
Making the travel site people want, even if it’s impossible - tomhoward
http://adioso.com/blog/2013/03/adioso-making-the-travel-site-people-want-even-if-its-impossible/
======
dmbaggett
Adioso: have you talked to ITA Software (now part of Google) about licensing
QPX? We solved the data issue, very painfully, over a 10-year period, by
working directly with the airlines. (This was, in fact, one of my major
contributions to the company as COO, and many people were involved.) Using
QPX, you could implement exactly what you envision with stuff ITA already has
running.

I'm a cofounder of ITA but am no longer affiliated with the company. But if
you want to talk to people there, I can connect you. Just reply here with some
way for me to contact you.

~~~
tomhoward
Many thanks David. We spoke to Jeremy very early on in proceedings (early
'09), and it QPX didn't seem to be a fit (or at least, a cost-effective one)
at that point.

But I'd like to think things have changed since then.

I'll ping you on LinkedIn.

~~~
pallian
Hey Tom - have you checked out Vayant? I've been playing with their API for my
upcoming travel startup and it's been really good. Results in less than a
second for most of Europe and Asia.

~~~
almacmillan
Totally. Vayant are on the open ended fast query wavelength. Tom links to them
in the last paragraph

------
NoPiece
[http://adioso.com/us/oakland-california-to-maui-hawaii-in-
au...](http://adioso.com/us/oakland-california-to-maui-hawaii-in-august-
direct-for-6-days)

Gives me fares of $772, $841, and $940 (expedia is not responding)

Checking Google Flights, I see if I leave later in August, I can fly for as
low as $443.

[https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=OAK;t=OGG;d=2013-08...](https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=OAK;t=OGG;d=2013-08-22;r=2013-08-28;s=0)

The search style you have is nice, but it is most important to me to get an
accurate low fare! And speed really matters too...

------
eduardordm
My mother owned a travel agency, my father a pilot. I was an airline pilot
too. We learned how to use various reservations systems that the author seems
to just ignore existence.

Amadeus and Sabre pretty much offer all those functionalities and much more
than that. I can do that exact search Dustin wanted on Amadeus with 2 lines on
a terminal.

All those websites building frontends to Amadeus and Sabre really should stop
stating they are doing something different from what already exists. Just
because expedia is an awful website it doesn't mean there is something magical
or impossible behind what you did.

I hope you guys are not just an Amadeus/Sabre/ITA wrapper, because if you are,
you are not profitable.

~~~
almacmillan
Ah a GDS romantic. GDS systems suck at search. Tell me? Why can't you even do
these type of searches on the Amadeus flight search page?
<http://www.amadeus.net> Maybe you would be kind enough to do a search from
somewhere to 'anywhere' or 'Europe' from 'any date' to 'any date' on sabre and
post the video. Bet you can't. Great flight search only happened when ITA
liberated search from the GDS dinosaurs.

~~~
eduardordm
ITA is even more expensive than those 'dinosaurs' and offer pretty much the
same functionality.

You missed my point (on purpose, but anyway...), which is profitability. As I
commented before most airlines are not even offering incentives to those
travel websites anymore. In fact, some companies are CHARGING websites to make
automated reservations into their systems.

~~~
tomhoward
Yep, so every decision we've made about how we go about building this product
has factored in profitability, and aligning consumer incentives with supplier
incentives.

------
underwater
If the slowness seen as being a problem for your visitors then why not flip it
around? Change their expectations about what flight search is.

The search is obviously going to take a while because your site is so powerful
and you're doing things that _no one else can_. Adioso isn't a dumb search
engine that makes you do all the work - it's an automated travel agent that
will churn through hundreds of flights and email you with a selection of the
very best in a short amount of time. It even understands language like a real
travel agent.

~~~
amirmc
To add to this, I'd suggest adding an 'email me' option if things are slow on
the site. Waiting on a website longer than 20-30s is painful but receiving a
well formatted email within 10mins (with the same info) can still feel like
magic.

It's a stop-gap but could work well in this case.

~~~
digitalengineer
I'm working on something with the same concept but for a different market.
There's no way for me to tap into 3rd party databases (for now). I'm setting
it up so the results will be added to your own personal search-page where
(only) you can view them after x-time. From there you can choose to view more
details and/or close the deal. Not as fast as live-search, but I'm
communicating it from the get-go.

