Why would airlines even want penny pinching customers to snag the best deals via a third party?

At the very least it would make more sense to let their own frequent flyers snag such deals.

One reason I could see is to keep perceived price level for the frequent flyers. If they don't see best deals they won't expect those. And the hardcore deal hunters are not loyal to you or your brand.

Giving frequent flyers very good deals make them expect them, thus not be so willing to pay "regular" price.

They could easily position it as a reward for loyalty for FFs who spent more than $X in the last calendar year with them.

The loyalty reward in this case would be treating virtual interlining tickets as if they were an actual interlined ticket.

Virtual interlining is really dangerous model for them and their brand. It basically means that they would be reliant on someone else without any guarantees in case there is delays or problems.

And with different alliances they already have fully functional interlining model. So trying to extend outside this is not beneficial for them.

Well someone at the airline does need to crunch the numbers to figure out at what $X of spend the risk becomes sensible to take on.

Those flyers don’t care. Most frequent flyers are using other people’s money (business travelers) or are not price conscience.

We don’t even compare prices for domestic flights and we fly a lot on our own dime (15x-20x+ a year since mid 2021). We instinctively just book Delta where we have status and lounge access.

They do care when there is no valid routing from point A to point B via official codesharing/interlining/alliance partner airlines on a given day, forcing an overnight layover, or virtual interlining.

Usually this happens when flying long haul business class from smaller airports to another small airport on a different continent.

To fill empty seats ? Still better than nothing

People say this, and yet we see vacancy everywhere all the time.

The last ~10 times I've flown have been completely maxed flights. I can't remember the last time I saw an open seat anywhere.

Yep, post-covid it seems like airlines are favoring fewer flights that are more packed. I don't fly a lot (couple times a year), but when I do, it's very rare to see a flight that is not at least 95% full.

Yeah, for the routes I've flown over the last 5-10 years, significant numbers of empty seats are very much the exception rather than the rule, and it got worse post-covid.

I remember a Lyon -> Bangkok on A380 on April 2nd 2010, we were 50 in the plane (capacity 530). Less than 10% full. With 20 stewards.

Eventually there just isn't someone who wants to go at any price, but the airplane still needs to fly.

Overbooking is still an industry standard approach to profit maximization. The opportunity cost of being overbooked (rebooking/refunding) is way lower than having a few seats empty because of the average cancellations.

tl;dr - airlines are happy to sell you a seat that's taken, betting some % of other people cancel.

Curious what routes you fly, I have been on full flights consistently in the past few years, mostly Boston to Denver

I haven't flown in a number of years, but when I was, it was common knowledge that all airlines intentionally overbooked their flights. If you ended up being one of the unfortunate last 5% (or whatever) to check in, you were effectively turned away and offered a voucher for your trouble.

Is that still done?

A friend was bumped on a full flight from London to Europe last week because he didn't check in early enough, but I haven't heard of it happening on the continent side.

As far as I know this is a true American problem, I have never heard about this, or have experienced this in Europe or Asia.

Same reason they offer deals in the first place, price discrimination and yield management.

But that's exactly the opposite of what is happening - allowing third parties to construct itineraries that compete with the ones that are being sold by the airlines results in a competitor; not an enabler; for yield management purposes.

It’s an ongoing tension. Direct bookings are ideal but are only adequate if your brand awareness and loyalty is strong, like AA and Southwest. To whatever extent that’s not the case, you need to be available via partners/agencies and on metasearch sites in order to be found.

Our pitch to airlines when we were trying to establish partnerships with them was that we could find flexible travelers to fill seats that would otherwise be empty, and we had unique ways of doing that (which is why the company was able to pivot to enterprise), but we weren’t strong enough for them to feel the need to partner with us (and they don’t want to help a small player grow into a big player).

Flight revenue optimization is an art and science at least as old as industry deregulation, and funnily enough is now something my old company is providing a lot of help with. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em as they say.

Once an airline schedules a flight, each additional passenger is 0 marginal cost.

Besides the people who have high status with an airline are usually price insensitive business travelers.

The people who aren’t penny pinching customers who do fly often on their own dime are either going to pay for business class or first class seats or are going to get auto upgrades for free once they book. At least that’s how it works on Delta.

They surely aren’t going to sully themselves by sitting in the “cattle class”.

For instance, Delta releases cheap economy seats to their partners like Virgin and KLM. I routinely book short flights between MCO (Orlando - current home) and ATL (former home) all of the time for 5500 points via KLM/AirFrance to fly Delta (cash price $230 one way) and to see my parents in small town south GA (MCO - ATL - ABY) for 8500 points (cash price one way $358).

The tickets that Delta releases to partners are the least desirable times and they take away even tho use three weeks before the flight because they can jack up prices.

As an example, there are at least 15 flights a day between MCO and ATL on Delta. Three of those flights may be available on KLM or Virgin

> price insensitive business travelers.

I've done paid travel for several companyies and they've all still been price sensitive. They usually have some policy where they'll detect some "reasonable" itinerary but then let me choose my own as long as it's within a certain dollar amount of their "reasonable" itinerary.

