
Show HN: Travel spontaneously on a budget - johmu
http://www.wander.am
======
flavor8
I like the idea, but it needs more work.

Bug 1: After searching, I clicked to another tab for a couple of minutes, and
then back to it. It popped up a dialog saying "it's been a while, we need to
refresh your results", and then reset my search to the original form state.
Quite annoying, especially since I'm on a VPN and location-detection therefore
has me in a different state.

Bug 2: OK, so I stuck with the original $1000 budget. It offered me a trip to
New York, NY, for several nights. I click into New York, and now it shows
hotel rooms starting from $2500 and down -- i.e. it forgets the budget as soon
as you start looking at details, making the entire premise of it useless. When
you click into a "package" why don't you divide results into frugal ("save on
accomodation to have more spending money"), on-budget ("here's what you can
afford"), and spend-a-little-extra ("for a bit more, you can upgrade to...")
sections?

Bug 3: And as said elsewhere, get rid of the dark patterns. It makes you look
scammy.

~~~
ezekg
I've noticed that nearly every travel website does this--you search within a
budget, find something you really like, but once you go through the checkout
flows, you realize it _actually_ costs 25-50% more than what they said it did.

It's such an annoying dark pattern that me and my wife have been working on
our own weekend travel website [0] that is upfront about all pricing, e.g. we
include fees in the price when possible, e.g. deposits for rentals, cleaning
fees, etc. And we won't show outdated flight information (some of these sites
show fares from over 24hrs ago).

[0]: [https://travelalpacamybags.com](https://travelalpacamybags.com)

~~~
Mononokay
The url is a bit large, maybe shorten it to travalpaca.com or
alpacamybags.com? I love it overall though.

~~~
ezekg
Unfortunately, the owner of alpacamybags.com wants ~$2,500, which is a little
too far out of this site's allotted budget at the moment. I've tried to
negotiate other amounts. Will look into it in the future for sure, but right
now I think it's fine. Most people that find us don't type the URL anyways.

Just snagged travelalpaca.com, though. Thanks for the tip!

~~~
billmalarky
If you can get in touch with the owner, I imagine they would be willing to
drop that price significantly since it's a good fit for you but you clearly
don't "need it."

$1,000 in the hand is way better than $2,500 that never comes.

~~~
ezekg
I've actually already tried negotiations via domainagents.com--they don't seem
to want to go below $2,000, which is unfortunate. But like I said, not a big
deal either way. Maybe later on.

~~~
sli
Heh, well, sucks to be that guy, then. Because uBlock blocks that domain as it
stands right now.

------
alkonaut
Switch off notifications, remove the "X people looking at this" (creepy), make
sure to have city-wide codes not just airports, don't offer travel to the SAME
city the user is already known to be in. (EDIT: didn't see that it listed it
as car+hotel when in my own city - makes sense but was still surprised.
Including trips to the same city should perhaps be an option in the search?).

Edit: also: rarely interested in flights with 2 stops for a 1 night holiday -
"direct only" needs to be an option.

Also I'd like to see a savings calculator. If I'm in Oslo, a $500 trip to
Copenhagen feels like I could find it almost every day (the normal might be
$520) but next to it might be a $500 trip to New Zealand - that HAS to be a
more rare deal that I really should jump on. Or is it?

Otherwise - great idea and neat execution.

~~~
Cthulhu_
The X people looking at this is something hotels.com and such do as well -
mind you it's probably one of the many dark patterns that sites like that
employ to create fake scarcity / popularity, similar to "x people booked in
the last y hours" or "only x seats / rooms left at this price"

~~~
bogomipz
>"The X people looking at this is something hotels.com and such do as well -
mind you it's probably one of the many dark patterns that sites like that
employ to create fake scarcity / popularity, similar to "x people booked in
the last y hours" or "only x seats / rooms left at this price"

I have started to refuse to use sites that employ this "high pressure"
nonsense such as booking.com/hotels.com. Even if you could trust this
information who cares how many people are currently looking or have booked a
hotel room in the last day? It makes for a really sleazy feeling experience
and and a visual nightmare. It's like a virtual used car salesman.

Would you shop at a store that insisted on annoying you with such "pressure
tactics" while you trying to buy food or clothes?

