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Where can I fly for how much?
- albertsun 16y agoThis is just like Travelocity Dream Maps, which went away a while ago and I've been missing it ever since, but even better!
- bryanh 16y agoWow, talk about impressive. Just curious about the tech behind this. Do they just cache a bunch of average prices together between major airports and just set a max limit? Surely it can't do fully comprehensive search at the speed it runs at.
- buss 16y agoThat's my guess.
- hugh3 16y agoThat would also explain why it only lets you set a month, and not a day.
- borism 16y agojudging from other Kayak tools I've seen they cache searches by actual users. 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.
- jojopotato 16y agoThey're definitely showing you historical prices from their cache. Kayak gets such a huge volume of traffic that they can use the lowest price on that route seen in the last 24 hours and have pretty good coverage/accuracy. 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
- nooneelse 16y agoThe novice sometimes has "the potential" fogging their view of reality. While for the expert, sometimes the shadow from what-is-lacking mountain covers both.
- tomhoward 16y agoTheir database only contains cached results from previous searches. Kayak doesn't store the entire population of flights themselves - they forward users' queries onto a 3rd party flight inventory provider (ITA Software), then cache the results to power services like these. This means that results are likely to be current and complete on popular routes, but far less so on the long tail.
- jojopotato 16y agoIf I had to guess, they probably cache as aggressively as their contract with ITA allows because Kayak gets charged per search by ITA. *edit: From the two ITA contract that I know/have heard about anyways.
- ojbyrne 16y agoAnd from what I know, ITA doesn't allow you to cache at all.
- martythemaniak 16y agoOMG, I've been waiting for someone to build something like this forever. 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.
- noodle 16y agoso, i built something almost exactly like this for myself to use, except it doesn't display itself on a google map. instead, it cross-references itself with a database of people. 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 :*-(
- _pius 16y agodon't feel dumb, just put it up, add user accounts/Facebook, and make it a group travel planning tool. I could've used something like that while helping plan a bachelor's party.
- noodle 16y agoi probably will, but it just kind of takes the wind out of the sails to know you're half copying something. that spark of "i'm doing something neat" isn't quite there.
- aaronblohowiak 16y agoi dont know.. this is interesting for me, but it would be profoundly more useful with my (admittedly small) group of friends.
- noodle 16y agowhy more useful for your friends?
- mcav 16y agoCool. Couple thoughts: - 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.
- hugh3 16y agoBased on what the prices look like I'm fairly sure it'd have to be return (or else it's doing a lousy job of finding the best available fares).
- thrdOriginal 16y agoYup, they don't do a very good job of making it obvious, but clicking on "check latest air fare" confirms these are round-trip prices (other than that, this is really cool).
- hugh3 16y agoNow that's just plain neat. And useful, since I'm currently considering where to go on summer holidays. 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.
- krschultz 16y agoThat depends on your starting location, from Newark it shows Denver just fine.
- lftl 16y agoYeah... it also changes the destinations based on which timeframe you choose up top. I'm willing to bet that Kayak is for the most part simply caching the results that other people have recently searched for on the site and showing those when available.
- run4yourlives 16y agoNeat concept, but where is the data coming from? There is no way that the cheapest flight from Vancouver to Toronto is $460. Maybe half that.
- hugh3 16y agoOne way or return?
- run4yourlives 16y agodoh... didn't dawn on me that this could be return... too many airline websites!
- jallmann 16y agoNice. You can fly from orange county (CA) to long beach for $270. Or you could drive up there for 10 bucks of gas in 25 minutes.
- hugh3 16y agoI checked and couldn't find any direct flights. The cheapest way I could find from SNA to LGB had a one-hour stopover in Phoenix. Probably not a popular route.
- GFischer 16y agoIt's still not perfect - it shows Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Montevideo, Uruguay for a meager U$ 600, while Montevideo to Buenos Aires correctly shows U$ 110 (a more reasonable average price). But I concur that it's very cool.
- travisp 16y agoThis is great and I've been looking for something like this for a long time. 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.
- hugh3 16y agoWell, it gives a rough order of magnitude, and might encourage people to consider destinations that they would have thought were too expensive. As in "Gee, I was going to go to Salt Lake City, but it turns out I can get to Lima for the same price..."