Who are these "price insensitive" companies?

What's always been especially annoying to me is that I've never had an option to pay out of pocket to upgrade my seat. Company travel portal only lets me book an economy ticket, and if I ask the airline about upgrading, they say to contact the company travel portal, who of course tells me to contact the airline. $eyeroll_emoji

Of course, the companies always have a strict "ALL TRAVEL MUST BE BOOKED THROUGH THE PORTAL" policy, so I couldn't even just pay the ticket out of pocket and get a portion reimbursed.

> I routinely book short flights between MCO (Orlando - current home) and ATL (former home)

That's only ~450 miles. I'd just drive that.

Why would I drive 6.5 hours when I can just get dropped off by the airport, whiz through Clear + TSA Precheck, hang out at the Delta lounge where I get free food and alcoholic drinks, hop on the plane and be there in an hour and a half?

Especially since it is essentially free?

Besides I work remotely and we have been down to one car since mid 2020. If either one of us are going by our self, we wouldn’t want to leave the other without a car.

As far as price insensitivity , what are the chances that the cheap routes are going to be available when and where the business traveler needs to go?

I assure you that the travel policies that your company uses for you aren’t the same ones they use for their executives.

I doubt very seriously that Andy Jassy or Bezos had their expense report rejected for a $3 stick of deodorant they charged to the room like what happened to me when I was at AWS (cloud consulting department - ProServe).

But even Amazon didn’t make you choose the cheapest route and I could always choose thier “most preferred carrier” - Delta - even if it did cost more.

I could also choose non stop vs layover if it costs more.

Ah, see...

For me, flying is a bigger ordeal than that.

It's a 30 minute drive to the airport, to which I want to arrive 2 hours before departure to ensure I have enough time to go through security. It's never been more than 30 minutes at my airport, but I don't want to chance it. There's also the time it takes to check my bag and walk to the gate. I'll typically get to my gate an hour early.

I don't fly nearly enough to get access to lounges.

Then when I get there, there's the waiting for my bag, then waiting for transportation...

From the time I leave my house to the time I arrive at the hotel, that 450 mile flight would take me a total of probably around 4 hours. I'd rather just add on another 2 hours and drive myself, especially since that means I'll have my own car when I get there. But I enjoy driving, so that likely influences my choice as much as your access to TSA Precheck (I should get that) and the Delta Lounge, not to mention it being free.

I enjoyed Adioso back in the day. Found lots of cheap flights.

Great to hear! Thanks for saying so.

I still hope to rebuild it one day but only when I can do it as a passion project. You can’t make a living from a site like that.

Why not? People make a living from Amazon affiliation websites. Don't the flight companies have the similar programs?

The upfront capital costs and fixed running costs are huge, and the commissions are very low - often zero, normally about $1 or $2, only very rarely $10+ if it’s a high-priced purchase (business/first class with multiple passengers, but that’s rare on a budget flight funding site). And because travel is an infrequent purchase for most people, you don’t get much of a retention flywheel.

This is why there are close to zero flight search engines that are successful standalone companies and almost all the big brands have been acquired by bigger dominant players - Kayak is now a sub-brand of Booking (prev. Priceline) and Skyscanner was acquired by Trip.com in China.

Yes they can be valuable properties but more as a traffic generator for selling other products (accommodation, car rental, insurance), and you need a big team to do all that.

> Kiwi.com does this now.

Sorta, the real pain point is if anything needs changing on any of your tickets, it's a total PITA. I value 'less hassle' more than I do saving 5-20% of the airfare. For me Kiwi (and other middlemen like it) are a hard 'No'.

This is true when going through any third party portal for either flights or hotels.

No reasonable amount of savings is enough to convince us to ever use a third party portal.

My wife and I travel a lot as a hobby - mostly domestically with one or two international trips a year - and something is statistically going to change between the time we book and the time we fly on at least one of our trips.

It’s a lot easier to make changes directly with the airline/hotel especially when you have status than going through a portal

Just last month we had a flight to Vegas + hotel over Labor Day that we changed at the last minute to go see my mother in law who had been taken to the hospital by our older (adult) son. We were able to change our flights to another city (ATL instead of LAS) as an even swap.

This was Delta airlines.

Then two hours later we found out she had Covid and decided against it and were able to call and change our flight back all without any change in fees and get our hotel reservation back.

Good luck doing that when booking through a portal.

It's even worse when using points. Amex now uses Expedia on the back end for hotel booking. I made a res for a hotel in Italy and I tried to change it. Amex says call Expedia. Expedia says call the hotel. The hotel says call Expedia. Soooo frustrating. I think Amex travel is going to poop, and that used to be their thing.

At least with Amex you can transfer to airlines and you will almost always get more than 1 cents per point by transferring to an airline.

Unfortunately, Amex’s hotel partners - Hilton and Marriott are usually horrible redemptions.

Chase -> Hyatt is the gold standard. But Hyatt has a small footprint

Delta is not perfect, but compared to United and American it’s practically Singapore/Emirates vs Spirit/Ryanair. The whole experience is better in every way.