------
almacmillan
Thanks for this series Tom, you guys are trying to succeed in a really
challenging technical sector (Travel) and I, for one, really appreciate your
honesty. I think that some of the confusion & criticisms I see in other
comments are that after reading your pieces we all rush off to try adioso and
some observations predominate:

# The ui is quirky on different screen sizes # The calls to Expedia are SLOW #
The natural language search is perhaps only one search interface and not
necessarily the best # The core bit you guys have worked on 'wingtip' is sort
of lost in this version of Adioso because of trying to increase coverage # You
could have utilised existing api's like ITA's QPX, Everbread's Haystack,
Amadeus, even Skyscanner's api and increased coverage whilst being much
faster. # The example link at the end that presumably is the answer to the
question "For the first time, we’re seeing signs that the flight data we need
is becoming available, in the right format" is totally misleading. Vayant are
an ITA competitor not a raw data provider. They have managed to achieve in
their price cacheing tech what you have only achieved for lots of low cost
carriers. # And this last point is my biggest confusion about Adioso and what
I think is your internal confusion. Are you a tech platform for flight data or
a consumer facing flight website. Because Kayak, Hipmunk (and previously
Orbitz erc) are B2C consumer sites that get data from ITA, Amadeus etc.
Vayant, ITA etc are B2B data platforms - tech companies. Only skyscanner truly
is both I think. They are a B2C site that last year enabled the selling of
over £2 Billion worth of tickets but which is powered by its own 'Graphite'
Graph and price cacheing databases.

The embarrassment I feel for you is when you say that you are making a travel
site 'even when it's impossible'. I cringe for you! You haven't built a site
even as good as Skyscanner's and you're saying pretentious statements like
that? I know startups are hard and this is for a book so poetic license is to
be expected.

I say ditch the BS and get back to reality. You could attach your natural
language interface to someone else's api (like Vayant's) and have a better B2C
product or keep improving 'wingtip' but this all seems like a confused
desperate fudge.

Incidentally, when are you going to talk in detail about 'Wingtip' it's the
bit that most interests me. It IS Adioso. I really do wish you guys every
success though. What you are doing is needed but ditch the slow ass Expedia
api.

~~~
tomhoward
Thanks for the comments - kind and otherwise.

I'm happy to let it all stand unchallenged - there's a lot you're not aware of
or not seeing, but we know what we're doing and we're gonna keep doing it.

And yes we will be writing about Wingtip sometime soon.

------
sokoloff
I tried the business trip I'm taking next week, and that I just researched on
hipmunk earlier today.

"Boston to Tunis to Barcelona"

Big bag of fail. Adioso's trying to send me from "Boston, Texas" to
"Barcelona, Venezuela", and finds no matching flights.

Even the simpler search "Boston to Barcelona" is sending me to Venezuela, not
Catalonia. It's finding no matching flights.

I tried "Barcelona, Spain", editing the URL to be barcelona-es, barcelona-sp.
Nothing worked. Maybe it's a corner case or maybe it's deeper than that, but I
figured I'd send along the feedback. I do wish you the best, as airline
"exploring" is a right pain in the ass.

~~~
tomhoward
Thanks for this.

Placename disambiguation is something we've wrestled with a lot lately. The
way we do it now is: (a) find the most likely origin you meant based on
proximity & size; (b) if we have historical data, choose the most likely
destination given previous popularity, and (c) whatever the case, give prompts
on each one to let you tell us you meant a different one.

Also, we don't currently support multi-city trips, so that would've confused
the search parser.

But just running these searches now, they seem to give results:

<http://adioso.com/us/boston-massachusetts-to-tunis-tn>

<http://adioso.com/tn/tunis-tn-to-barcelona-es>

But yeah I know what you mean; the results can be baffling when they're not
what you expect.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

------
sharkweek
This is fantastic -- I love everything about the concept; hopefully the speed
issue can be addressed. But overall, fantastically designed product; kind of
reminds me of a Wolfram Alpha for travel with interpretive responses to search

------
jawngee
I love the shit out of this site. I use it all the time. Happy to see it's
from HNers.

I have nothing constructive to add, other than I prefer this to HipMunk.

------
mgkimsal
this is really highlighting the fact that there isn't one way to build one
interface for all needs. Some people _have_ to travel on certain days - they
can't rearrange those days for love nor money, and existing interfaces (while
not great) work within those parameters.

Other people want to say "2 weeks in Moscow in April or May" and have
something find either the cheapest, or quickest, or longest flights around.
Adioso is going for that (obviously), but I'm wondering what else they can do
to perhaps market more towards the 'free and easy traveller' crowd vs the
'locked down scheduled days' crowd.

------
troymc
Maybe be upfront about the slowness. An example is the commercials for
Buckley's Mixture (for getting rid of coughs).

"It tastes awful. And it works." (pictures of people grimacing at the taste)

<http://www.buckleys.ca/about/history.htm>

You can have a link to answer, "Why is it slow?"

~~~
jfoster
Or give them something to watch while the magic happens. A mesmerising
animation, for example. The most important thing is to convey that nothing is
broken, and progress is being made.

~~~
sirclueless
Maybe do like the old Sims games:

"Upholstering Airline Seatbacks..." "Recalculating Airspeed Velocity..."

Maybe too cheesy, but it would make me laugh.

~~~
thematt
"Reticulating splines"

------
intellegacy
The Travel Site I want is a mixture of wikitravel and tripadvisor, only
updated more often and not so narrow. By narrow I mean that users on a site
only go to restaurants that are mentioned on the site, potentially missing
some hidden gems.

The biggest problem whilst traveling for me is not flight info. That's not a
problem I have, really. I buy a flight once and forget about it. But I spend a
lot of time worrying about not getting ripped off, or walking around finding a
safe place to sleep, choosing decent restaurants, selecting authentic places
to see and things to do. Wikitravel did an OK job but again it was 'narrow'
and also infrequently updated.

In summation, the perfect travel site for me would be basically a map telling
me local places to sleep/eat/activity and the price and quality and rating.

