Unfortunately, that was then and this is now. Several of the airlines have dropped out of participating in flight comparison sites, and those that do apparently pay staggeringly little per referral. This is greatly eroded the usefulness of Hipmunk and similar sites, and taken away the motivation for anyone to pressure airlines to participate. Why bother when the most you can win is a tiny sliver?
I wish there is a way to simply pay a little money to get a comprehensive high quality comparison of all available flights from all airlines. I don't want AI, I don't want a travel agent to do it for me. I most definitely don't want to visit multiple airline websites and try to manually compare the offerings. I just want to see all of the different ways to get from point A to point B, in a well engineered graphical representation, all at once so I can quickly and effectively choose the best fit. I would love if there was a way to simply pay some dollars to do so.
You plug in your cities and dates, and you get an 80x25 screen with the raw data in an easy-to-read (once you're used to it) tabular view.
Of course, that only works if by "some dollars" you meant like $25,000/year. :)
What I think you’re asking for already exists. You didn’t mention price, which makes a big difference, but price aside, route data is available in both raw and GUI form. Check out flightconnections.com for a GUI tool.
Price is what consumers care about and without a perfectly efficient (or regulated or monopolized) market, there will never be a single source of all prices for all routes. This doesn’t exist for food, clothing or many genuine commodities.
Someone else replied with a link to ITAs white-paper that discusses the difficulty of the problem you’ve described. But, that only considers cash flights; what about fast trains, frequent flier miles, buying and using points, credit card bonuses, best rate guarantees, combining low cost-carriers, charter airlines, cargo flights, consolidator deals, local deals, company benefits, etc.
It’s a huge market that feels like it should be commoditized but is actually quite differentiated with significant barriers to entry.
My personal experience at Flightfox is overseeing the booking of travel for more than 60,000 people using travel websites rather than traditional GDSs (Global Distribution Systems - what travel agencies and online travel agents use). Our team has used most of the websites mentioned here and never relies on just one.
Most coders here could build a simple tool to make their searches much more effective and efficient:
* Accept date/route/class input, like “10SEP DEN-FRA first”
* Open tabs to 5-10 of the best and most varied travel websites
* Skim the results and book
If I had to choose 5 flight websites for such a tool: Kayak, Google, Orbitz, Skyscanner and Momondo.
Given this, you may wonder what’s the point of Flightfox. We started with a pure focus on travel hacks (much more advanced than searching 5 OTAs), but we now do our best work managing travel for businesses. For consumers, we can only use one skill: saving money. For businesses, we can become their entire travel department and put everything we know into practice. Not just saving many $1000s/month, but helping with finance strategy, loyalty programs, upgrades, 24/7 emergency support, super-cheap business/first, etc.
It's a difficult problem, for sure, but I'd like to be able to specify, for example, 1 checked bag, minimum 33" legroom, and then have the prices include checked baggage and any seat upgrade costs (if necessary, based on the airline's plane configuration).
The 'sort by agony' thing is great, but after getting stuck in a tiny seat sometime last year, I now pay close attention to seat size/pitch (I'm 6'0", my knees were on the back of the seat in front of me if I sat as far back in my seat as I could). I would have definitely loved to have Hipmunk rank 'agony' high on that one.
https://www.google.com/flights/
Skyscanner sometimes
More recently, I've begun using Google Flights in more of an "explorer" capacity. Enter my starting city and travel dates. Then I use their map to see how much it is to fly to different places in the world. Perfect when I don't have a plan
* Awful, text list of flights. I want a way to visualize the options, to wisely choose from many options.
* Subset of the airlines. Google still has Delta at least, which has disappeared from Hipmunk and some others. But no Southwest.
I'd be willing to pay a little more, if the flight wasn't like being in a metal torture container or the cleanliness levels were so poor that I get to my destination with an immediate illness. But right now I can only see that some flights are more expensive than others and no idea why. And I have to go off of my average experience with an airline to guess if the flight will be pleasant or miserable (except for United domestic, that's always miserable).
They also didn't put any serious energy in to markets outside the US (much less brand awareness in Europe) and were late to monetise supplementary channels like hotels and car hire.
Regardless, it's true that flight search is a tough game. Big incumbents, tight margins, crazy web of legacy madness behind the scenes (tech and business side).
I use:
1. Expedia. Recently had a problem that they never issued me an eticket. Had to confirm with the airline directly that I actually have a ticket!
2. Vayama. Really like them. Good tool. Can be time consuming to change a ticket.
3.Book directly at airline. God idea, especially considering the problems laid out at #2. Not. Never book a ticket in a 3rd world country directly at the airline. I learned it the hard way!
4. Dohop. Quite unknown but I really like it. Use it a lot recently.
5. Swoodoo for the EU
And yeah, googles ITA.
Unless it's a global airline (British Airways, Air France, KLM, Emirates, etc.) always book with an airline in your native country via codeshare. At least that way, you have some recourse via normal consumer protection measures in the event things go wrong.
At https://kiwi.com we combine flights ourselves instead of just taking the combinations from the big guys, you should try it out with a few queries. Not being limited to airline agreements when connecting flights can really drive the price down or make obscure routes viable.
