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. :)
12. UA 456 10:13 IAD 11:35 LGA vvvv vv
Then you type 12<go> and get all the details. It all happened as fast as you could type plus about 10msec plus the speed of light roundtrip to lower Manhattan. And in the nine years since I used it, I bet they added other points of presence on other continents.
I wonder how many other Google features I have been missing out on due to adblock being turned on...
Edit: turning off 'cosmetic filtering' on uBlock put it back again.
I don't scoff. But I can't afford it. By the way, the guy who said Google "flight schedule LAX ORD" did a great service here.
Alternately, visit your local university business school library.
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.
Also I really like the flexible dates view [1]
Shame about Southwest for sure, but I think that's more on Southwest than anyone else (do they list their flights on any aggregator? I remember hearing somewhere that's part of their shtick is that they don't)
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).
Um, ground-breaking search visualisation UI? Or am I missing something?
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.
Apparently the rewrite of this dry wall of text is not live yet, so let me paraphrase:
You contact us and we book you the flight that gets you to your destination the earliest (if needed we pay for a taxi or bus or anything to get you to another airport if needed.)
This doesn't sound like a 100% guarantee. Most of the times on the day tickets will be a lot more expensive than advance purchases.
I'm not sure about the details since I don't have much to do with the legal side of things, but I would assume that Kiwi.com had to put this clause in to avoid having to pay when a flight's price is 1000x higher than it should be as an error fare, or similar cases. I've personally never heard of a case where expenses weren't fully covered because of this clause.
Concorde — Discover cheap flights to hundreds of destinations worldwide: https://concorde.io
1. By creating an account, you can search from your home airport to hundreds of destinations worldwide. 2. Yes, the filters you propose are very achievable in the near-term, meaning that I already have the data, I just need to create the appropriate front-end for viewing it. 3. Exactly. The quality of the deal is intended to be mileage-run worthy, but not necessarily everyone wants to earn miles. I've found a lot of people just want a cheap and fun vacation spot that is somewhere far from home.
Please let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions for improvement! Thanks!
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.
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.