- AaronM 16y agoI like it, but one thing I noticed if if you select a starting date, it doesnt automatically set the return date to the next day. So if you select a date some time in the future you have to scroll twice
- ig1 16y agoIt's a neat tool (if you're in the UK check out the similar "I'll fly anywhere" option at http://flightchecker.moneysavingexpert.com/ http://flightchecker.moneysavingexpert.com/) but the problem with it is that for most people the cost of the flight is going to be less than the cost of the hotel. 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.
- hugh3 16y agoIf you're travelling in a pair, and you're staying for a reasonable length of time (say, a week) then the hotel cost shouldn't dominate. 7 nights * $100 a night / 2 people is only $350 -- less than the airfare to most places. 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.
- ig1 16y agoHmm maybe it's just a European thing, you can typically fly most places in Europe/North Africa for for a couple of hundred dollars. Getting to the US isn't much more. Hotels on the other hand tend to be more expensive + hotel tax can be pricey. 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.
- hugh3 16y agoAh yes, in the European context, where flights are cheaper and hotels more expensive (and extremely variable between richer and poorer parts of Europe), you could very well be right.
- elai 16y agoYou can go from london to south east asia with AirAsia X for $500 and a decent midrange hotel costs around $20 to $30 a night. Also if your backpacking (hostels) or couchsurfing, it can be quite valuable.
- drivebyacct 16y agoHhmmm, is there an option for round trips?
- resdirector 16y agoGood question. I think the prices are all return.
- nooneelse 16y agoFor more visual intuitiveness, perhaps some isolines or a 3d, height based on price kind of thing? Probably just flashiness for no end though. But, using different colors for the labels along the price axis probably wouldn't be. Seems to be &-ing the checkboxes, which is a bit odd for the languages.
- orblivion 16y agoIsolines I'm not sure, the market does weird things with pricing, something further away may end up being cheaper.
- nooneelse 16y agoYeah, it would look very much like messy islands/mountains, probably lots of extra lines for little helpful effect. That is why the height map occurred to me. But, like I said, that might be getting too close to flashy, spinning-whizzbang infographic land.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Rabidgremlin 16y agoBuilt this 3 years ago for Air New Zealand :) http://promos.airnz.co.nz/howfar/ http://promos.airnz.co.nz/howfar/
- borism 16y agovery cool! 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 :)
- bond 16y agoI was just talking to my brother in Auckland about the price to Rarotonga! Paradise only at $270, crazy price!
- Rabidgremlin 16y agoThey do.... I worked for them for 4.5 years as the architect with their Innovations & Ventures team. Very cool place to work.
- iamcalledrob 16y agoWe built a similar proof of concept just this weekend, at London Startup Weekend. http://london.startupweekend.org/ http://london.startupweekend.org/ 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/ http://www.zolidays.com/ "Have Budget, Want Holiday"
- rlm 16y agoOn a wide screen (1680x1050) the text "Zolidays - Have budget, want holiday." is still visible on the screen.
- phreanix 16y agoHave airfare will travel. I love it.
- aohtsab 16y agowhoa - it'll be cheaper for me to fly to Moscow (from DC) and travel to Eastern Europe by rail than actually flying directly in -- by about $420. This is dead useful; thanks for the link!
- jarek 16y agoDepending on how, if at all, you are getting around the region otherwise, eastern European railroad might not be something you want to add to your itinerary.
- dagw 16y agoThe inter-country express trains tend to be pretty good. The slower local trains on the other hand can be a bit hit or miss. I mean they'll basically always get you to where you want to be, but perhaps not always exactly on time. But really when all is said and done trains in Europe generally work just fine.
- aohtsab 16y agofortunately I'd blend in because I'm Eastern European -- and its something I'll have to deal with anyway. =)
- mtr 16y agoVery cool, especially as I'm busy planning a trip (BCN-ROM-STR-BCN). There are ~4 possible airports for STR but most search engines don't let you choose them (aside from 'nearby' airports, which can be a bit moot with Europe's typically awesome rail infrastructure). And Kayak doesn't track many Low Cost Carriers. I normally a huge Kayak fan, but I've had to use www.skyscanner.net and www.wegolo.com a lot for this particular trip. 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. :)
- marquis 16y agoi find skyscanner to be far superior. kayak's is a great overview but i didn't find it actually took me straight to when those cheap flights were - you still had to guess the cheap dates. when you know where you want to go and just want to find the cheapest time to fly: it shows you the flight costs over a month, and you don't have to hope that the fare is still available. example of nyc to chicago over month of june: http://www.skyscanner.com/flights/nyca/chia/june-2010/june-2010/cheapest-flights-per-day-from-new-york-to-chicago-in-june-2010.html http://www.skyscanner.com/flights/nyca/chia/june-2010/june-2... see smaher's comment for an even better idea!
