
Adioso is reinventing travel search. Check these never-before-possible searches - tomhoward
http://adioso.com/blog/2013/01/a-year-ago-no-travel-site-in-the-world-could-answer-these-flight-searches/
======
beatpanda
This is great — SkyScanner (which I almost never hear about, even though it's
fantastic) has similar functionality, but definitely not the ability to search
for "somewhere warm". I like that.

But what's up with travel startups not allowing remote workers? I'm looking
for work right now, including at a travel startup, and that's just baffling to
me.

Some of them offer an enhanced vacation "perk", but that sort of misses the
point — I (and probably a lot of people who are passionate about travel) am
more put off by having to be in the same place 48-52 weeks out of the year
than I would be having to carry a laptop to wheverer it is I feel like being
in the world.

~~~
tomhoward
Half of our team members work remotely from home, in other parts of the world
from our main base in Melbourne.

And we encourage our team members to travel as much as possible, working
remotely from anywhere in the world.

~~~
kokey
A feature I miss with Skyscanner is to search for flights leaving say in the
evening (e.g. Wednesday after work), and returning in the afternoon (e.g.
Sunday afternoon). I normally have to search for the days I want (Wednesday to
Sunday) and then use the sliders to get flights for the time of day that I
want. However, this really throws off the part where they sort destination by
price, since the time of day I want to depart seriously affects the price.

~~~
WickyNilliams
Very cool, could definitely use something like this! Has always bothered me
that travel sites always want to know things in such absolute terms, when most
people are searching speculatively before they know anything about specific
dates etc.

Another feature from skyscanner that I'd love to see: being able to set "from"
as any airport in the country. For example, the UK is small enough that
traveling to _any_ airport is completely feasible. So I don't really care
where I'm flying from (though it's advantageous if it's close to me), I just
want the best price/distance ratio.

------
casca
I've been running searches like this using <http://matrix.itasoftware.com> for
years but I've built up my own lists of what constitutes "Eastern Europe" and
"US West Coast". ITA provides software for the airline industry so has high-
speed connections - anyone know what system they're using to get the flight
data?

This could be a great tool that allows people to do powerful, meaningful
searches that have been limited to more technical folk. The business model is
there, the big question is whether the queries are allowed to run long enough
to find the best results.

~~~
deanclatworthy
I've _never_ found a cheaper flight using Matrix. It must be heavily skewed
with the US or missing a lot of European airlines.

~~~
waitwhat
Matrix (and Adioso, which I guess uses the same backend) appears to be missing
at least RyanAir and EasyJet, and presumably other low-cost carriers.

Honestly, if you don't include the 2nd and 4th largest European airlines[1],
you might as well forget about the European market entirely.

Skyscanner and Kayak both include the low-cost carriers.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_airlines_in_Eur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_airlines_in_Europe)

~~~
deanclatworthy
Given that skyscanner doesn't find easyjet results for me, nor does it find
ryanair I'm going to guess that they don't let these services pull in their
data to consumers. I am guessing this is an ownership issue, and that they
want to process customers themselves, rather than through resellers.

~~~
namdnay
Most low cost carriers aren't willing to pay to be listed in Global
Distribution Systems. Kayak is linked to Amadeus and Matrix to ITA, so unless
extra development is done, they will only list flights from GDS-listed
companies

~~~
forax
|so unless extra development is done

This is a large part of my job. We have content from many airlines which are
not listed by ITA, Amadeus, or Sabre

------
waitwhat
Some more feedback: If I do a search for direct, one-way flights from Tallinn
to anywhere next month, the experience is awful.

"anywhere" appears to search a list of cities in sequence, not in parallel.

The top city on the list is Beijing (I doubt Tallinn-Beijing has ever existed
or ever will); Dubai, Shanghai and Incheon are also in the first ten. Combine
this with the server speed, and you have me staring at a throbber for far, far
too long for searches that I know won't succeed and should have been trivially
filtered out.

If I repeat the search, the same 48 cities are shown in the same order. Please
stop trying to get me to go to Beijing. Consider a longer list, randomising
the order and searching in parallel.

Your search results show no direct flights from Tallinn to London or Paris
next month. This appears to miss results from RyanAir, EasyJet and Estonian
Air. (Of these, your coverage page only claims to support EasyJet.)

~~~
flyinRyan
On a side note, why would you buy a one-way ticket? Every time I've ever
checked it's cheaper to buy a two-way ticket and then just not use the return
flight.

