
Show HN: AirHelp flight scanner finds all past flights and checks for eligibility - henrikzillmer
https://www.airhelp.com/en/ahlp/travels/
======
dankohn1
A quick pitch for Tripit. Although you can let Tripit scan your email, you can
instead just forward airline and hotel receipts to it and it automatically
parses the data. It then puts it in an iCal calendar that you can import to
Google Calendar. Personally, I use a Zapier to copy the Tripit calendar
entries into my main calendar so that my colleagues won't try to book me into
meetings while I'm on flights.

Finally, Openflights.org is an awesome site that imports and visualizes your
Tripit data.

[https://openflights.org/user/dankohn1](https://openflights.org/user/dankohn1)
In the last 7 years, I've flown 44 days in the air for 428,989 miles which is
1.796x of the way to the moon (i.e., I'm almost home!).

More travel info
[https://www.dankohn.com/travel](https://www.dankohn.com/travel)

~~~
size12font
Hi,

Johnny here, I work in product @airhelp.

We love Tripit! We love them so much we have a partnership with them:
[https://travelupdate.boardingarea.com/tripit-airhelp-
partner...](https://travelupdate.boardingarea.com/tripit-airhelp-partnership/)

And originally we had a Tripit integration. But we decided to remove it for
launch because we ran into a few bugs (on our side).

That is a super cool hack with Zapier, thanks for sharing. I'm currently using
Fantastical 2 (on of my fav products) with connection to Google Cal. Gmail
already populates my calendar with the flight times but unfortunately not the
travel time to the airport. Maybe I should add some kind of buffer for all my
travel events.

-jq

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miljank
I'm not sure if the app works as advertised. I submitted my claim and 4 weeks
later their team is still reviewing it. A question to their support team has
not been answered for 2 weeks. All in all, it looks like a scam to get inbox
access.

------
Integer
IMO, the legal network and a reputation of always suing airlines are the most
important things in this line of business. For example, if you are seriously
delayed while departing from an EU airport, you are entitled to a
compensation. Inside the EU this mostly works, but consider the case when you
live outside the EU and the non-EU airline basically tells you: "sue us". I'm
currently using the services of one of their competitors to try and extract
250 euros from one small airline that thinks that because they're outside the
EU they can delay a flight for two days and not pay the legal amount.

------
chinathrow
That company does offer this for one reason:

"We’re here to end your flying woes once and for all. We help air passengers
around the world secure compensation for delayed, canceled, or overbooked
flights. We’re also the first service to provide a free map with your personal
travel stats in just one click."

Giving a third party access to my mails next to my ISP: no way.

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colinbartlett
There a bunch of services like this that scan emails and offer something
valuable enough in return that they might be worthwhile... Earny is another
one.

I really like the idea of them but I just wish there was just some better
security model. What if granting read access to Gmail could give you an
auditable log of every email read through the API? That way, services like
this could prove that they are being responsible with their access rights.

~~~
pintxo
How is it going to help to know _after_ the fact, that they are not
trustworthy?

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
It helps future users avoid the service. Although, I think a better solution
would be if Gmail etc. had an API where you could whitelist based on email
address. Then these scanning services could ask permission per email address.

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kiwijamo
Must have a Google, Hotmail or Outlook account. Yeah, nah.

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hiroprot
I filed my first claim with AirHelp a few weeks back. It’s “sent to airline”
now, so we’ll see what happens.

I don’t think that I’ll hook this directly into my email, but if the one-off
service works well, I’m sold.

------
gazoakley
Any chance of support for KAYAK or AwardWallet? Both offer a TripIt style
forward booking email to add to an itinerary - I think AwardWallet offers an
API for access to account data.