May not be everyone’s experience, and if you live in a big hub city for one of the others they might be better. But for me, I only book something else if it will save me a plane change.

We flew Southwest last month from MCO - LAS (we’ve been twice this year) because we wanted to try it and SW has more non stop flights than Delta from MCO.

We knew about the non assigned seats. But flying Southwest without assigned seats is like a reenactment of Peloponnesian War (“We are Sparta!!”). We said we would do a layover before flying SW again.

My wife chose to fly Spirit back to LAS when she went to a conference over flying SW and that’s saying a lot.

And those are two of the worst flying cities in the US. MCO, piles of families that have never flown before doing a once-in-a-lifetime trip. LAS, drunks who don’t know how to keep a lid on it.

I don’t have an issue with SW. The seat thing never bugged me too badly.

But no first class. And if I can’t afford business/first, I can’t afford the trip these days. I would rather stay home.

Same reason that while I may use Kayak/others for searching, I almost always book the ticket directly with the airline unless it's such a huge savings that it's worth to go through a third party and deal with multiple airlines. Many airlines will price-match these days so if do find the same flight cheaper through a third-party they'll give it to you at that price (providing all legs were with their airline of course).

My (recent) experience with Kayak is that when you do finally pick a flight to book, it only redirects you to the carrier site where you book it manually. This was once for United and once for Delta. Is that interaction maybe carrier-dependent?

I haven't had that experience.

The savings can be a lot more than 20% - last month I had a roundtrip ticket of $2000 brought down to $1300 (and got there faster!) via the switching airlines approach. It did come with some additional stress - needed additional visas and was worried about missing flights.

If things go wrong with Kiwi, they're likely to go very wrong, yes...but on the other hand, if I can keep saving $700 per trip, I can afford for them to go very wrong sometimes and still come out ahead.

Is this the real Aviato?

Seems likely if you imagine the producers just looked at an alphabetically sorted list of YC companies for name ideas.

The last few times I used Skyscanner, I was disappointed because their "database" was outdated. When I clicked on a flight from the search results, it took me to the airline's website, which then showed a higher price. Often, there's no official fare from the airline, and Skyscanner lists prices from third-party providers I don't really trust.

I'm finding Google Flights more reliable these days.

Is Google Flights based on the ITA Software acquisition?

Yes, you can think of Google flights as a scaled front end on top of the ITA data.

Is this actually true? For example Ryanair flights will show up on Google Flights, but not on ITA Matrix.

I believe (and it's been ~4 years since I left Google) that ITA is one of the data sources, but there are now direct API connections with some providers.

I loved Adioso! I used it all the time to find great deals in Europe. Thank you for building it!

I love hearing this! Makes it all worth it. Thanks for sharing :)

Also loved Adioso, while traveling in Europe I used it extensively - the UI was incredible and I could never understand why it was not much much more popular... I haven't traveled much in the last 4 years and it's sad to see it does not appear to exist any longer?

> You often still need to negotiate individual agreements with major airlines in order to be able to publish and sell their fares.

Out of curiosity, what's stopping you from just scraping/crawling this on a daily basis? I'm at a scale-up that offers a BI solution for the hospitality sector, and we scrape well into the tens of millions of data points per day using web crawlers.

They obviously don't want you to, so it's an ongoing cat and mouse game of integrations breaking, but once we we're established and had a customer base, the ability to negotiate data API agreements actually opened up. Especially if you have data to offer in return.

Some airlines (Air Canada, in particular) are ramping up their attacks outside of just technical means [1].

It's a pretty sad state of affairs, but it seems some airlines would rather throw lawyers at a problem than let their users have a better experience.

[1]: https://onemileatatime.com/news/airlines-shut-down-websites-...

We built the company from the start by scraping low cost airlines, and always did a lot of it.

It just a very big undertaking - building all the scrapers, maintaining them (every time any detail of an airline website changed), getting around anti-scraping measures, running servers, and even then your data is out of date as soon as a flight’s price or availability changes.

Do you think consumers have a limited appetite for airline bullshit? After all congressmen fly.

Adioso was amazing! It was the only flight search engine that let explore possible trips (rather than just looking up flights once you knew where you wanted to go) by searching for regions or "International".

Great to hear! Thanks for saying so.

Question for you: can Google Flights (or any other flight search engine) give you the same kind of search capabilities/answers/experience you got from Adioso?

Not that I'm aware of. Google Flights has good data (such as price change data), but it feels like any other search app. Adioso felt more like Pinterest in some ways, where I could have a vague idea of how I wanted to travel, and then explore different trips based on that. Even just big photos (IIRC) of different cities gave some idea of vibes.

I've looked for other booking sites that helped me determine where I want to go, but haven't found anything else similar sadly.

Thank you for sharing this. It’s some food for thought! So much thought and effort went into how the site would feel to use, but it’s very hard to convey the importance and value of that to investors who are not in the primary audience. I still haven’t let go of the idea that we could make it work some day.

It very much came through. Always disappointing when a great product doesn't become a great company, but I hope you get some satisfaction in knowing you built a great product that a lot of people really enjoyed!