~~~
dagw
That has not been my experience at all. I just checked a flight from
Gothenburg to Amsterdam leaving in three weeks time(a random example), and a
one-way ticket was almost exactly half the price of a return flight. In fact
it's been a long time since I've seen too significant a discount for a return
flight vs two single flights.

~~~
flyinRyan
Oh ok. Well, that's what I would expect but when I left the US for good one-
way tickets were about double two-way.

------
sabj
Have enjoyed watching Adioso develop and evolve over time, continuing to
improve. Good job team. But, for me, the lack of additional airline data
renders it completely unusable still, to have so many missing - I just can't
get the whole picture price OR schedule-wise.

I always felt that travel search was a big pain point that I was invested in
solving. It also has some very obnoxious data lockdowns after scale. Anyone
here have a ready blueprint for some great resources to test and hack around
different travel search and booking engines with helpful APIs? I know some
offer odds and ends...

Everything is running extremely sluggishly for me right now - including the
wingtip time reported on the page? - dunno if HN is a contributor but FYI!
Totally unusable even vs. doing month-wide ITA Matrix searches.

~~~
deanclatworthy
It seems as if they only search Expedia, judging by the graph's label at the
top. Even still, it's missing many cheap and budget airlines.

Whilst I commend them for letting me search over a period of time using
natural language, I'd rather spend the time searching individual days on a
search engine that has more sources.

~~~
tomhoward
Not just Expedia at all.

The progress indicator above the calendar chart shows that we hit Expedia,
Cheapoair and Adioso's own Wingtip engine.

Wingtip has most low-cost airlines across most of the world. See
<http://adioso.com/help/coverage>

~~~
deanclatworthy
+1 for Ryanair (even though they are an awful company). You are also missing
norwegian which pretty much is the go-to budget airline for anyone living in
the Nordics/Scandanvaia (& Baltics).

------
DigitalSea
Whoa. I am super impressed. I thought the title was a bit grandiose, but the
ability to perform advanced almost natural like sentence searches that were
showcased in the blog post is phenomenal. Expect these guys to get snapped up
by the likes of Google or Facebook sometime soon. It looks like 2013 is
shaping up to be the year of search especially with the release of Facebook's
Open Graph search which operates basically the same.

~~~
skrebbel
> _Expect these guys to get snapped up by the likes of Google or Facebook
> sometime soon._

That would be sad.

~~~
DigitalSea
I am only assuming that's what will happen. If you're innovating in the search
space like Google have been doing so for a long time now and of late, Facebook
then you're going to attract attention of the bigger players who are trying to
gain bigger footholds in a particular niche.

Hopefully they don't get acquired and are super successful. Time will tell.

------
jakozaur
Kudos for determination!

<http://tomhoward.co/part-1-reality-check>

<http://tomhoward.co/part-2-stunts>

------
bmmayer1
Hey guys--

I LOVE your product but I consistently get way-slower-than-it-should-be load
times on all your pages and searches. Just now I got a 502 Bad Gateway. Looks
like you have some growing pains, which is great, but I highly recommend
investing in a cloud server :)

~~~
mctx
Agreed - it's a beautiful site, but way too slow. I get the following results
on a search:

Adioso Wingtip 31035 ms, Expedia 82331 ms, Cheapoair 38141 ms

And the home page takes about 20-30 seconds to load.

I'd love to hear about Adioso's backend - anyone from the company here to
discuss it? Do you have any caching?

~~~
tomhoward
Yeah I'm a co-founder, though not an engineer - they're all busy spinning up
more servers :)

We'll be writing more posts about the core tech in coming weeks, but feel free
to let us know what you'd most like to know about.

~~~
barrkel
The pages are also too wide. Having to do both horizontal and vertical
scrolling is severe usability setback.

(I do not run my browser maximized, because too many other sites (e.g. HN)
would use up the whole window, making text hard to read. Text is much easier
to read when the lines are reasonably short than when they extend across the
whole monitor width. And besides, I want to see other windows on my desktop
than just my browser.)

~~~
prawn
Bit awkward on iPad.

------
JacobAldridge
I'm a big fan of the Adioso story, and have learnt so much from their
experience (even though our Australian-based travel businesses are only
superficially similar).

I think it will take some time for people to realise that the geography of
their real world travel conversations ("ever done South-East Asia?", "I'd love
to see Eastern Europe!") can be used in travel searches where traditionally
we've had to restrict ourselves to countries, or even cities.

As that transition is made, it will open up a whole wonderful world of
experiences for people - and hopefully with the corresponding business success
for Adioso.