------
Cenk
I wish I could import my flights from App in the Air

~~~
Bayram
Hi. We actually check your past flights for eligibility and send you an email
with compensation amount. Then you can use AirHelp or contact airline directly
to file for compensation. Hope it helps

Bayram, CEO @App in the Air

P.S. We've got API to access one's flights (with permission, of course):
[http://docs.appintheair.apiary.io](http://docs.appintheair.apiary.io)

~~~
Cenk
Hi Bayram! I loe App in the Air, have used it for years now. Top 4% of
travellers 2016! :) I just wanted to test AirHelp’s maps feature really, not
for the compensation but because it looked cool.

~~~
Bayram
Cenk, oh wow - cool! thanks for being with us and please let us know if any
questions or feature requests.

------
dawnerd
Yeah absolutely not giving access to scan my emails. Sorry. I don’t care what
service you have, if you can’t provide an alternative way to get the data I’m
out.

Also where’s your privacy policy? I don’t see it. You’re also not the first
service to show a map of flights I’ve take. There’s been services around for
YEARS.

[http://www.jetitup.com/](http://www.jetitup.com/)
[https://my.flightradar24.com/](https://my.flightradar24.com/)
[https://www.flightmemory.com/](https://www.flightmemory.com/)
[https://openflights.org/](https://openflights.org/)
[https://www.jetlovers.com/](https://www.jetlovers.com/)

To name a few.

~~~
8_hours_ago
Their privacy policy is here:
[https://www.airhelp.com/en/privacy/](https://www.airhelp.com/en/privacy/)

I don't see anything specifically about what information they collect from
scanned emails.

~~~
dawnerd
My biggest question is: why isn't it linked on the homepage? (along with
virtually any other company information).

~~~
8_hours_ago
It is linked from their homepage:
[https://www.airhelp.com/en/](https://www.airhelp.com/en/)

The linked page
([https://www.airhelp.com/en/ahlp/travels/](https://www.airhelp.com/en/ahlp/travels/))
is a terrible landing page and doesn't have much information or a link to the
homepage. The homepage is much more informative about what they offer, which
is more than just a map of your past flights.

~~~
dawnerd
Oh, I just assume their linked page was their homepage. That's pretty bad on
their part.

------
antihero
No way. E-mails are incredibly sensitive data, you are not getting access. I'd
consider using this if I could manually put my flight details in, but F-U-C-K
T-H-A-T.

What reason do I have to trust you at all?

What if you got hacked?

Plus I don't use any of these emails. This is an awful idea.

------
henrikzillmer
Ever wondered how many flights you’ve taken or how much money you’ve spent on
tickets? With AirHelp’s new travel map you can find out. From now on you'll
know EVERYTHING about your traveling habits, such as: \- how many flights
you've taken \- how many countries you've been to \- how many days you've
spent in the sky \- how many km/miles traveled \- how much money you've spent
on flight tickets \- how much time you've spent watching safety demonstrations
\- how much time you've waited in line at security and everything displayed in
the dopest dope travel map!!!

And here's the kicker! If you've been on a delayed flight that is entitled to
compensation, we'll automatically let you know and offer to claim the
compensation for you. You'll NEVER miss out on compensation again because
AirHelp automatically got your back.

Finding 10-12 flight itineraries among tens of thousands of other emails is
more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack. Therefore, the first step
of the process is selecting all emails that potentially contain an itinerary.
We achieve that by an algorithm that combines some good-old-rules with a
machine learning piece based on Extreme Gradient Boosting model. The next step
is extracting all flight details from emails. In order to do that effectively,
we use a set of our home-grown parsers and partner with 2 vendors to process
less popular formats. This way our coverage and accuracy is higher than what
any of our competitors can provide, and is paralleled only by Google’s Inbox.
Even before the official launch of our email parser, our systems were
processing around 500,000 emails every week. It meant that at peak times quite
powerful machines were needed to keep up with the demand. Anticipating the
official launch, in order to drive down the costs the critical parts of the
system got re-written to the Go language, and today’s launch was handled from
one of the smallest AWS EC2 instances. Currently we repurposed the tools
created for building itinerary parsers to construct software for verifying
other documents sent to AirHelp by claimants and extracting from them
necessary data.

~~~
arethuza
"Ever wondered how many flights you’ve taken"

What I would pay for is something that would make me forget the amount of time
I've spent in airports and on crappy flights over the years.

~~~
size12font
Well ... sadly I've spent about 29 hours in security lines...

[https://app.airhelp.com/shared-
stats/22d49947a0bf239c931b7d2...](https://app.airhelp.com/shared-
stats/22d49947a0bf239c931b7d2827e31dc7?lang=en) #mytravels

-jq

PS. I work in product at AirHelp

