I've always hated the fact that all major travel sites work based on the assumption that you already know exactly when and where you're going, rather than at least giving you the option to explore your options.
Full disclosure: I used to work at TripAdvisor on flights.
Needless to say, the number of combinations of these variables precludes doing any kind of exhaustive search (especially since you're being charged per query). And availability is constantly changing, so your results are potentially out-of-date the instant you receive them.
Given these restrictions, the only way to support such broad-ranging queries as "where can I go for less than $1000?" is to cache results from previous searches and attempt to guess at the answer. Which is why, when you start narrowing down date ranges and choosing more obscure airports, the results quickly become so sparse as to be useless.
i use it when i'm hiring sports officials, to find the ones that would be the cheapest to fly in. never really considered how useful it would be for others.
i feel dumb as hell, looking at this and seeing what i could've done :*-(
For example, here are all of the flights from SFO: http://www.skyscanner.com/flights-from/sfo/cheapest-flights-...
But otherwise definitely damn cool
P.S. ITA Software Matrix is good at this if you have a list of places, but not for random destinations.
http://www.skyscanner.net/flights-from/us/august-2010/august...
This means that results are likely to be current and complete on popular routes, but far less so on the long tail.
*edit: From the two ITA contract that I know/have heard about anyways.
Personally, this thread is eye opening because I work on a similar product. I saw this when it came out (a couple weeks ago maybe). My first impression wasn't that it was particularly impressive, but apparently I just don't know what's cool for users in a travel product =P
plus they might have robots crawling popular searches at different dates.
so it benefits to be around very large hubs like NYC, but if you're out in the country you may not be so lucky.
http://adioso.com/au/syd-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html http://adioso.com/us/jfk-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html
http://adioso.com/se/stockholm-to-beach.html
One thing I would love to see is adding larger/fuzzier destination areas such as "the tropics", "the carribean", "the mediterranean", "Africa", "South America", or "Mexico".
ANZ rocks!
P.S. I'd buy one-way Rarotonga ticket in no time... the problem is, I'm at the other side of the Globe from AKL :)
I worked for them for 4.5 years as the architect with their Innovations & Ventures team. Very cool place to work.
I do notice that it doesn't add extra destinations as you zoom in, though. For instance I can zoom in on Colorado as much as I like and it won't tell me that I can fly to Denver (even though there's probably twenty flights a day). Nor will it give me a price for Paris, but Nadi, Chennai and Oaxaca are much higher priorities.
So if you're after a cheap holiday it's much more important to fly somewhere where you can get a cheap hotel than to get a cheap flight. Hopefully they'll add hotels to the calculation in the future.
Besides, saving money on a hotel is mostly a matter of deciding how awful a place you're willing to put up with. You don't get that option with airfares.
And you do actually get the awful trade-off with planes in Europe as well, you get budget airlines like Ryan Air which many people don't travel on because they're so bad.
I never care where I go. The more random the better.
I wish they could just plan the full trip for me. Flight + hotel + (maybe) car.
I bet too they'd do it better (within a given locus) than the computer, knowing things like that there was a carnival at such-a-place and that the vistas at t-time of year are magnificent, etc..
- Are prices one-way or round trip? It's not obvious to me.
- I tried to type a zip code at first, before realizing that it would only work with the City name.
Seems to be &-ing the checkboxes, which is a bit odd for the languages.
Probably not a popular route.
But I concur that it's very cool.
Maybe half that.
More seriously, I would expect RyanAir charges a hefty fee to third parties who want access to their API, just like they change much higher fees to passengers who use a credit card than other airlines.
EDIT: Atually RyanAir is there (London -> Knock)
for example: LBC is only listed with two possible destinations but there are at least 6.
It doesn't contain any real information, and is targeted at people who want to take holidays, instead of just flights, but is the same concept.
It'll also do some analysis of your facebook profile to automatically sort results so you instantly get relevant places to go.
It's still purely a proof of concept, and a bit crashy on Heroku because of a bug in the facebooker ruby gem (don't facebook connect right now!), but that should be fixed when we have more time to work on it.
http://www.zolidays.com/ "Have Budget, Want Holiday"
The only thing it needs now is to allow you to better refine the time period (e.g. only weekend trips, or only two weeks in October, etc). As it is now, it's great for people with a month or more off of vacation, but doesn't quite do it for the rest of us yet.
Colour-coding the prices would make it a lot more intuitive to read/scan for deals.
Detects me as being in New York (I'm in Switzerland) if I go to the base URL.
Only offers Fahrenheit... and dollars I think.
I'm sure you've found that on your own already, but it answers the question.
I am curious why the submitted link wasn't truncated to /explore/, as it currently links a calgary based search.
Something similar, from big guys in the online travel business: Amadeus Affinity - http://www.amadeus.com/amadeus/x163551.html - accurate prices - choice per price range, comparison of prices on date range - destination per type of activity (beach, golf, whatever) - etc.
The URL for a major air travel company using it is - wait for it - ...
http://www.lufthansa.com/online/portal/lh/de/booking/affinit...
(Lufthansa Germany home page > Trip Finder)
Finally it's a bit odd that there are "0" flights shown from BCN to Canada with zero filters. As a beta product it's still mega-cool. :)
example of nyc to chicago over month of june: http://www.skyscanner.com/flights/nyca/chia/june-2010/june-2...
see smaher's comment for an even better idea!
However, it doesn't work for India.. which kind of sucks, but I hope that will be improved over time.
It would be nice to know which reservation service this is using...
I am going there in a few months and I have a ticket for $800 out of LAX but the system doesn't want to show anything..
(from UK)
