budget, Want Holiday"

~~~
rlm
On a wide screen (1680x1050) the text "Zolidays - Have budget, want holiday."
is still visible on the screen.

------
Rabidgremlin
Built this 3 years ago for Air New Zealand :)
<http://promos.airnz.co.nz/howfar/>

~~~
borism
very cool!

ANZ rocks!

P.S. I'd buy one-way Rarotonga ticket in no time... the problem is, I'm at the
other side of the Globe from AKL :)

~~~
bond
I was just talking to my brother in Auckland about the price to Rarotonga!
Paradise only at $270, crazy price!

------
travisp
This is great and I've been looking for something like this for a long time.

The only thing it needs now is to allow you to better refine the time period
(e.g. only weekend trips, or only two weeks in October, etc). As it is now,
it's great for people with a month or more off of vacation, but doesn't quite
do it for the rest of us yet.

~~~
hugh3
Well, it gives a rough order of magnitude, and might encourage people to
consider destinations that they would have thought were too expensive. As in
"Gee, I was going to go to Salt Lake City, but it turns out I can get to Lima
for the same price..."

------
ig1
It's a neat tool (if you're in the UK check out the similar "I'll fly
anywhere" option at <http://flightchecker.moneysavingexpert.com/>) but the
problem with it is that for most people the cost of the flight is going to be
less than the cost of the hotel.

So if you're after a cheap holiday it's much more important to fly somewhere
where you can get a cheap hotel than to get a cheap flight. Hopefully they'll
add hotels to the calculation in the future.

~~~
hugh3
If you're travelling in a pair, and you're staying for a reasonable length of
time (say, a week) then the hotel cost shouldn't dominate. 7 nights * $100 a
night / 2 people is only $350 -- less than the airfare to most places.

Besides, saving money on a hotel is mostly a matter of deciding how awful a
place you're willing to put up with. You don't get that option with airfares.

~~~
ig1
Hmm maybe it's just a European thing, you can typically fly most places in
Europe/North Africa for for a couple of hundred dollars. Getting to the US
isn't much more. Hotels on the other hand tend to be more expensive + hotel
tax can be pricey.

And you do actually get the awful trade-off with planes in Europe as well, you
get budget airlines like Ryan Air which many people don't travel on because
they're so bad.

~~~
hugh3
Ah yes, in the European context, where flights are cheaper and hotels more
expensive (and extremely variable between richer and poorer parts of Europe),
you could very well be right.

------
AndrewWarner
Finally! I've been waiting for something like this.

I never care where I go. The more random the better.

I wish they could just plan the full trip for me. Flight + hotel + (maybe)
car.

~~~
bryanh
That might be a pretty cool app idea: random trip planning. As in: "I don't
really care, I have $1200 to blow on a 5 day trip June 4th-9th. When do I show
up for my flight?"

~~~
pbhjpbhj
This is the sort of thing I'd expect a good old-school human travel agent to
do pretty well.

I bet too they'd do it better (within a given locus) than the computer,
knowing things like that there was a carnival at such-a-place and that the
vistas at t-time of year are magnificent, etc..

~~~
expertcs
try <http://www.mygola.com> Sounds perfect for this kind of a thing.

------
mcav
Cool. Couple thoughts:

\- Are prices one-way or round trip? It's not obvious to me.

\- I tried to type a zip code at first, before realizing that it would only
work with the City name.

~~~
hugh3
Based on what the prices look like I'm fairly sure it'd have to be return (or
else it's doing a lousy job of finding the best available fares).

~~~
thrdOriginal
Yup, they don't do a very good job of making it obvious, but clicking on
"check latest air fare" confirms these are round-trip prices (other than that,
this is really cool).

------
tinblink
Hi,

Something similar, from big guys in the online travel business: Amadeus
Affinity - <http://www.amadeus.com/amadeus/x163551.html> \- accurate prices \-
choice per price range, comparison of prices on date range \- destination per
type of activity (beach, golf, whatever) \- etc.

The URL for a major air travel company using it is - wait for it - ...

[http://www.lufthansa.com/online/portal/lh/de/booking/affinit...](http://www.lufthansa.com/online/portal/lh/de/booking/affinity?l=en&blt_p=DE&blt_l=en&blt_t=Homepage&blt_e=Passinglane&blt_n=Quicklinks&blt_z=Lufthansa%20Trip%20Finde&blt_c=DE|en|Homepage|Passinglane|Quicklinks|Lufthansa%20Trip%20Finde)

(Lufthansa _Germany_ home page > Trip Finder)

------
mtr
Very cool, especially as I'm busy planning a trip (BCN-ROM-STR-BCN). There are
~4 possible airports for STR but most search engines don't let you choose them
(aside from 'nearby' airports, which can be a bit moot with Europe's typically
awesome rail infrastructure). And Kayak doesn't track many Low Cost Carriers.
I normally a huge Kayak fan, but I've had to use www.skyscanner.net and
www.wegolo.com a lot for this particular trip.

Finally it's a bit odd that there are "0" flights shown from BCN to Canada
with zero filters. As a beta product it's still mega-cool. :)

------
resdirector
Small issue: seems like the seasons are not hemisphere dependent. E.g., if you
travel from Melbourne, Australia, then it shows Spring 2010 rather than Autumn
2010, etc.

------
albertsun
This is just like Travelocity Dream Maps, which went away a while ago and I've
been missing it ever since, but even better!

