

Flightfox + AirBnb + Vayable - todsul
http://flightfox.com/blog/crowd-sourced-vacation

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jonemo
The Flightfox promo stories seem to come up on HN regularly. Last time I fell
for the bait and decided to try it out. Unfortunately, the experience as a
real user was nothing like what these advertisement blog posts imply. Here's
my Flightfox experience.

My main issue with these promo stories (the last one was for a round-the-world
trip if I remember correctly): They give you the idea that on Flightfox you
can post complex travel plans that are difficult to search for otherwise and
get good results. That's actually not true. The form you fill out to create a
"contest" is basically the same as the search form on any travel search
engine, in fact simpler. I tried finding an itinerary for me and my girlfriend
where the outgoing flights are to different destinations (Zurich and Berlin)
but we return together (from Berlin). Luckily, there is a comment field for
more complex specifications. Unluckily, the "experts" seem to ignore the
comments. Out of three suggested itineraries I ended up with, one didn't get
us to the places we asked for (and was more expensive than our own best
result), and one added flights I explicitly didn't ask for (and was more
expensive than our own best result).

In case you are wondering what the third result was: An amazingly cheap price
and a useful travel itinerary. You need to pay the finder's fee to see the
booking instructions by the "expert", so I did just that. The excitement
didn't last long: The expert must have misunderstood the Brussels Airlines
website because the price he quoted was for a different travel date. He kept
insisting that the deal exists even after I alerted Flightfox to the
situation. Ironically, Flightfox claimed to see the same cheap deal until I
sent in an annotated screenshot. Travel experts who don't understand the
standard pricing grid on travel websites don't have much expert cred in my
book...

In the end, I emailed Flightfox about the poor outcome that I paid $50 for.
After some back and forth they gave me a link through which I was supposed to
request a refund. That link didn't work. After writing them again, the link
worked and I got my money back. The time I spent replying to incorrect replies
from "experts" and annotating screenshots, however, is lost forever. The only
good thing I can say about Flightfox is that their support always replied very
quickly and professionally.

One final point on those promo stories: On their example contests, Flightfox
offers rewards of $500 and naturally get tens of results. I don't book my
travels on a PR budget and therefore don't have that much cash to spare for
finder's fees, which probably explains why I only received three results, all
of which were useless in one way or another. So be warned: If you want to get
as many and as good results as they do, you should be ready to put some cash
on the table.

I hope this helps a few other people here put the amazing Flightfox promo
stories into perspective. If you have cash and little time to research flights
yourself, Flightfox will probably work for you. Me cash-strapped grad student
is back to playing with Kayak, Orbitz & Co myself while waiting for the next
installment of travel porn to get voted up on HN.

~~~
laumac
Hi jonemo,

I spoke to the guys here and your contest was indeed a special case. It's true
we're not flexible enough to put two people traveling from different locations
on a single ticket/contest. But as you rightly pointed out, your comments
should have sufficed.

The second mistake on our end was misreading the issue and the third was our
new refund process, which unfortunately had issues during your refund. This
isn't an excuse, but your case really was a series of unfortunate events that
ended up affecting the same person, you.

In addition to the refund, I believe we also offered a free contest to win you
back.

All of that aside, we're trying our best to deliver the highest quality
results. It's not easy on a 2-sided platform, but our efforts are paying off.
Every day we save people $1000s; that's not a soundbite, we really do. We hold
these 'showcase' contests as a bit of fun for our experts and also to prove
out business hypotheses. Every now and then, a couple of contests like yours
slip through the cracks, but we do everything we can to re-gain your trust.

The last thing I want to clear up is your suggestion that we don't do complex
flights. That's simply not true. Your case was unfortunate, but it wasn't
really a complex flight. We do much much more complex itineraries involving
frequent flyer miles, pets, unusual luggage, etc.

Again, apologies for the poor experience and we'd be more than happy to pay
for future contests to regain your trust.

------
bwblabs
The AirBnB place for day 4-5 in Amsterdam is more than 100km (62 miles) away
(1:30 hour drive). The combination with the Vayable Nightlife like a local
experience in Amsterdam is hard, because if you take the public transport the
last train will leave around 23:00. I guess more sub optimal combinations are
chosen, nice idea but it won't work like advertised.

~~~
todsul
Hi bw, oops, an oversight. The accommodation in Amsterdam (the plane converted
into a living space) must have overwhelmed our good judgement. I suspect a
taxi would still fit within the budget, but certainly sub optimal as you
suggested.

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ph0rque
This should be a microsite, not a one-time promotion. It would let you
customize various things like where are you flying from, how many people, and
what your budget is like.

~~~
todsul
Hi ph0rque, we weren't sure this would work, so needed to test the experts
first. We're still not positive it will work at scale. With so many variables
and subjective customer preferences, the experts had quite a tough time.

In terms of the business, we're at a crossroads in this respect. We can either
A) go much deeper into flights, or B) venture sideways to do entire trips.
We're running a battery of these tests to provide the necessary data.

We thought the results would be interesting to anyone looking to take some
time off. We would never have come up with such thoughtful itineraries, so at
least for the FF team we'll plan full trips like this in future.

~~~
espadagroup
This reminded me a lot of what Wanderfly used to do: you tell them you were
interested in "Adventure" for X days under Y budget and it would crawl a bunch
of places and spit out a list of trips with the total costs flights included.
I thought it was brilliant and loved it. And then they changed into another
social travel tagging site of some sort.. Honestly I would gladly pay for what
you showed in your example, a list of awesome trips within the parameters set
by me. This is also similar to Jetsetter's Concierge service, which is
actually quite good, though for a set fee of like $295 or something.

~~~
newman314
Agreed.

I'm not into tour groups. I'm much more into going somewhere and having the
freedom to explore. At the same time, due to limited time available, I would
like to maximize my experiences once I do get somewhere.

I also would love some sort of service that is somehow able to look at my past
browsing behavior and remember/suggest places to go.

To elaborate, I see lot of places online that I think: "Man, that would be
cool to see someday". But when it comes time that I actually have an
opportunity to go somewhere, sometimes I forget about something I wanted to
see previously. Being able to solve that disconnect problem would be
fantastic.

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robryan
Has anyone here used flight fox? Did you get results that made it worth it?

To me it is interesting to see whether the NP hard routing and the incomplete
data of online flight search tools create a big enough gap for it to be
economical to pay someone to do it,

~~~
siganakis
I used it for a complicated round the world itinerary.

My first competition didn't get any takers ending with no flights, but I
contacted support and they re-ran it and I got about 8 different itineraries -
all cheaper than expected.

Funnily, there was $1000 to be saved by flying from Melbourne to St Lucia
(Carribean) via London (~15,000 miles) rather than via LA (~11,000 miles).
That made no sense to me at all!

~~~
cjrp
More airlines competing on the longer route = lower prices?

------
jeebus
How come every FlightFox post here feels like spam? :-(

~~~
todsul
Thanks jeebus; so kind of you. We're just a startup hacking travel using
humans vs machines. Empirically, folks here seem to enjoy our in-house tests.

~~~
lewispb
I enjoy your posts. More please.

------
nikunjk
Can you open the exact dates/flights/hotels to the public if we wanted to book
one for a fee?

~~~
todsul
Absolutely. Email support at flightfox and we can send you all the info. They
are all still mostly bookable, but the AirBnb room availability is most likely
to change.