Vote with your wallet if possible.

~~~
komali2
Don't high pressure sales tactics get stock sellers in trouble?

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datamoshr
Just as some feedback, it saw that I was based in London, auto-selected
Heathrow as my base airport and the first trip it offered me was a $800 trip
to London. Don't think I'll be taking you guys up on that offer.

~~~
andr
Had a similar experience where I live. It looks like the algorithm decides you
don't need a flight to where you live, just a hotel, so the overall amount
ends up cheaper. Switching from Flight + Hotel to Flight Only gave me a more
meaningful result.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Weird. "You don't need a flight to the place you already live" makes sense,
but why would you need a hotel?

------
overlordalex
It would be neat if you could work in visa requirements as well so that it
only includes visa-free or visa-on-arrival destinations.

I find easy visas a privilege that not many western travellers are aware of;
If I wanted to travel somewhere most of the time I need to first apply for a
visa (which can take several weeks). This includes a fee, photographs and
fingerprints, and an interview. Not to mention the airline tickets and hotel
bookings. When I talk with American friends they complain that their visa-on-
arrival is only for 60 days instead of 90 and "it's so unfair". /rant

~~~
isostatic
Visa requirements depend on a lot of things, including obviously what passport
you hold (multiple selection), there's transit issues too -- if you hold an
Afghan passport you can travel to Svalbard without a visa, but you can't fly
there from Oslo because that requires a Schengen visa. In fact you can't even
transit airside at Schipol. However if you hold a specific type of Canada
residency permit you can.

And even once you clear the visa problems, you then get into yellow fever
documentation. Do you need to take a yellow fever certificate if you transit
via Addis Abiba on the way to South Africa?

------
solarkraft
Hotels, flights: Maybe. But not all of "Travel". I was offered a flight to
Amsterdam for 850 or so US$. Not living that far from there the cheapest train
ticket to there is 40€. And that's from my train station a few minutes of
walking away, not an airport an hour's drive away & with all the airport
related hassles.

I've seen this kind of service before. It's not new. Flight search engines are
common. Don't many already have something like this integrated?

That said: an _actual_ "Travel spontaneously on a budget" site would be great,
but it'd be _much_ larger in scope.

You might want to team up with some travel site like TripAdvisor or Lonely
Planet and integrate local budget (we're on a _budget_ ) offers like the DB
Sparpreisfinder.

~~~
dawnerd
For transport theres [https://www.rome2rio.com/](https://www.rome2rio.com/)
which is pretty nice about showing the different modes you have available.

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DangerousPie
Why are you trying to get permissions for browser notifications? That is
incredibly annoying and immediately makes me distrust the site.

~~~
moonka
It's so frustrating the number of websites that ask for this when you land on
their page now days. It reminds me of the bad old days of popups.

------
supernes
Flight search UI is janky as fuck, recommended I spend €4,000 on a hotel for a
six night "budget" trip, and the FOMO notifications are infuriating. Hard
pass.

------
Freak_NL
It looks nice, but it feels a bit anachronistic to exclusively focus on air
travel in 2018 considering the environmental impact of aeroplanes.
Recommending flights from Schiphol (Amsterdam) to nearby Brussels or London
without showing more eco-friendly alternatives (Thalys and Eurostar, or even
ferries) is a bit disappointing.

Travel does not necessarily mean taking a flight somewhere (especially in
Europe).

~~~
icebraining
Agreed, that's exactly what I've been felt is missing. I'm not sure about
flights+hotels, but for flights alone the tools already existed (Adioso,
Google Flights).

Alas, I still haven't found any that let me do the same for trains and buses.
GoEuro already lets you search, but you have to choose a specific destination.

~~~
Freak_NL
Cheap buses shouldn't be too hard with the proliferation of Flixbus etc.
(Amsterdam → Berlin starts at €29), but as a 200cm Dutchman travelling by
coach definitely does not fall within my definition of an acceptable mode of
travel for leisure (neither does flying for that matter).

Finding cheap train fairs is indeed a puzzle sometimes! It helps a lot to have
some familiarity with the major European train companies, the major high-speed
connections, and how to book the discounted tickets in advance (incidentally,
Amsterdam → Berlin starts at €39,90 when booked two months in advance). Of
course seat61.com is useful too as a general source of information.

What I really miss is a tool that shows me destinations that can be
comfortably reached by a combination of day-time and sleeper trains on dates
that still have discount tickets available. Nothing beats waking up early in
the morning in Vienna or Munich in a sleeper train; it's like getting a free
day of travel, and you arrive fairly well-rested instead of weary from travel.
I'm not doing anything useful in my sleep (besides sleeping), so I might as
well spend that time travelling.

------
tmoravec
Seeing this picture for one of the European capitals is funny:
[https://d19wm5yhteu8df.cloudfront.net/destination/images/att...](https://d19wm5yhteu8df.cloudfront.net/destination/images/attachments/000/000/097/large/slovakia.jpg?1503758567)
. Slovaks will find it less amusing I think.

Also, when I click the picture (it's for Bratislava), I see mismatched cities:

    
    
        Flights to Bratislava
        (Flights from Prague (PRG) to Vienna (VIE))
    

Looks like there's still some QA to do.