------
contingencies
As someone who ran a travel startup in mainland China for a few years, forgive
me for being unimpressed. Here's what happened. I loaded the page and
consistently expected to see something impressive to justify the title, but
only got: \- Source/Destination detection \- (DateJS style...) natural
language temporal specification

What is so impressive about that? It's not even multilingual. Does it do typo
detection? Does it do non-airline routes? Does it do passport/visa law
interpretation? Embassy/agent/border point locations, open times and
fees/currencies for visa acquisition? Black market vs. theoretical currency
conversions? Credit card acceptance? Processing times? Time-of-day detection
and night-time travel warnings?

You could hire me as a once off or occasional consultant for some more cheap
ideas and reality-checks (full stack engineer from AU, previously lived US, so
not ignorant of performance issues or your team cultures, either) or you could
continue retreading old ground. Either way, there's a lot of the latter left
to do before impressive happens.

Oh yeah... and the slow thing really is a problem. All I can think is that you
are scraping data from many sources, because for the query I ran, there is
exactly 1 (one) carrier, and a fixed schedule, with exactly 1 (one) price per
standard, linear fare-period. There is no excuse for a non-instant response,
unless your architecture is somehow borked.

~~~
tomhoward
The features we're showcasing are:

\- flexibility on dates ("mid July for 10 to 15 days")

\- broadness on destinations ("Southeast Asia", "Western Europe",
"California")

\- non-geographic searches ("Somewhere warm")

\- a UI that supports these flexible results.

No it's not perfect. Yes it's slow.

But no-one else has succeeded in building a product like this - largely
because of the limitations in the 40+ year-old travel industry infrastructure.

We're determined to find a way to break through that and make this work.

~~~
contingencies
> flexibility on dates ("mid July for 10 to 15 days")

Leave and return date flexibility exists within sites like Kayak, I use it all
the time. Though it would be nice to make it more flexible, I agree, but this
is not a new or killer feature.

> \- broadness on destinations ("Southeast Asia", "Western Europe",
> "California")

Many people have this, usually powered by iffy geonames databases that are
monolingual, out of date, or just plain wrong. These existing systems work
fine for major destinations though. Best of luck doing the smaller ones and/or
other languages better.

> \- non-geographic searches ("Somewhere warm")

Iffy. Looks cute on advertising, but of dubious value given that everyone's
definition is different. Example: Warm for a northern European or Canadian
might be southern France in the European winter. At the same time, even
further south and where it may be warmer in northern Africa, someone from LA
or Sydney would not find it 'warm'.

> no-one else has succeeded in building a product like this

Major travel aggregators such as Qunar.com and Kayak.com are pretty ballpark.
While you can definitely top their UIs in numerous small ways, you will have
to make the net UI change valued enough to sway and keep users. Good luck with
that.

I would go back to your target market and their use cases ... look at what
they value ... un-tech-bias your judgements .. re-align your USP. (Suggestion:
consider a range of 'cheapstake' to 'livin it fine' budget per day in a
city/country and refocus on helping people to find new and innovative
destinations they might like to visit but have never considered, by helping
them to find destinations that meet their budget requirements. I know this is
really a strong potential selling point for loads of weather-dissatisfied
Londoners, and South America and Asia are strong potential regions for north
Americans. Ditto south&SEA for Chinese, who are cashed to the hilt right now.)

OK, that's it for the free assistance ;)

~~~
tomhoward
_While you can definitely top their UIs in numerous small ways, you will have
to make the net UI change valued enough to sway and keep users._

Yes.

~~~
contingencies
> While you can definitely top their UIs in numerous small ways, you will have
> to make the net UI change valued enough to sway and keep users.

... also, complex enough to implement that the existing players can't just
immediately emulate your changes (simultaneously letting all their users know
about their great, new 'innovation', thus killing your only USP) should you
actually gain any traction.

Not being negative, just realistic. Good luck.

~~~
tomhoward
_Not being negative, just realistic. Good luck._

Heh, you're just being _that guy_ :)

Believe me, we've put a bit of thought into what we're doing.

Thanks for the interest, seriously.

~~~
contingencies
No worries. And much love to all the downvoters.

------
cj
I've been using Google Flights (<http://google.com/flights>) lately, which
lets you graph prices depending on departure date and length of stay. Click
"flexible dates" in the date-picker. Extremely useful and fast.