~~~
saravk
Hmm.. couldn't resist inserting a plug here. But the site you mentioned is
very close to what i'am building now <http://www.kettik.com>.

Like you i spend a lot of time before a trip researching on the kind of
experiences i could have once i get there. And being an independent traveler
i'am more interested in the kind of activities i could do by myself rather
than having someone arrange it for me. So i designed the site along similar
lines.

User experiences(blogs)/photos/attractions/activity/sleep/eat/

I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Especially on the way how the content is
presented, there's a lot of scope for improvement there.

~~~
intellegacy
I'll check it out, thanks.

At first glance I'm wondering why I can't filter by locale. It reads more like
a travelogue website than one that can help me immediately.

------
ratsbane
Very nice. This search works with the way I think. I remember being amazed
when Kayak came out and again with Hipmunk. This might be next in that
sequence.

~~~
zaidmo
I did a search: JHB to Buenos Aires in November for 60 days.
[http://adioso.com/za/johannesburg-za-to-buenos-aires-cr-
in-n...](http://adioso.com/za/johannesburg-za-to-buenos-aires-cr-in-november-
for-60-days)

On flysaa.com (Star Alliance member) I can get a cheaper direct flight. Not
sure what logic was coded to determine which result receives preference (i.e.
ranking) in the results.

I also usually use <http://flisea.com/> to search for reward flights on Star
Alliance airlines. Not sure what API to linking to - perhaps you could check
it out.

Or perhaps, change the purpose of the site: Find the best available reward
flights on One World, Star ALliance and SkyTeam over a specific period of
time. It's focused and a big need for frequent travellers

~~~
ratsbane
Tried it just now. <http://flisea.com> was confused when I entered "San
Francisco" as the destination; I had to enter "SFO" when what I really wanted
was "SFO | SJC | OAK" and it never returned any flights. Adioso has room to
improve their price search but the user interface is just what I want to use -
no error messages, just does the best it can with what you give it.

------
thorin_2
Results are buggy. "San Antonio to Caribbean for two weeks in July" displayed
plenty of results, including Georgetown, except it was Georgetown TEXAS. My
next search was for "San Antonio to anywhere in July for under $200". I get
many results; however the price range is way over $200 on most of them. If I
hit the back button I lose my search (can't see what I last typed to fix it).
Also I keep almost clicking the giant PLAY button in the center of the page to
start my search, probably because my search string ends right about where the
big play button is. My eyes have to scan far right to see the actual search
icon, which is somewhat obfuscated because it has no contrast with the search
bar. I guess I can just hit Enter to search ;)

------
justin_vanw
Kind of a misleading blog post. It seemed like exactly the site I have been
trying to find (a way to give less specific queries when finding tickets).
However, it makes you be as strict as any other flight search engine it seems.

This query is 'too broad': <http://adioso.com/fr/france-to-california-june-13>

All I want is to find the cheapest ticket from anywhere in Europe to
California in the middle of June, and nobody can give that information to me.

EDIT: I'm sure this was modded down by one of the employees of this site. I
included a link that proves what I said, instead of modding my comment down,
how about explaining why the linked search is 'too broad'?

~~~
tomhoward
Adioso co-founder here. I didn't downvote you. I can't speak for the others,
but I highly doubt it; they're all too busy working to improve the site and
besides we're just not like that.

The post doesn't say Adioso can can currently let you search for _anywhere in
Europe to anywhere in California_.

We're working towards that kind of capability, but as you say, no other site
in the world can do it, and we can't either, yet, but I think we're working
harder than anyone else to offer it.

~~~
justin_vanw
If I wrongly accused you, my apologies.

That is what the blog post led me to believe I could do, and I was genuinely
surprised that I couldn't do it.

I really don't see any queries I can do on your site that I can't do on Kayak
already, except that Kayak seems to have many more sources of data and
therefore fares at least as low and sometimes lower?

