But maybe think about replacing the 4MB background video with a static image or something. It felt a bit overpowering for me (moves too fast) and it also doesn't scale right with the viewport leaving white text on a white background.
Ditch the video altogether. It is sluggish at best but also detracts from the material the user actually interacts with. And after a minute or so the jump back to the start of the loop is jarring. If they want the entire moving/sparkling water effect, use an animated pic with a transition effect between few frames rather than a full-motion videos.
My work laptop with an i5, 8GB memory, and typed characters lagged 5-10 seconds behind. I did an "asdf" check and though the browser had completely frozen it took so long to appear. The video is killing this site for me.
Thank you, we'll look for alternatives on the video ha :) Our mobile view also is a bit confusing at the moment so trying to make that look a bit better too!
I tried :
Lyon, France as Home (2017/05/02 as start date)
Tokyo Narita, Japan (7 days)
Osaka Kansai International, Japan (14 days)
Noumea Tontouta, New Caledonia (14 days)
This told me that "Something went wrong!
No valid route could be found for these destinations, please try another destination"
I added Paris, France with "0 days" as it's a typical stop when flying international from Lyon.
This gave me a result, but the first stop is Noumea and it says "$false - BOOK". The other destinations have a real price.
My route is weird though, does not seem very optimized (I fly around the world once, from France to New Caledonia and back, before going to Japan, which is on the way), but I guess that's another problem!
I had this as well. The home airport was London Gatwick, and the other entries were Bangkok, Khon Kaen, and Singapore.
It seemed to me that it couldn't find a route from London to Khon Kaen (Khon Kaen isn't an international airport), but interpreted that as a zero cost flight. The route it gave me was Gatwick -> Khon Kaen -> Bangkok -> Singapore and the cost for the whole thing was a fraction of what it should have been.
The way to make that route work, by the way, is to go Gatwick -> Bangkok -> Khon Kaen -> Bangkok -> Singapore (or throw Chiang Mai or Hat Yai into the mix). You can only reach Khon Kaen by air through internal flights in Thailand.
While not directly related to your problem with the website, consider taking the train (shinkansen) between Tokyo and Osaka. It is fast, convenient, and leaves and arrives from city center and can easily count as a "thing I did on vacation".
Actually my real intent was to fly to New Caledonia, and on the way there stop by Tokyo, and on the way back Osaka (I have family to visit in these three places).
But yes you are right about the train experience in Japan! I also tried a night bus from Tokyo to Osaka once when I was a student... leave it up to the Japanese to make that a great experience as well! Recommended if you're on a tight budget.
Oh wow! I was trying to write this myself last week, and got about halfway done before I realized that my credit card rewards booking system gave me different prices than Google :(
Major kudos on implementing the AirBNB search as well!
I had this other idea that if you want to get somewhere(B) and you don't mind visiting other places if the flights are really cheap, you can get from A to B spending couple of days in C and maybe even in D so that A -> C -> D -> B. It is easy to pair these flights in Europe, so that every flight will be <2hours and will cost 10-25$. I think I even started coding this, but ended up having not enough time, and brute-forcing this problem is sort of hard. Maybe there already is a ready app for that.
I don't understand why all this types of applications assume that a have a destination and dates. I'm very flexible and I can work remotely. Surprise me with the cheapest flight anywhere. Does this kind of app exist?
Discover Destinations does that. You input what kind of destinations your looking for (food, hiking, museums, etc.), and it'll show you the cheapest flights.
I use a combination of Google Flights and Skyscanner for that.
If you put a start airport into Skyscanner, you can tell it that your destination is anywhere, but you still have to pick a date. But it's a decent way of seeing where you can fly to cheaply.
Once you pick a destination, Google Flights lets you bring up a monthly view so that you can see which days are cheapest to fly (and sort/filter by things like flight time and price).
Google Flights also has explore functionality (IIRC, red dots are airports you can reach directly, grey dots are not), but it can be a bit hit and miss.
Not sure if you're in the UK but I recently started an e-mail alerts service for cheap, weekend flights. You can check it out at https://citybreakflights.com. You get weekly e-mails with different dates and destinations.
One option is something like https://www.jacksflightclub.co.uk/ where they'll send you notifications of surprisingly cheap flights to a variety of destinations.
This system needs to take in more scheduling constraints like if I need to be somewhere for specific dates, but am free to travel before and after.
I just booked a multi-city international trip like this a couple days ago and did quite a bit of searching to get a conveniently timed, low cost, direct flights. I was somewhat flexible about which cities I visited also.
"Flying short" or "Hidden City" is another tactic. Airlines don't like it, but it's not illegal. Can't check bags, and you may not want to associate your frequent flyer account.
That is, sometimes it's cheaper to book a flight with a connection, say LAX->ATL->MIA, and get off in ATL, than it is to pay for LAX->ATL.
I think skiplagged.com does this. Are you trying these as well?
my dad has been working out, and using the cheapest flight from A to B for over 50 years. And he's still very good at it. If you gave him an option to say "I want to get from A to B for the best price, I don't care much about the route, and I want it to take X days, suggest something to me" I'm sure he would be interested.