Seems like adioso is trying to do something similar. Really well designed, but
it seems like your servers are stressed with the load right now. I'm looking
forward to trying it for my next trip :)

~~~
username3
You should try <http://hipmunk.com> if you like Google Flights.

~~~
cj
I have used hipmunk, but Google flights is faster and has better flexible date
search.

------
ffumarola
I rarely say "Wow." I just shared this with 5 people in less than 2 minutes.
This is EXACTLY how travel search should be. EXACTLY. I hate the rigidity of
having to select days. And then mess with 2/3 day flexible windows on both
ends to find cheaper fares. "Travel to Brazil next month for 14 days" is
exactly how my vacation planning works, so that's how I want to search it.

I have a lot of praise. Only negative is the site is really slow (at least
right now).

~~~
ffumarola
Following up on my search: Sao Paulo, BR to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
early March 1 stop return 26 days later

I am going on about 10 minutes now with no results. So it isn't slow, it is
unusable.

Also, it seems to make me choose either direct, 1 stop, or 2+ stops. Which
seems odd. Why can't I leave that open-ended so I can look for best price?

------
est
This is fantastic.

can we search something like this?

Leaving in 3 days to a coastal city speaking English with hotel room prices
from x to y with a beach window and a swimming pool.

~~~
heyitsnick
Sounds more like a hotel search than a flight search.

~~~
est
They are often used together.

~~~
dagw
Yea, what would be really great would be to be able to put in a total budget
for flight plus hotel. I'd love to be able to search for flight to large
European city sometime in September with 4 nights at a central 3-5 star hotel
for a total of less than $X. That would be a killer feature.

------
ssharp
My wife and I are at a point where we want to do some travel this year, are
not picky where we go, don't mind spending money, but don't want to waste
money (read: find good bargains).

This type of search is really what I'm looking for. I love that you can type
in "somewhere warm" and give general time frames. I don't know if something
this flexible has been implemented elsewhere (maybe without the natural
language search) but I haven't seen something this flexible before.

I'll have to try this out a few times along with my standard travel search to
see how the results quality compares but I'm hoping this provides insights
into deals and locations that were previously much harder to find.

------
toast0
To be a grumpy old man, I think these type of searches were possible in 2009.
[http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/03/11/how-to-find-
cheap...](http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/03/11/how-to-find-cheap-
tickets-with-flexible-date-search/)

Blame the US Department of Transportation for flexible date searches going
away; DOT was requiring headline prices to include all taxes and fees
included, but you need to know the full route details to calculate those; and
flexible date search was based on fare rules. I hope these guys don't get
caught up in that, because flexible searches are awesome.

------
toddrew
I love this.

I'm currently searching for the cheapest way, I dont care how long it takes,
to get from Guatemala City to as close as I can get to Santiago, Chile.

After a number of Adioso searches I found that it would be much cheaper for me
to fly - Guatemala - Miami - Lima, saving me around $400 per person (flying
with my gf).

A feature I would love would be a reverse search. Searching by destination
with an open ended departure location. I'd love to put in Departure: North
America Destination:Santiago, Chile and find the cheapest option.

------
thaumaturgy
Wow guys, great job. This is how search is supposed to work in 2013, and
you're the first ones there.