~~~
tomhoward
Have a look at the scrolling search suggestions on the front of
<http://adioso.com>, then try executing the same searches on Kayak, _in a
single search_. All of them.

~~~
justin_vanw
All of them? Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying, but if you mean that
the random travel searches you scroll on the site are a feature, that is
bordering on insane.

I don't need to go to some random place for some random duration at some
random time.

So, since it would be insane to consider _random_ trips to be a useful
feature, I assumed that it was recommending certain trips because they were
really good deals. Maybe your system figured out I live near San Jose, and
recommended me a flight because it was just such a great deal it was worth my
time to try that search and maybe go on a vacation on a whim. That would
actually be an awesome feature, and I would probably use it a lot! So, benefit
of the doubt.

So I tested that theory, and here is what I got:

[http://adioso.com/us/san-jose-california-to-hawaii-hawaii-
ne...](http://adioso.com/us/san-jose-california-to-hawaii-hawaii-next-week-
for-7-days)

Best flight that Adioso found was $535 for that trip. BTW, Expedia _never_
returns on your site.

Then I went to Kayak. It took me about 30 seconds to fill it out, and it took
me here: [http://www.kayak.com/#/flights/SJC,nearby-
HNL,OGG,LIH,KOA/20...](http://www.kayak.com/#/flights/SJC,nearby-
HNL,OGG,LIH,KOA/2013-03-13-flexible/2013-03-20-flexible)

So, the best fare that Kayak found was a $277 hacker fare. That's almost
exactly half as much as what Adioso found. Sure, that's a hacker fare, and for
a 10 day trip not 7 days. Fine, the best fare that is exactly comparable is
$350 for a 7 day trip leaving next week round-trip on Delta.

~~~
tomhoward
_Sigh_ :)

I mean they're examples of searches you can do on Adioso, many/most of which
take a lot of time and many repetitive searches on other sites.

The Hawaii search you tried came up with the same fares as Kayak when I tried
it. It may well have timed out for you, which is part of the performance
challenges this post is mostly about.

But it occurs to me your approach to travel doesn't make you the intended
customer for this product, so I won't try to persuade you further :)

~~~
djcapelis
Who exactly _is_ your intended customer currently? I'm honestly curious. Your
site currently doesn't support things like "I'd like to leave from anywhere in
CA and go to Europe sometime in August and have a really great experience and
a really good deal" and you're also claiming it doesn't work for the style of
the person you're responding to... so... who exactly is it that you think is
the target user of Adioso?

I'm not just giving you a hard time, either. I'm planning a trip soon and
we've got a lot of flexibility in a lot of ways combined with some whacky
constraints in others. Is Adioso right for me?

I honestly can't tell. It seems like I should be able to.

~~~
nedwin
Random location (in a rough geographic area) to random location (in much
larger geographic area) would be pretty crazy search.

I think for most travellers it's fair to say that they know what their
starting point is. Or am I making an ass of myself?

~~~
djcapelis
Usually! But I know people whose idea of a geographic starting point would be
a lot larger than you'd think and would just treat it as an excuse for a
roadtrip.

Also you could have a schedule where some days I know I'm going to be near
city X and others near city Y, but I wouldn't mind beginning from either.

------
hnriot
Maybe it's better on the desktop, but the site is unusable on the iPad retina.
Even typing into the search box is laggy. The resulting search results don't
fit the page, have things on top of one another. Basically unusable and for me
any travel site has to work on my iPhone and iPad. My desktop is for
development, mobile for everything else.

It seems as though google flights is a lot better at finding cheaper flights.
I don't want a search box that attempts to guess my query.

For me google flights, kayak and skyscanner meet all my travel needs.

------
danso
This is the kind of website that wows those of us on HN, because it is a very
well executed site.

But it does not solve a need, from what I can tell, that Kayak or other meta-
searches solve. And at first glance, it seems slower than Kayak and has fewer
options.

Visually, I think some people would debate whether your layout is more useful
than the clutter of Kayak/Priceline/etc. It certainly meets the guidelines of
attractive typography and whitespace but it took me some time to interpret
what's going on.

In one real sense, I think the width of your site is a real problem. There's a
reason why content sites, like blogs, usually fix their content width to
600-700 pixels: because it's hard to go from left to right and back to left
across a wide width. Your current layout forces this upon the user in a way
that's not very easy to read. Most people might say that Kayak is ugly and
cluttered but it is much much easier to figure at a glance. Sometimes,
ugly/cluttered is better...kind of like the debate between HackerNews and
DesignerNews.

I'm sounding too harsh here...but only to be helpful. This was a site I showed
all my coworkers because I thought it was pretty cool. But "cool" or different
isn't enough in the travel space, unfortunately.

~~~
tobyjsullivan
> But it does not solve a need, from what I can tell, that Kayak or other
> meta-searches solve.

I'll give you my last flight search (and ticket purchase) as a direct counter-
example.

I want to go to Europe for two to three months. I'll fly wherever is cheapest
and I'm willing to go for any period between March and July.

This is theoretically one search on Adioso. It is impossible on Kayak or any
other website I've seen to date. And when I say impossible, I don't mean
impossible in a single search, I mean I would have to do several thousand
searches to cover the full matrix of options which would actually be
impossible.

Not to mention, the carriers listed by Kayak actually was quite limited (not
sure about others).

~~~
NoPiece
Try this:

[https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=YVR;t=POX,ORY,XCR,B...](https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=YVR;t=POX,ORY,XCR,BVA,CDG;d=2013-03-20;r=2013-03-24;mc=m)

Then flip between to the Map and lowest fare icons (top right of map). I find
this much better at zeroing in on a good fare, with loose travel requirements.

~~~
monksy
Thats what drove me crazy about this website. You can't do what you're
describing. You can with Hipmunk and apparently google flights.