~~~
dotancohen
It's not our capital, but Haifa with some quarter million people has places
like that right in the middle of the city. Small isolated house on a hill,
dirt road and all.

~~~
V-2
It's not about that such places can't exist, just whether they are
representative of the destination

------
jonballant
SkyScanner is still the king when searching for flights coupled with the
"Explore" option which will return the cheapest flight destinations. You can
also simply search for a country such as "Greece" and the results will rank
the cheapest airports from your departure.

When including other travel options such as Trains, Buses (Flixbus), GoEuro
shows these methods, but without the "Explore" capability.

SkyScanner just announced the ability to include train travel which hopefully
will be a marriage of these technologies.

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/skyscanner-adds-train-
trav...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/skyscanner-adds-train-travel-
booking-starting-in-uk/)

~~~
pouetpouet
to compare multiple modes and even combine them
[https://www.rome2rio.com/](https://www.rome2rio.com/) is great

------
doughj3
Why must the search be constrained by dates? If I'm providing a start
location, and a budget, I'd like to see options for travel regardless of dates
- indeed I'd hope this would allow for more flexibility to stay within the
budget.

~~~
bpatel576
I've always wondered this myself. Wouldn't travel companies want to open this
information up? It seems like it would be a good use of price discrimination.

------
V-2
2018 and no Unicode support? _" Gdańsk Lech Wałęsa Airport (GDN)"_ shows as _"
Gda?sk Lech Wa??sa Airport (GDN)"_ in the _" what's your home base"_ box.

------
isostatic
Correctly identified my local airport (Manchester), however failed to
recognise my local currency (GBP).

Hilarious costs too for a "budget", and a default of 10 days away isn't
spontaneous. My shortest short-distance flight booking was 82 minutes, my
shorted long haul was 18 hours (for work), and 3 days (for leisure)

------
spiraldancing
My dos centavos ... Running NoScript, giving full js permission to the primary
domain and all (apparently) relevant 2ndary domains, home page still doesn't
resolve.

If you need google, facebook and pinterest just to display a landing page, I'm
never gonna use your site.

------
boffinism
For me it's an immediate turnoff if my browser tells me a site wants to show
notifications. A notification means a site wants the right to bug me for my
attention when I want to be doing something else. I can think of about 1 site
that I think deserves that right. Especially because most content sites want
to abuse that right to pull your attention back if you forgot to close the tab
after you were done. So I always hit 'Block', and then I feel less warm about
the site for asking.

Ditto the annoying Intercom popup that takes up way too much screen real
estate. If I want to ask a question, I'll come to you.

It may be just me, but I suspect a lot of HN is has similar grumpiness levels
about this sort of thing.

~~~
casperc
Same for the “18 people are currently looking at this route”.

I know a lot of travel sites do it, but I don’t see how it adds any value for
me to know that (if it is even true)

~~~
clon
This is a dark pattern akin to booking.com, to create time pressure for you,
not provide actual value.

If the latter were true, then sometimes it should say "You are the only one
looking at this hotel. Take your time!"

But no. Travelling to the most obscure places across Asia I have NEVER seen
anything but hordes people looking at my hotel in Kampong Cham. Probably
different dates too.

I am willing to bet it is derived from /dev/urandom adjusted to the size of
the establishment.

~~~
bauerd
>Travelling to the most obscure places across Asia I have NEVER seen anything
but hordes people looking at my hotel in Kampong Cham

Haha, this is so relatable. Not a long time ago I arrived at my "high in
demand, better book RIGHT NOW" guesthouse somewhere in Mondul Kiri Province
and had to wake up personnel in their hammocks. Turns out they had no bookings
for some days …

------
pwenzel
I love the ability to search departures from my home city. When I change it
from "1 Passenger" to "2 Passengers", it would be helpful if the price
reflected the total cost of 2 passengers.