Seriously though I can't even imagine the logistics behind that one. Even if only fit and healthy people used the service there's so much that would need accounting for - air pressure within the plane even if we ignore the whole people are jumping out of a commercial jet
I was curious how does it compare with results from kiwi.com. I tried to fill in a few destinations (London -> Bangkok -> Seoul) and... it gave me no result. So I guess the need to fill in a precise date/number of days is a bit killer here. Having an interval ranges (or a tolerance +-one day) would make a difference.
SkySave finds you the cheapest route when visiting multiple destinations. So if you want to visit LA, New York and Miami and you're in London it'll tell you the cheapest route (ie. go from London to LA then NY then Miami and then back to London) and if you tried going first to NY and then LA etc. it could be a lot more expensive. You need to pick a result from the auto-suggestion dropdown and you just need to say how many days you want to stay at each place. We will be adding in tolerance though! Nice suggestion
Just made a quick try, and booy what such a good idea ! Question : I am french, and so filled Home with Paris, and destination with Los Angeles. I am getting fantastic prices, but only in the sense US -> FR. The service is only available for the US then ?
Thanks for trying it out and the feedback! It's available for any destination in the world. 'Home' is just the airport that you're starting out from and returning to. So for example, if you're in Paris and want to visit LA, New York and Miami it'll find the best way to go from Paris -> LA -> NY -> Miami -> Paris. Where LA, NY, Miami will be in the cheapest order. Or you could enter for destinations like, Beijing, Bangkok and Singapore.
You should let me specify only airport codes and you do the translation in the background... I went in and did SFO, IAD, LHR, DBX and assumed any travel site would understand where I wanted to go without clicking the dropdown entries
Used to handle that, not sure why not anymore. I'll definitely fix it up. I'm planning on making it so that it tries to guess what you mean (essentially first auto-suggestion) if you don't click on it.
It also makes it hard to disambiguate cities/airports. Entering "Portland" brings up two entries named "Portland, United States" (presumably Oregon and Maine) along with "Portland, Australia", but no way of telling which Portland in the U.S. is which.
i see white text with shadows on white background and there are three identical fields for Days, no idea what is their meaning, i guess duration of trip, but not sure why there are three of them
Unfortunately it's displaying very strange in browsers and not preservring the two columns. It's supposed to go destination, duration, destination, duration etc.
it's displayed properly now, though still don't understand purpose of that horrible quality top background image
also does my home take into consideration nearby airports, because i was not offered options about it, being too strict about it it's not good choice if i can just take train 2-3 hours away and have much more or cheaper options and i can enter multiple home airports it should be filled in home filed before entering any text there in background as example
You need to make sure you pick a destination from the suggestion box (click on it), enter the number of days for each destination and click the '-' button if you're not using one of the destination fields. Sorry if that's a bit confusing, currently improving that so it's a little bit more lenient :)
EDIT: We're pushing out a fix now that should resolve this, you can now have empty fields for destinations and it'll just include the filled out ones.
I did pick destination boxes from the drop down each time, and I entered the number of days each time.
As a side question, what happens if I want to start in one place, and finish somewhere else? Suppose, for example, I want Paris -> Atlanta -> Sydney -> London : is that possible?
If this works properly and well I can see that I would not only use it, but would pay money for it, but at the moment, for me, it doesn't seem to be working.
FWIW, I'm well-known in my companies for breaking anything that people think is ready to go and suitable for deployment to muggles, so these teething problems are to be expected.
That's very bizarre that you got an error then! Could you try it again please, oh and make sure to set a date a bit into the future as otherwise might not have as many flights available.
Wonderful suggestion :) I'll make it so you can input a different final stop to you're starting point. We want to keep it free and potentially monetise via affiliate sales and show people how much we've saved them, perhaps some would be generous to donate 1% of the amount they saved? Who knows!
We'll definitely be fixing it up though, still a bit rough around the edges haha.
If you're flying to multiple destinations it matters which destination you visit first, which one second and so forth. SkySave tells you which route is the cheapest. For example, it can be a lot cheaper to fly London -> New York -> Miami -> Los Angeles -> London than if you were to go to LA first and then Miami. Does that make more sense?
OK, that really wasn't clear, so here are some specific suggestions:
The video under the white text often makes it difficult to read the catchphrase. I'd suggest editing the video to reduce the brightness by 60% (No doubt others will disagree);
The text at the top does not, to me, communicate this idea that you are choosing multiple destinations, and that the site will try all the orderings to find the optimal itinerary;
It says:
Discover the cheapest route to fly for your next holiday
You are using the word "route" in a way that doesn't communicate to me the idea you've mentioned above;
It says:
If you're visiting multiple destinations it can be on average 30% cheaper to fly a specific route as opposed to others
Again, you're using the word "route" in a very odd way.
So, concrete suggestion to highlight the problem, I'd say something like:
You choose the places to visit - we'll arrange your itinerary to minimise the costs.
looks like a nice project. If I can have one suggestion:
offer the option to enter a fixed date for one of the destinations (instead of the start date ).
Use case: If I am flying for a business trip to a given destination, the dates are pretty much set there. There is another place close by that I would like to visit and I don't care too much if it will be before or after the business trip, but the business trip needs to happen on selected dates.
But maybe think about replacing the 4MB background video with a static image or something. It felt a bit overpowering for me (moves too fast) and it also doesn't scale right with the viewport leaving white text on a white background.