Concorde — Discover cheap flights to hundreds of destinations worldwide: https://concorde.io
Relied on their price forecasting tip on one flight the other month. It advised waiting until the last few days to buy, and that paid off.
* In a second-tier city - no single airline has good options, but by comparing all of them I can usually find a only-mildly-lousy flight.
* Not especially price sensitive, I usually pay up to 2x the cheapest possible fare, to get a better schedule, seats, etc.
This sounds like something for the Justice Department to get involved in.
The problem, of course, is the commoditization of the airline industry. Leisure travelers are, at this point, loss leaders that fill empty seats for their real business: consultants and sales people who travel 50-100+ flights a year. The industry is overly reliant on an increasingly shrinking segment of business travelers who fly on higher-fare tickets and often on short notice, so it does everything it can to make that kind of travel very painful UNLESS you do it all with a single airline and use full-fare tickets. If you thought air travel was unbearable on your last vacation, imagine how bad it is to do that 3 or 4 times a week -- so you try to consolidate to get a few perks like early boarding, lounge access or first class upgrades (nobody pays for domestic first class -- they're almost always loyalty upgrades).
So the real problem is that the airlines don't care at all about your $200 flight to Tampa to visit granny. They have to fill the seats to pay off the leases on the airplanes, but they make almost zero margin off of you because leisure travelers are so price-conscious. Business travelers are willing to pay an extra $300 for the ability to cancel their ticket on short notice, and often carry less baggage and cost less to serve. So the airlines try to lock in those types of customers with loyalty programs (which are so scaled back as to be nearly worthless unless you fly over 125 segments a year -- roughly 3 flights a week, every week of the year that's not a holiday), by making it harder to comparison shop, etc. and screw the little guys.
The product is absolutely awful. Like just stunningly bad.
Pretty amazing to find flights to Europe from LAX for under $500 for many destinations in Europe and Asia. Sub-$400 for some destinations too
20 years and no equity has taught me that next time I do a start up, I want restricted stock, not options, with an exercise price of $0.01. Or founder stock. In fact, I think the only way to do a startup is a founder (unless you're just starting out.)
One of the reasons I'm not bitter is that the VC industry is dying. IT's not obvious yet, but like the headphone jack, its days are numbered.
So, If an engineer gives up $70k a year in salary to work for a startup, the "options" should have an intrinsic value of $70k a year (the numbers that vest in that given year.) So should the RSUs. Anything less is cheating that engineer.
Those options or that stock should have the same participation as the venture capitalists. I will accept preferred having some narrow advantageous rights, but it should be only a few that are essential and make sense. Right now these deals are loaded down with double dipping that screws entrepreneurs because it is "standard practice "and "VCs need to cover their risk" -- but this is BS -- VCs have less risk. The VC is in many deals, the entrepreneur isn only one.
If anyone should get LPs it is engineers. So the company I'm founding next will have one class of stock, or if it has two it will be the founders and employees with preferred stock. (and sure VCs will balk, until they are desperate to get in on the deal-- but you should be raising money not when you have an idea or because you want to be able to pay yourself, but when your investors are desperate to get in on the deal. If that sounds unrealistic, then you're following the standard startup model, which is designed to screw founders, and now I'm getting circular so I'll get off this train.)
RSUs can be granted, with no cost, as a form of compensation. I think that's the better way to do it.
Options require an exercise price which is the source of a lot of hassle. For instance an early employee gets pushed out because someone wants his equity, so he has 90 days to come up with $35k/year (so $70k if he's been there 2 years) to exercise his options he's already effectively paid $70k a year (in lost salary) to get.
Options are very tenuous- they can be cancelled or adjusted in acquisitions (according to many terms) etc. RSUs have none of these problems. (Though the tax situation might be worse for them, but that's showing the IRS or the people who lobbied the IRS for the rules, setting it up to screw employees.)
I could go on.
Founder Shares are just shares with special rights for founders. Google and Facebook had them.
Hipmunk raised $55M over 7 rounds [1] and had 51 employees [2].
It became obvious that Hipmunk was never going to be a 100x growth company, and the industry is not headed in a positive direction for small companies (access to accurate data is increasingly a roadblock), so I'm guessing the investors were happy to get out before the value of the company was zero.
I'm sure the employees were given optional retention packages, and the executives likely compensated very well, but I wouldn't expect anyone got rich here.
Also -- I recently used Hipmunk (been using it for a few years now), but found that it didn't find deals that Chase's rewards portal found, which I thought was terribly odd (why would a rewards portal find better deals?).
I hope that the team had a nice exit, and that they continue to develop Hipmunk within Concur.
The investors will get a base hit, the employees, nothing.
The founders probably did OK, but they might have the same type of deal ($0 for their stock, except their retention is probably orders of magnitude better than any employee's).
The craziest routing.
Instead flying for USD 700 A->Destination or A->B>Destination Fly A->C>D>E>F>G>Destination
It's either that or book directly from the site if it involves doing something special (ex: award travel).