------
beefield
What I would like to get is a travel search engine for which you give you give
origin, destination and luggage specifications (how many pieces, weight and
special luggages). Then the system compares total cost and time for the
journey, not only flights taking into account the special luggage costs but
train, rental cars etc. Ideally then one click shopping for all of the
required connections.

~~~
rplnt
I'd be love to have a unified train search and purchasing for Europe. Search
is fine, purchasing is a mess. Especially because you can buy the same ticket
from multiple different places for very different prices.

------
tcmb
Some quick feedback:

1\. You seem to be missing SXF, Berlin's Schönefeld Airport.

2\. Once that's in, It would be nice to just enter the city, in case I don't
mind which airport I'm flying from.

3\. The top result was traveling from Berlin to Berlin...

4\. I'd like to be able to specify 'fuzzy' departure and arrival times. For
when I want a trip that fits within my budget, but am flexible with regards to
when I travel.

~~~
rockostrich
This is shameless self-promotion, but if you have an iOS device the Hopper app
has a feature that lets you watch flight prices for flexible dates/length of
stays/destinations and will send you a notification when there's a deal for
any of those things.

Disclaimer: I work for Hopper

------
solatic
Quick bug report: when accessing the site from Israel, the footer's "Nearby
Airports" section includes:

* Ramon Air Base (no civilian flights)

* Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport (Israeli/Lebanese border is closed)

* Damascus International Airport (Israeli/Syrian border is closed)

Simply asking "what's within X radius" is not a sufficiently robust algorithm
for this problem.

------
tomgreen000
Like the overall idea. One important feedback - needs the ability to specify a
'departure' city not just airport. E.g. London has 5 main airports, and most
people would be able to fly from any of these. An umbrella search that is
"London" and aggregates across all the airports for the city is key.

~~~
seszett
You were showing as shadowbanned for some reason.

I would add that rather than a city, I would like to be able to specify a
general area, or a list of airports. From my place, I don't care much if I
must depart from Amsterdam, Paris or Brussels, and London is fine as well if
it's cheaper. Every time I look for flights, it gets tedious to try every of
these departure locations to check the flights I can take.

~~~
tomgreen000
huh, is there any way to find out why you were shadowbanned? some kind of
request for information process?

Is this something which applies to my whole user account, or just this
particular comment got flagged up?

Maybe questions I should send to the mods really.

~~~
seszett
Well, this comment was greyed out as well (I clicked "vouch" for both) so it
looks like it's something with your account.

I think I'd send an email to the mods, as I have no idea what got you flagged.

------
borne0
It's been a while since I worked with anything air travel related but why do
all the flight search engine UIs operate very similarly? Is it just because
it's the best way to do it or are these booking engines still tied to the GDS
systems (Sabre, Amadeus, etc)?

~~~
ericgrigorian
I'm working on a travel web app right now and sadly it's still tied to GDS
unless you want to affiliate link your users out to some other site.

------
creichenbach
Selecting a list of airports, or an area, or city with distance range would be
nice. From where I live, there are multiple airports about the same distance
away, and I don't care much which one I use; but it might make a huge
difference due to different airlines.

------
imonroe
Excellent idea, but I couldn't make it work in Chrome. I got empty results,
unexpected UI weirdness, stuff that never showed up. If you can make it work,
it'll be my new favorite thing, but it's not there yet.

------
dyeje
I don't see anything that sets this service apart from flight and hotel
aggregators. I was hoping it would be for flash deals or alertnative / thrifty
vacation ideas. Instead it seems more like a worse Kayak.

------
peterbraden
The deals seem particularly expensive and the site in general is very slow.

------
m90
An issue I hit: while the geolocation correctly located me in Berlin, the
first suggestion for a trip will be Berlin itself, which is kind of not what I
expected.

------
mindhash
I built a business travel app a couple of years back.

I think budget filter is not enough to create enough value as most people set
a budget for entire trip and not just travel. If you could crowd source data
of avg expense for taxi, and stuff then this could get really interesting.