------
Untit1ed
It's reasonable to take the speed hit in order to make it more useful to more
people, but the UI seems to be designed with fast searches in mind (for which
it'd be perfect), rather than for the necessarily slow searches that actually
happen. It'd be a lot nicer to use if you typed your query and something
happened to reflect the immense amount of stuff going on behind the scenes
rather than just sitting there for a few seconds...

------
saravk
Any plans of releasing an affiliate API ?. I'am current creating a travel
media site (think Tumblr + Tripadvisor mashed together) and i would love to
integrate a intelligent, accurate & unobtrusive little flight search widget to
the site.

For instance when a user visits a page under any destination (say Bangkok) I
would like to present him with something like 'Flights from {Your Location} to
Bangkok starting at {xyz}$" to get him to start his flight search.

Here the 'xyz$' pre-search number should be a real price that the user would
see in the search results and not some unrealistic number that sites like
Tripadvisor and Expedia use as link bait. The start location should be the
user's current location and the destination should be from a list of options
(e.g {dest: "Ko Phangan, Surat Thani, Thailand, Asia"}) specified while
calling your API.

A few months back i explored various options available at that time and gave
up on the idea as being impossible. But now, since you are making the
impossible possible.. maybe you could do something about it? I'am sure that
many other publishers would be interested as well.

------
snilan
You should be able to say "New york to southeast asia for three weeks" instead
of "New york to southeast asia for 3 weeks"

~~~
tomhoward
Sure we can do that pretty easily, but why would you want to type four more
characters?

~~~
balabaster
Mostly because it's natural to type a word longhand in the form of a sentence.
So it's not that you should be able to do one or the other, but that you
should be able to do either. A user shouldn't be coerced into doing something
unnatural for them if your premise is to make it conform to a user's natural
language rather than forcing a query type language.

~~~
tomhoward
Yeah makes sense.

------
YPetrov
Great website, love the idea! One thing I still don't get is why exactly it is
slow? How come you can pre-load some data, but not other? The first thing that
comes to mind is caching, but I guess I am not understanding the problem
correctly.

Side note: 2 weeks ago there was a hackathon at our university (Edinburgh) and
in the Travel category one of the teams tried to do exactly the same thing.
However, they only implemented the NLP part as they were using data via
Skyscanner's API. Our entry[1] had a similar flavour, but rather than typing,
one could select their cities and we did the planning for them.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ir7XrlC0aw>

~~~
almacmillan
They have their own fast, local price cached graph 'wingtip' but it only has
data from selected low cost carriers. With this redesign they have felt the
need to fill in the gaps via calls to Expedia's api's which are slow.

~~~
YPetrov
Any ideas on what prevents them from getting the rest of the data?

~~~
almacmillan
Adioso began as a single source for price search to low cost carriers and the
low cost carriers are not in the GDS because they won't pay the prices.So I
presume they scrape (spider at regular intervals) the low cost carrier prices
from the airline websites but possibly they have api direct links. Tom could
tell us. (Tom I really want an in depth post on wingtip!) But to do fast real
time search for hundreds of airlines you need more than a fast schedule (time
dependent graph) you also need the complex fare rules worked out and
programmed. All of that data is available but costs. The last bit is you then
need to check availability via wherever you can book the ticket (GDS or direct
to airline) and cache it for speed. I think that the fact that Tom links to
Vayant's price cacheing api it is an admission that it isn't raw data that's
lacking it's a higher level api where fares and availability are already
worked out. Because seriously to do that yourself is a huge time & engineering
challenge. It took ITA years. Adioso have the fast Graph and can get the
schedule data. Vayant is offering an off the shelf solution to do fares and
availability. Could work.

~~~
YPetrov
Right, makes a bit more sense now. Thanks for the thourough explanation. Also,
I would too be interested in a post which gives more insight into Wingtip as
it sounds quite interesting.

------
cgag
Can you make the audioso logo link to audioso.com, and the world blog link to
the blog?

------
drsim
Great blog post and great perseverance.

But I prefer Skyscanner's 'whole month' search. I can see flight prices for
the whole month to a whole country on a single screen. With yours I see seven
days at a time. And it takes an age to see the next seven!

I'm sure it's a difficult problem getting accurate 'fuzzy' flight info fast,
but Skyscanner have it cracked and have done for some time.

I like the idea of your somewhere warm search, but again it's dead in the
water if it takes 30 seconds to _start_ returning results. Just because you
offer powerful search doesn't mean you can sacrifice speed. You've still lost
my attention in spite of the novelty.

~~~
tomhoward
Thanks for the kind comments. Regarding speed/performance - did you see the
part of the post where we explain this?

~~~
jaggederest
Explaining it doesn't help your users deal with it ;)

I'd suggest making it a bit more asynchronous, or returning whatever results
you can first. Allow people to save searches, perhaps, and come back to them
in a few minutes.

~~~
tomhoward
_Explaining it doesn't help your users deal with it_

Didn't say it did :) We just know it's a problem - by far our biggest problem
- and the one we're most determined to fix.