------
nooneelse
For more visual intuitiveness, perhaps some isolines or a 3d, height based on
price kind of thing? Probably just flashiness for no end though. But, using
different colors for the labels along the price axis probably wouldn't be.

Seems to be &-ing the checkboxes, which is a bit odd for the languages.

~~~
orblivion
Isolines I'm not sure, the market does weird things with pricing, something
further away may end up being cheaper.

~~~
nooneelse
Yeah, it would look very much like messy islands/mountains, probably lots of
extra lines for little helpful effect. That is why the height map occurred to
me. But, like I said, that might be getting too close to flashy, spinning-
whizzbang infographic land.

------
sambe
Is there a contact link? This is neat but some obvious non-US improvements:

Colour-coding the prices would make it a lot more intuitive to read/scan for
deals.

Detects me as being in New York (I'm in Switzerland) if I go to the base URL.

Only offers Fahrenheit... and dollars I think.

~~~
PidGin128
<http://www.kayak.com/feedback/form>

I'm sure you've found that on your own already, but it answers the question.

I am curious why the submitted link wasn't truncated to /explore/, as it
currently links a calgary based search.

------
arnorhs
It even works for Iceland. That's neat. That's not the default with these
kinds of services.

However, it doesn't work for India.. which kind of sucks, but I hope that will
be improved over time.

It would be nice to know which reservation service this is using...

------
marquis
i find skyscanner to be far superior. kayak's is a great overview but i didn't
find it actually took me straight to when those cheap flights were - you still
had to guess the cheap dates. when you know where you want to go and just want
to find the cheapest time to fly: it shows you the flight costs over a month,
and you don't have to hope that the fare is still available.

example of nyc to chicago over month of june:
[http://www.skyscanner.com/flights/nyca/chia/june-2010/june-2...](http://www.skyscanner.com/flights/nyca/chia/june-2010/june-2010/cheapest-
flights-per-day-from-new-york-to-chicago-in-june-2010.html)

see smaher's comment for an even better idea!

------
xsmasher
The UI is nice - but the slider doesn't need two ends, just the max end. It's
also hard to dial in numbers <$1000 because of the range of the slider. Some
+/- buttons would fix that up, or an old-fashioned text field.

------
thefool
I just wish it had the option to find all available flights under a certain
price. I'm a college student and wouldn't mind just randomly going to a random
local for a little while if it was cheap enough.

------
AaronM
I like it, but one thing I noticed if if you select a starting date, it doesnt
automatically set the return date to the next day. So if you select a date
some time in the future you have to scroll twice

------
david_p
I have unknowingly been waiting for this for my whole life ... thank you so
much ! It would be event better if there where some details added, like the
possibility to choose one-way/two-ways flights.

------
whatwhatwhat
Its not showing any flights to Buenos Aires???

I am going there in a few months and I have a ticket for $800 out of LAX but
the system doesn't want to show anything..

------
sev
Awesome! I looked under "Even More" and didn't see a hotels option. It would
be great to have that option as well, on a smaller scale of course.

------
run4yourlives
Neat concept, but where is the data coming from? There is no way that the
cheapest flight from Vancouver to Toronto is $460.

Maybe half that.

~~~
hugh3
One way or return?

~~~
run4yourlives
doh... didn't dawn on me that this could be return... too many airline
websites!

------
jallmann
Nice. You can fly from orange county (CA) to long beach for $270. Or you could
drive up there for 10 bucks of gas in 25 minutes.

~~~
hugh3
I checked and couldn't find any direct flights. The cheapest way I could find
from SNA to LGB had a one-hour stopover in Phoenix.

Probably not a popular route.

------
kingnothing
I don't know if the devs read this, but the money sliders don't work on the
iPad and, presumably, other touch based devices.

------
hardik
Is the site not working for non-US visitors? (tried about thrice since
morning)

------
aohtsab
whoa - it'll be cheaper for me to fly to Moscow (from DC) and travel to
Eastern Europe by rail than actually flying directly in -- by about $420. This
is dead useful; thanks for the link!

~~~
jarek
Depending on how, if at all, you are getting around the region otherwise,
eastern European railroad might not be something you want to add to your
itinerary.

~~~
dagw
The inter-country express trains tend to be pretty good. The slower local
trains on the other hand can be a bit hit or miss. I mean they'll basically
always get you to where you want to be, but perhaps not always exactly on
time. But really when all is said and done trains in Europe generally work
just fine.

------
stuaxo
Can you allow currency and default to local currency?

(from UK)

------
joris
Copycats! We already had this feature on <http://qfly.com/> (on
<http://qfly.nl> to be precise) 10 months ago.

~~~
phreanix
No offense but their UI seems a bit more intuitive and simple to use than
yours.

------
csmeder
This is cool. Does Air BnB have something like this?

------
moolave
This is almost like housingmaps.com but X100.

------
phreanix
Have airfare will travel. I love it.

------
trin_
do they list the airlines somewhere? they dont seem to be listing ryanair for
example.

~~~
gaius
That's a good thing :-)

More seriously, I would expect RyanAir charges a hefty fee to third parties
who want access to their API, just like they change much higher fees to
passengers who use a credit card than other airlines.

EDIT: Atually RyanAir is there (London -> Knock)

~~~
trin_
well the ryanair flights seem to be there partially.

for example: LBC is only listed with two possible destinations but there are
at least 6.

------
drivebyacct
Hhmmm, is there an option for round trips?

~~~
resdirector
Good question. I think the prices are all return.