------
just_wondering
I think it is great what you are doing. Of course, this is what travel search
should be like. Though, I'm genuinely curious, what are you really trying to
achieve? Sure, more flexible nice is great. But it is definitely not a killer
feature. Low price seems to be key when it comes to mass air travel. As far as
I can tell from the responses, all you do is show fares from airline
aggregators (I also got a timeout when I tried). Is this really a viable
business model? I'm sure they will eventually come around to offer the same
search features that you have. In the meantime, there are already many
competitors that offer improved search interfaces (e.g. skyscanner.net, which
I have used for my last trip). How are you differentiating yourself from these
services? Also, while I think that improved search is needed, I would suggest
reconsidering which aggregators you include. For my last trip, I found a great
fare on cheapoair.com (through skyscanner), but at the last moment, I was
having second thoughts, and decided to google them. Well, to say the least,
they do not appear to have a very good reputation. Similar with edreams. But I
never booked with them, so perhaps, they are not as bad as some of the online
reviews suggest. However, one thing that's pretty vexing is that they often
will advertise a fare, but then when you go to there site, and try to book it,
it is no longer available. I know that you're just providing their data, but
as far as I'm concerned this is a major annoyance. Just yet another reason
that makes me doubt your current business model is viable. Not to mention that
you are up against sites like travelocity, which is essentially owned by the
airlines themselves...would love to hear your side of the story, though!

~~~
tomhoward
_I'm sure they will eventually come around to offer the same search features
that you have._

That's what we thought when we started working on this 5 years ago. We're at
how little progress has been made.

We see a huge variety of opportunities for innovation both in technology and
business models. Stay tuned :)

------
bchallenor
I'm pretty sure that the 88 people [1] who want to go from "MEL to Perth UK"
actually want to go the other Perth. Interestingly only 3 have signed up for
"MEL to Perth AU" - perhaps you could add some heuristics to your
autocomplete?

Similarly for "Auckland NZ to Christchurch UK" - people might be getting more
than they bargained for there. :)

[1] <http://adioso.com/following/missing_routes>

------
jacobr
You should down-prioritize airport codes in the search, especially since it's
natural language search. I searched for a flight to Goa, and got "GOA
(Genoua)". I could then correct it to a bunch of other airports, several in
India but only one with "Goa" in its name. What I was looking for was flights
to any airport in Goa, India.

------
bsimpson
I think your iconography is backwards: mobile phones have taught people that a
target cursor means "I am here." You should use that for the From, and perhaps
the Place icon you're currently using for From instead for To.

Also, your filters should be smart enough to enforce their own constraints. I
should never have to wait until the results page to get this:

    
    
        "Please reduce the range of trip lengths you are searching for, and we'll be able to find you results."
    

For the record, I got a 502 Bad Gateway nginx on one search results page, but
it went away on refresh.

I like the ideas you guys are bringing to the table (and the personality of
your announcement). Not only are the searches you've demoed here clever, but
the filters (afternoon flights shorter than N hours) are nicely integrated.
Scrolling feels a bit janky though.

Good luck!

~~~
wernah
Thanks for the feedback. I wrestled with the iconography for a while. I know
the instance your talking about (old google maps mobile used it for 'I am
here') and was wondering if anyone was still conditioned to that. I'm not sure
who else uses a crosshair icon to good effect.

Daniel - Adioso Interface Designer

~~~
bsimpson
I think it is Google Maps that I'm thinking of, but Google Maps had damn near
100% mobile marketshare until this year.

------
natch
Please make it more clear whether the results are round trip or not. The best
way to do this is to put a big ROUND TRIP right next to the price, instead of
making us guess. I understand the price is shown in a box that encompasses two
flights, but I don't know if this is a design mistake, trickery, or an actual
RT price. It's good to be more clear than you think you need to be, when it
comes to stuff like showing prices to fickle comparison shoppers.

Nice stuff though! I look forward to using it when the load isn't so heavy as
it seems to be right now. And please don't sell out to someone (cough, Yahoo!)
who has a history of cutting the features that users love.

------
fnordfnordfnord
This is fantastic. As a college instructor, I have flexible schedule options,
but I can't afford to pay too much. I also hate trying to pen-test the normal
airline reservation system for the cheapest flight days/times/etc.

------
akosner
Very cool looking, but it does not return the best prices for the searches. I
compared to hipmunk (which doesn't always have the best prices itself) and
found significantly lower fares. Keep at it, guys!

------
_casperc
One thing that seems to missing from most travel sites is the ability to
compose a travel consisting of several legs.

For instance, this spring I am going to India with work, after which I want to
travel to somewhere in southeast asia, probably with one or two stops, and
then home to copenhagen.

It should be possible to have an overview over my entire travel, not just the
one leg or a simple return trip as my travels are rarely just that.

(looks good though, I am definitely going to try it)

------
danielharan
Travelling in Kathmandu right now on a slow connection and haven't managed to
load the page after 2 minutes. I guess the target market isn't already
traveling...

------
smiler
Do people actually need these kind of searches when they book travel? I don't
know about anybody else but my life is pretty scheduled and the dates I can go
on holiday are fairly fixed and planned months in advance. Research of where
to go is done with my wife on tripadvisor and looking through brochues.

Ebookers / Expedia search is pretty easy - pick the dates, pick the location,
compare prices.

I just don't see the need for these kind of searches

~~~
LinaLauneBaer
I am self employed and thus I can more or less travel at any time I want. I
can easily trade flexibility against money if this allows me to travel more.

------
hoopism
Concept is great but the response time kept me from trying the service out.

at 50 seconds worth of search time you've lost me.

------
sasolit
I don't get what's so special about this as <http://www.fact-
finder.com/semantic-travel-search.html> has been around in Germany at least
for two years.