------
rkuykendall-com
"That’s slow, especially when you have to do dozens or hundreds of searches to
deliver a single set of results."

This seems like a simple communication problem. If this information was
displayed to the user ( "36 Searches Completed" or something, ticking up while
they waited ), watching that number quickly grow would make me feel crazy
productive. "I just waited 5 minutes for a search result" turns into "Oh my
god, it would have taken me an hour to do all those searches, this is awesome!
Oh, I just did another 3!"

Of course, this is exactly what is happening. You just need to communicate
that to the user.

~~~
tomhoward
Yaya, we plan on doing something like this.

~~~
rkuykendall-com
Great! I plan on using Adioso all the time once I get past grad school and
have some money. The "Anywhere" destination is exactly how I would love to
travel, but no other site allows that.

~~~
prawn
Skyscanner has an "everywhere" option of some description.

~~~
rkuykendall-com
That's nice if I know exactly when I want to leave and return.

------
jfoster
I have a hypothesis. If the results are exactly what I want and are so good
that I don't need to do multiple permutations of the same search, it won't
matter one bit that the search takes a long time to complete.

~~~
tomhoward
I like this hypothesis a lot.

~~~
jfoster
The challenge is that not only do you have to really nail it with the "one
bullet", but you probably also have to prove it as well. Just coming up with
the best answer might not be enough, because people don't trust travel sites
to do that. How do you earn trust? You have to convey the sense of an
exhaustive search encompassing all the best-known airlines (especially the
budget ones), all the available fare types, and flight times. It's almost like
putting together a business case for the trip. "Here's the recommendation,
based on all these different things we considered."

~~~
daxelrod
Thank you for expressing this. My first thought when trying out a travel
booking website is always "Am I missing out on something?"

------
Sakes
The site looks beautiful, and the UI for the search results is really flexible
& powerful. Just a fantastic job.

But the search box, it requires educating the user, and this is your initial
and most important functionality on your site. The funny thing is, you allow
your user to type in the search as if they are speaking to a person which is a
great idea and obviously the way it should be, but that is not how users have
been trained to interact with random websites. I am sure you are aware of
this, I am sure the search box is very important to you, but I think you
should revisit the search box and homepage.

Here are some ideas, feel free to love them, hate them, praise them, trash
them. I hope they are good and if not I hope they give you some new ideas.

* Home page - plain white & bare, logo centered, add airplane or luggage to logo so you don't need to describe what you are offering, text "Where do you want to go?", text box, and nothing else. (Format it like google and people will be more inclined to use it like google)

* Automatically figure out where they are coming from. Google analytics knows already, so I am sure there is some way to grab that info. Assume this is their starting point until they tell you otherwise. It currently is defaulting to LA.

* The first question anyone answers when traveling somewhere is "Where", thus the only text on your page asks, "Where do you want to go?".

* As the user types in his destination / search, the website immediately responds informatively and aesthetically.

* Once you have matched a destination, the background of the page changes to a beautiful image of that location, the vacation doesn't start once you get off the plane, it starts now. Going from plain white bkgd to a destination image bkgd ideally will slowly start to pull your user into a vacation mind set.

* Once you have matched a destination, the text on the homepage changes from "Where do you want to go?" to "When? You could type next week, or 03/22".

* If the user deleted the destination before entering "When", repopulate the input field with both the destination and when they want to travel text, he will now understand that you just keep entering information into the field as if you are talking to a person, or searching on google.

* Once you have matched when, introduce new imagery of activities you can do there and/or native food dishes. You are continuing the theme of providing your user with an vacation experience now, not later.

* Once you have matched when, the text on the homepage changes from "When? You could type next week, or 03/22" to "For how long? You could type a few days, or a weekend"

* After you have all needed search data, proceed to results, and if possible continue vacation now theme

* The search box should still work as originally intended as well.

 __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __
__ __

Keep up the good fight, don't let them leave the home page without thinking
"This is cool!", and I would love to one day hear people say "I need to
adioso!"

~~~
wernah
Hello, I'm the designer behind the homepage and search box. Thanks for the
great feedback! As you could have guessed, there's been a lot of thought and
iterating over the homepage and the orange search box, both on a functional
level and a branding experience.

It's been a really interesting exercise. Searching (at least from a Web
interface POV) is a really robust paradigm and a space that is challenging to
innovate in. While I agree that we haven't quite 'nailed it', I feel like
we're constantly moving towards the promised land while adhering to the
plethora of backend and frontend contraints.

I like your idea from a story telling perspective, but it feels a little step
heavy. We're trying to be patient in educating users on the breadth of queries
we can handle. Understanding what you could put into the Google search box was
a very gradual discovery experience.

