Show HN: what Google Flight Search instigated me to code up...

6 points by talmai 14 years ago | 6 comments

http://viajando.us

A little background: I'm from Brazil. In Brazil we speak Portuguese (PT-BR!). "viajando" could be translated to "traveling" or "travel to".

I was blown away by the new interface google provided for flight search. I mean, Hipmunk in itself proposed a new, unique, and novel way that (at least in my opinion) completely changed the landscape of how flight search should be done. But when google stepped in, it proposed an almost instant manner for me to see flights, repeat searches, put in adjustments and what-not. The simplicity of it was also something that got me itching...

My wife is always looking out for cheap tickets to visit back home, and I thought it would be great if she could use that interface... but alas, flights are still limited to US only. So when I saw a $2 .us domain go up on namecheap, I snatched viajando.us and coded this really simple way to see flights to/from US/Brazil with no typing whatsoever.

Obviously, there are limitations:

1) US/Brazil flights only 2) Limited number of airports 3) Round-trips only

All of these limitations are for now. Although (1) probably won't change so soon, (2) and (3) has more to do with the huge amount of background search and parsing I need to do to get all the updated search results. Each airport has all flights to the other country's hubs, all dates with a 15 day range, and all round-trip flights with a 30/15 trip length.

While the interface only shows the cheapest flights, I have them all. In fact, this will probably be really fun to play with from the statistical and data mining point of view... to see which airports, air line companies, and flights have the greatest variability, etc..

Would love any feedback from everyone here. Thanks.

personlurking 14 years ago |

I clicked on San Francisco and see that Galeão says "(SP)" next to it. Galeão aka Tom Jobim (aka GIG) is located in Rio.

For the commentor who got the message in Portuguese, "Os vôos cadastrados no sistema saindo deste Aeroporto com essa duração de viagem ainda estão sendo processados!" means, "the flights registered in the system leaving from this airport with that flight time are still being processed".

I use OX Lion and when I use the trackpad with two fingers to scroll the page, the map gets smaller or bigger. A bit annoying. Other than that, with a little work on the UI, I think you have a good idea. I would like to see an alternative with some sort of text-based layout for the flight information, perhaps with dropdown menus, etc. Another idea is to be able to select the departing city and the destination city via the map, at which point the cheapest flights are shown.

Also, TAM has (or at least had in 2010) direct flights from MIA to MAO which your site is missing. Let's see if there's anything else. The bouncing icon is, imo, a bit tiring. I think the color change is enough.

talmai 14 years ago | |

Thanks for the typo catch.

All the hubs are fixed, which means that outgoing flights will not exist/be shown to airports which are not part of the search/parser. Clearly this is a limitation, but I'm not considering all airports in US either. Might you know all the main Brazilian airports with high traffic to/from US?

Only the cheapest flights are shown, so when you click SSA, for example, you will see the cheapest outgoing flights by date for all the US hubs.

Thanks

personlurking 14 years ago | | |

No problem. Not sure of all the highest traffic airports to/from the US but if you download the latest PDF from Infraero (http://www.infraero.gov.br/index.php/br/estatistica-dos-aero...) you can see which BR airports have the highest traffic internationally and therefore deduce that they probably offer flights to the US...or at least cross-check them.

tlack 14 years ago |

I seem to be getting this message whenever I click a city or city pair: Os vôos cadastrados no sistema saindo deste Aeroporto com essa duração de viagem ainda estão sendo processados!

Am I using it incorrectly?

Have you tried to monetize the flight search directly, i.e., finding someone who will pay you to send the booking their way? Our usual travel booking partner no longer pays us for air customer referrals..

talmai 14 years ago | |

You can switch the language to english by clicking on the translation button, also many (if not all) of the flights are only updated for monthly travel time, so make sure you aren't choosing 15 days. (I'm still working through putting my parser to run in parallel).

Referrals, last I read, where indeed being removed.. I think the monetization will be in showing things to do in the place, events that are ongoing, friends' travel plans...but this market is so overloaded. Let's talk, maybe we can brainstorm something together.

tlack 14 years ago | | |

You can definitely monetize tours/excursions/attractions via services like Viator. We haven't had huge amounts of luck with it but the option definitely exists. Contact me directly: lackner@gmail.com