In our case we could map project budget for travel to trips using historical
data(not so accurate but good for ballpark)

------
dawnerd
Can't open result in new tab, slow loading, and prices that are way higher
than they would be if I searched on my own. Not really sure whats the use
case. Google flights does a lot of this and does it fast. I can view the whole
world and estimated prices on the fly. Also needs an airline filter.

Also no results when clicking through a listing.

------
dshuang
Congratulations on getting as far as you have. There is plenty of actionable
feedback from HN.

What are you prioritizing for your next release? I would recommend including
the most often repeated UX complaints from this "Show HN". Iterate quickly and
get another round of feedback. Keep up the momentum.

------
notoriousjpg
Neat idea. Does anyone know how these relatively small operations all have the
flight and hotel search API integrated? My understanding was that flight
commission's are quite low, and unless you have serious traffic it's not
profitable to run these types of sites?

~~~
splonk
Flight commissions are tiny. Hotel commissions are not - probably in the 10%
range off the top for smaller operators.

------
sct202
The flights seem quite a bit more expensive than what I am used to seeing
between major cities.

------
goda90
I try a $1000 for two based from the local regional airport and all I get are
the cities with the two international airports that are ~2 hours drive away.
We usually drive to those for flights anyway because they are so much cheaper.

------
nkkollaw
Cool, but it's "on a budget" for the States.

In Europe, I can go from cold to the beach with EUR15 with Ryan Air, and
AirBnB for as low as EUR20/night in a decent apartment in many towns.

That's on a budget European style! :-)

~~~
icebraining
Agreed. I've spent a weekend in Paris, and the whole thing (travel by bus +
two nights stay + 2 museum tickets) cost me less than their minimum budget.

------
Xenos_Ender
A minor UI suggestion to improve information availability.

[https://imgur.com/a/5paZy](https://imgur.com/a/5paZy)

How am I supposed to know if I am interested in "Monteg.."?

------
tasuki
What a great idea!

Curiously, first recommended city to visit is the one I set as the home base.

Also, when going for eg two weeks, it might be interesting to suggest to spend
the first and second weeks in different places.

~~~
wpietri
Indeed, a great idea. And I have the same issue.

On the one hand, since I do live in San Francisco, taking a "staycation" is
not a terrible idea. It might be fun to live like a tourist. But the first 5
options for me are 1) San Francisco, 2) Oakland, 3) Sacramento, 4) San Jose,
and 5) Reno. For a site that is promising me exotic adventure, leading things
that are so quotidian is a disappointment. Sure, put in the staycation
options, but rank them lower.

I eventually just switched off the hotels and looked at flights only, as I
wasn't confident that the algorithm would do as good a job of picking a hotel
as I would.

------
philfrasty
Can someone enlighten me what the „on a budget“ in the title means? Do they
have some special deals? Feels like a booking.com with a „take me anywhere“
button on first look.

~~~
Cenk
You can set your max budget on the search

~~~
philfrasty
ok, not a native speaker, thought "on a budget" refers to cheap/saving
money/low in price.

~~~
ghaff
You are correct. Most of us are "on a budget" when we travel in the sense that
we have certain price ranges in mind even if we tend to prioritize saving time
over $$ and stay in fairly nice places. Budget travel or traveling on a budget
carries the implication that you're looking for cheaper options like buses,
hostels, free attractions, no-frills airlines, etc. Think the original Lonely
Planet demographic (though not any longer).

------
marpstar
Site literally just keeps telling me to up my budget. Apparently nothing fun
to do when you're flying out of DBQ.

------
kowdermeister
Bugreport: the search list disappears after a while. Maybe to load a new
result set? I didn't wait for it.

------
bpatel576
I would like a feature where I could add a group of people that are traveling
from different areas.

------
zoba
I love this! I would really like a map view that shows all the destinations in
the search.

------
DenisM
See also: Scott’s Cheap Flights. Daily flash ticket sales to a random place in
the world.

No affiliation.

------
SlowBro
Right side is cut off on my iPhone 6s (iOS 11.2.6) in verical orientation.

------
kerberos84
I don't like it when a website tries to load tons of javacripts.

------
elvirs
when selecting JFK as airport the first result was NYC. why would I want to
stay at NYC if I already selected the airport looking for places to go to

------
Ritsuko_akagi
so many wrong images of the destinations. Off by continents.. Does not incite
confidence

------
ngvrnd
doesnt render properly in firefox.

