You're Invited to Test My Flight Booking Engine Decided to build a new flight booking engine using some AI to weed out the garbage flights the airlines and meta-sites throw at us. Wanna help me test it? Put your name in the Google Doc below and I'll let you know when I put it into production. https://forms.gle/SWQbEqmpEw83ehgv7 Cheers, Thomas |
Not seeing Southwest flights is a downside but everyone is at this disadvantage from what I can tell. It's not a huge deal; if Southwest doesn't fly directly between the two cities, you are better off finding another airline.
Something I do want to see is something that combines Google Flights results and tools (flexible airports and dates) along with Skiplag's results. Google has a nice interface and great tools but Skiplag has that extra intelligence that helps you with one-way tickets.
I recently booked some flights to Europe to meet up with friends. I didn't want to fly their itinerary since it had gone up in price by a lot so I used Google Flights to find other European cities I could fly to and then fly from to meet up with my friends. My dates were flexible and both my origin and destination were flexible. I just needed to get to Europe as cheap as possible (getting around Europe is relatively cheap) and be in the right city on a certain day. One feature that would be good to have is a way to create a larger itinerary that involves round-trip tickets. Google Flights does all one-way tickets when you try to do a multi-city trip.
One interesting thing to have would be some sort of metric on how well the airline is performing. I originally booked a flight to Brussels on Wow Airlines. Imagine my surprise when they went out of business a week later and weren't offering refunds to Americans. Being able to see a small red flag that says "Hey, this airline is going bankrupt" would be pretty handy.
You'll get that $ back, granted, you still have to buy a more expensive ticket. Still, it's something
10 days trip to Italy, 4 stars hotel in Florence, business class flight in Air France including business class transfers both way $7700 - for 2 people - ALL above included.
Try to book this thing via Google or any other means
I think RouteHappy was the last travel startup that caught my attention. In fact, I was thinking of doing the same thing, but they beat me to it :) They brought visibility to data about the flights such as seat width, pitch, inflight entertainment/connectivity, inflight power, etc. that had been hiding in other places (SeatGuru, various travel review and business travel interest sites such as TPG).
But, they were acquired, which meant that they were more a feature than an independent distribution channel.
I'd love to see what this person is doing but as a viable business, based on current travel-agency-commission business models, I can't imagine anything that couldn't be copied by the big travel companies in an instant.
We need new business models here, or at least a strong incentive to go back to fee-for-service travel agents...