I too am hoping we can turn a proper noun into a verb :)

~~~
brianpan
Here's my take on the search box- I'm a parent flying with a young child, and
I just finished booking flights last week.

While the capabilities of the open-ended design of the search is amazing, when
I search for flights, I find that I am looking for something very specific. I
know cites and dates, direct flights only. Even before getting married and
having a kid, I generally think about where and when I want to travel well
before I start searching online. I don't know if other people are more
spontaneous than I am, but I am constrained by PTO days, other people's
schedules, etc. At the most I want the flexibility to change the leave/return
dates by a day or two.

Since I already know the parameters of my trip, I find that the input that
most travel sites have settled on (To, From, Include nearby airports, Leave
date, Return date) gets me to what I'm looking for faster. The open-endedness
of the Adioso search box was actually slower, since I tended to type too
little and did a lot of filtering afterwards. It felt like my choices are
either I type too much and the computer doesn't understand, or I type too
little and "fix it myself".

From my biased perspective, I think it would be a big win to have the
traditional search inputs be the default but with the open-ended search as an
alternative input (not "Advanced search" but maybe the link is "I'm
flexible"). As an alternative search, it's no longer a limiting search but it
now feels like: you can type _anything_ and the computer just figures it out!
Sweet! Also, user education no longer is a problem- everyone knows what to do
with an "I'm flexible" search box.

The other big speed advantage of the traditional search input is: often I will
return to a travel site weeks later and my trip details are already pre-filled
and all I need to do is hit the search button. You can't really do that with a
search box. (When I hit back from the Adioso search results page, I lose
everything and the search box is empty. That seems like a bug, I think I
should be able to save at least that little bit of typing.)

BTW, I didn't feel like Adioso search (getting back the initial results) was
slow at all. It felt just as fast as any other travel site and definitely
faster than the worst of them that leave you staring at airplane animations
for 10s of seconds.

Great work, I'm really interested to see what happens with Adioso. I'll
definitely be trying it more in the future!

~~~
lucaspiller
> when I search for flights, I find that I am looking for something very
> specific. I know cites and dates, direct flights only

I'm pretty much the same if I'm going on holiday - I usually chose an exact
city well before looking for flights rather than a country or an area.

If I'm flying back to my parents though, it's a bit different. There are a
number of airports around them:

\- one has flights daily but requires a 3 hour train journey

\- another has flights twice a week and is a 1 hour drive

\- another has flights daily, is a 1 hour drive, but is usually more than
twice the price of the others

\- another has flights daily, is a 2 hour drive, and the price varies

For this I usually just open SkyScanner (Adioso doesn't seem to have many low
cost airlines in Europe) in 10 tabs or so and compare the results myself...

~~~
heymishy
That might be the case for you both, but I certainly have a use case for this
style of searching. I often want to go on a break over a set weekend/week with
no set destination in mind, and very flexible with dates. This type of things
is perfect for when your not explicitly looking for a specific date range or
flight path.. more just experimenting with options.

Hats off to you guys, like the semantic query style rather than the
traditional mould!

~~~
brianpan
Absolutely agree that there is a use case for the open-ended search- it's
powerful, cool, and not yet addressed by anyone. My point is that the
"traditional" search also has it's strengths, especially when the trip is not
going to be open-ended: travelling to a wedding or graduation, travelling for
business, travelling with a group of friends where the schedule and
destination is agreed upon.

In fact, thinking about it more, I strongly suspect that personality (in a
Myers-Briggs J/P way) has a lot to do with how we prefer to travel. Some
people plan everything out ahead of time down to the hour, some people close
their eyes and spin the globe.

I think the other factor is how often you fly. If you don't travel/vacation
very often, you are more likely to be travelling for a specific reason where
dates and destination is known. If you travel very often, you will probably
have more opportunities to pick a random place to go for the weekend.

------
pmtarantino
I love the website, it is really useful. But I love more the idea of "We
identify a problem people have, and we won't give up until we solve it!" That
is very motivational.

------
travel123
a) It needs an 'OR' operator. If I enter from as 'Western Europe', I'm told
it's too broad, which is ok - but I'd like to be able to choose a few
convenient starting places rather than do a separate search for each. (To
those who say a random starting location is a bad idea: actually, in Europe,
it's a pretty good one. Depending on my destination, I've found it useful to
travel up to 8 hours by train to catch a decent flight, and I'd consider
taking a low-cost flight pretty much anywhere in the continent for a
particularly fun-looking and decently-priced flight to far enough away...)

b) It needs better data. <http://www.ltur.com/de/flug.htm?omnin=TopNavi-FL>
currently would let me get from Brussels to Punta Cana (Dominican Republic)
for 411 Euros if I left tomorrow. Adioso starts at 490, and the second
cheapest is already over 1000.

It's nifty; if it gets better data and a bit more flexibility, I could see
using it. I travel a lot and have a pretty flexible schedule. For now, I'll be
sticking with edreams, easyjet, etc.