------
throwaw_250113
Disclosure: Shameless plug from a team member of yet another travel search
Startup 90di (which mainly searches for flights, trains, buses in India). *

Seeing what Adioso has done, and also that there is a good deal of overlap.
Could not resist, telling about our Startup.

We do what we call as 'free text search'. Its customized for searches in
India, like you can do something like: 'Bangalore to Kanpur by train via
Delhi'.

Or you can just search by a train name, or number, or flight number or by
Airline name and many other things.

Some more examples of _free text_ searches possible are at:

<http://www.90di.com/travel/help/examples.html>

If you are interested, please do try out 90di.com, and any feedback is
welcome.

* Sorry for using a throwaway. I do maintain another account here, and contribute positively, I promise :-)

~~~
ElliotH
Out of interest, why the throwaway?

~~~
throwaw_250113
Hi, Because, my other (main) account is anonymous - just to be able to speak
my mind without any attachments :-)

------
nreece
Adioso is fantastic! A shout out to Tom, Fenn and the team. Great work guys.

------
kgosser
Was skeptical from the hyperbolic headline, but wow. This is a clear solution
to an overlooked Job To Be Done and I applaud the team and service. I plan on
using them next time I conduct travel plans.

------
zmmmmm
The natural language isn't as flexible as it seems to have been made out to
be:

 _"We've had an an error. Struggled to complete search: Couldn't find a place
called "bali some time in the next 3 months"_

~~~
tomhoward
We didn't make out that we could accept any time string - yet; the power is in
the ability to handle flexibility of dates and destinations.

But yes, among many things we need to improve, the search parser needs to be
more capable, and we'll be improving that as soon as we can find the time.

~~~
ElliotH
I look forward to the improvements. Beware the effect of being 'nearly there'
with the natural language stuff though. Failures on queries that feel like
they 'should work' can get annoying very quickly.

------
giociferri
This is really fantastic... every times when i need to search a flight to go
from my city in a cheap way around europe i had to do a lot of researches....
this is a really useful service!

------
gebe
Cool stuff but maybe not as revolutionary as the title claims it to be. Minus
the NLP most of these searches have been possible for years at my favourite
swedish travel aggregator site.

~~~
tomhoward
I'll bet you it can't. Please prove me wrong.

------
RyanZAG
Doesn't seem to be localizing prices to local currency? For travel search,
it's really important to localize prices if you want to get some of that
outside USA business.

------
filip01
Very impressive, but searching for Stockholm to "Somewhere warm", "any friday"
gave me a list of cities and images but "no flights". Why? Is Stockholm not
yet supported?

------
mikeevans
I'm really excited about trying this after all the positive feedback listed
here, but I've only had 504 errors and result pages containing "Damn We've had
an an error."

------
hayksaakian
How many trendy startups can travel search really support?

~~~
tomhoward
Any number until one gets it right.

~~~
hayksaakian
I just want amazon to take on airfair. Delicious low margin ticket prices
can't only exist in my dreams...

------
nsomniact
A while back we used Siri and natural language to do flight search and status,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=edJ-1caUmmc

The inspiration came from sites like SkyScanner

------
benjaminwootton
On a Galaxy S2, the popup is too big and its hard to find the close button.

When I found it and clicked on Gdansk, Kiev started loading but then hung.

------
dgiol
Nice. I really like adioso. I have recommended it to a few people already.

I also think Skyscanner (also mentioned in this discussion) is very good.

------
tnhh
Nice concept. But if I search for "Scotland" I am offered the Shetlands
(close-ish), Rutland Vermont, Syria, Estonia or Mexico.

------
yock
Did you seriously just redirect me to someone elses website because you didn't
like what browser I'm (forced to be) on?

------
notahacker
A dynamic search suggest feature would be a very useful to show what natural-
language variants are actually possible.

------
catsinpants
What's the difference between these queries and the ones already available on
ITA Matrix?

~~~
jpatokal
ITA is by aviation geeks for aviation geeks. Now I'm totally happy to punch in
"MEL LHR EK+ X:KUL", but most normal humans would prefer "Melbourne to London
on Emirates with stopover in Kuala Lumpur". Also, ITA has zero support for
more open-ended queries beyond limited date ranges, which is what Adioso is
focusing on.

------
mech4bg
Very impressive stuff, congrats.

------
hamey
Awesome stuff! Great work.

------
brianbreslin
great now you're making my wanderlust even worse! ;-)

------
johnlinvc
Is it hacker newsed? I'm having 502 bad gate way.