------
DanielN
Guys there is an easy way around your problem. if your results are as good as
you say they are then its just a matter of tweaking your ux. offload the
result delivery to email and pubsub the actual search. If you have thought of
this I would be interested in hearing why it doesn't work. If not then please
at least include it as an option.

~~~
nedwin
Not sure if this would work for them but it would definitely deliver a
shitload more emails for their database.

------
stormbrew
Have you thought about treating it as more of an agent query and bringing the
user back to the site with an email notification? The searches I tried were so
slow I'd probably forget about them and my stale-tab-killer would close them
before I'd see the result.

Plus then you could potentially update them if better results came along (and
they agreed to that).

------
chx
Speed is a nonissue. Take flightfox: it crowdsources the search and it takes
days. Educate people and they won't care.

------
mikeknoop
The reason this product doesn't exist "already" is because it's not the type
of searching airline's preferred customer need.

Airlines prefer business class customers (routine flights, willing to upgrade
to expensive business class tickets) and those customers typically search for
small 1-2 day windows.

~~~
tomhoward
Even if this was true, it hasn't stopped many/most airlines being financial
disasters.

We know airlines want this as much as consumers do, if it gives them a better
ability to manage their capacity and market their products more efficiently.

We also hear it's a myth that airlines prefer business-class customers; on a
dollars-per-square-metre basis they do better out of coach.

EDIT: Also note, most of the newest/fastest-growing/most profitable airlines
in the world are low-cost and don't have business-class.

~~~
notahacker
Presumably you've had some discussions with GDS companies: what reasons have
they provided for not offering [affordable licences for] such flexible search
parameters?

~~~
almacmillan
Nah, in modern flight search, ITA & Vayant take all the raw flight data like
schedules, fare rules etc which they buy from companies like OAG and Innovata
& IATA. GDS increasingly are nothing more than a source for cacheing prices
when a 'direct connect' connection to the airline is not available or where
the end consumer (an ota or travel agent for example) will be purchasing via
GDS. Certainly no GDS has tech that does open ended real time Graphed queries
like Google Flights, Adioso's Wingtip, Vayant, Skyscanner can do

~~~
notahacker
The cached prices are the hard part of the search though (anyone with a
licence to schedule data from Innovata or OAG can build a tool that searches
for "all return flights from California to Europe in summer"). In theory it
should be possible to grab current price/availability for that set of flights
from a GDS and filter it to give "all return flights ... under _$1500_ "
(minus some LCCs that don't accept GDS bookings) which is the more interesting
part of the problem from the consumer's point of view.

Presumably if Adioso are finding it worthwhile building their own price
scraping/caching engine the GDS companies aren't willing to allow their
systems to be [affordably] queried on that kind of scale. I'm just wondering
whether they're claiming it's impossible for technical reasons, IP reasons
(they sell price data back to the airlines) or just weren't willing to quote
Adioso an affordable rate.

------
727374
This is what I've been looking for - trip ideas based on a vague spec. Speed
isn't actually as important to me getting a comprehensive list of options. If
you take my order and then email me the results in 30 minutes, that's better
than 30 minutes wasted on Kayak and the like.

------
franze
hmm, adioso team, just wanted to say: your blog is set to meta robots
"noindex, nofollow" which does not make to much sense for a public blog.
(p.s.: no, i do not stalk your blog, i just use this obtrusive-testing plugin
www.f19n.com/b/canonical-robots-meta-user-script)

------
aymeric
I love the design, and the pictures in the search results :)

What I find annoying is the search results show dated prices and when I want
to book I get a higher price.

I am surprised no one mentioned this in this discussion, isn't that a huge
usability issue? Worst that speed or openended textbox?

------
nicholassmith
For what it's worth I think you've managed to improve the speeds quite
dramatically recently. Still a bit slow, but I've found Kayak on my iPhone can
be _pretty_ damn slow about returning a full set of results depending on the
time of day.

------
standeven
I tried two searches. In the first, it couldn't find St Lucia. In the second,
I searched for flights to Amsterdam and it returned flights to Albany.

Great idea, great presentation, but needs some more tweaking.

------
knes
Wow that website is unusable on mobile (nexus 4) what a shame...

------
pehrlich
"For a week or two" became "For a week"

Looking forward to using this. A lot. :-)

------
_casperc
There is still no good way to create a multi leg travel. That's the problem I
would personally tackle, as I face it every time I am planning a travel.

------
CubanSandwich
So apparently Adioso thinks "Scotland"" means "Suitland, Maryland, US". Okay,
so second shot with "Scotland, UK" becomes "Portland, UK".

------
darrelld
I've loved this site since 2011. Had no idea how grim things were for a while.
Good to see you guys pulling through!

------
tomd3v
What's that song at the end of their video?

~~~
serkawarrick
Hey I'm the guy behind the video. The song was actually produced specifically
for the video by my music partner Derrick Calloway. We produce under the name
Enso (www.ensoofficial.com)

Cheers!

------
tnorthcutt
Do you know if it will be possible to add Southwest Airlines to your data set
in the future?

~~~
deltaqueue
Not unless Southwest opens up their flight data, as it's currently closed to
everyone. AA tried this once and pulled Orbitz's access (Expedia followed in
support of Orbitz), then AA realized no one had any brand loyalty and "patched
their differences" with the companies.