- moolave 16y agoThis is almost like housingmaps.com but X100.
- sev 16y agoAwesome! I looked under "Even More" and didn't see a hotels option. It would be great to have that option as well, on a smaller scale of course.
- AndrewWarner 16y agoFinally! I've been waiting for something like this. 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.
- bryanh 16y agoThat might be a pretty cool app idea: random trip planning. As in: "I don't really care, I have $1200 to blow on a 5 day trip June 4th-9th. When do I show up for my flight?"
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoThis is the sort of thing I'd expect a good old-school human travel agent to do pretty well. 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..
- expertcs 16y agotry http://www.mygola.com http://www.mygola.com Sounds perfect for this kind of a thing.
- jlangenauer 16y agoAdioso (YC W'09) does this too - See, for example: http://adioso.com/au/syd-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html http://adioso.com/au/syd-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html http://adioso.com/us/jfk-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html http://adioso.com/us/jfk-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html
- timcederman 16y agoCOMMAND-F "adioso", happy to see it's you :)
- henrikschroder 16y agoThat is absolutely fucking awesome! http://adioso.com/se/stockholm-to-beach.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".
- tomhoward 16y agoIt's coming :)
- thefool 16y agoI just wish it had the option to find all available flights under a certain price. I'm a college student and wouldn't mind just randomly going to a random local for a little while if it was cheap enough.
- whatwhatwhat 16y agoIts not showing any flights to Buenos Aires??? 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..
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- csmeder 16y agoThis is cool. Does Air BnB have something like this?
- resdirector 16y agoSmall issue: seems like the seasons are not hemisphere dependent. E.g., if you travel from Melbourne, Australia, then it shows Spring 2010 rather than Autumn 2010, etc.
- arnorhs 16y agoIt even works for Iceland. That's neat. That's not the default with these kinds of services. 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...
- kingnothing 16y agoI don't know if the devs read this, but the money sliders don't work on the iPad and, presumably, other touch based devices.
- trin_ 16y agodo they list the airlines somewhere? they dont seem to be listing ryanair for example.
- gaius 16y agoThat's a good thing :-) 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)
- trin_ 16y agowell the ryanair flights seem to be there partially. for example: LBC is only listed with two possible destinations but there are at least 6.
- tinblink 16y agoHi, Something similar, from big guys in the online travel business: Amadeus Affinity - http://www.amadeus.com/amadeus/x163551.html 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/affinity?l=en&blt_p=DE&blt_l=en&blt_t=Homepage&blt_e=Passinglane&blt_n=Quicklinks&blt_z=Lufthansa%20Trip%20Finde&blt_c=DE|en|Homepage|Passinglane|Quicklinks|Lufthansa%20Trip%20Finde http://www.lufthansa.com/online/portal/lh/de/booking/affinit... (Lufthansa Germany home page > Trip Finder)
- sambe 16y agoIs there a contact link? This is neat but some obvious non-US improvements: 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.
- PidGin128 16y agohttp://www.kayak.com/feedback/form http://www.kayak.com/feedback/form 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.
- david_p 16y agoI have unknowingly been waiting for this for my whole life ... thank you so much ! It would be event better if there where some details added, like the possibility to choose one-way/two-ways flights.
- hardik 16y agoIs the site not working for non-US visitors? (tried about thrice since morning)
- joris 16y agoCopycats! We already had this feature on http://qfly.com/ http://qfly.com/ (on http://qfly.nl http://qfly.nl to be precise) 10 months ago.
- phreanix 16y agoNo offense but their UI seems a bit more intuitive and simple to use than yours.
- stuaxo 16y agoCan you allow currency and default to local currency? (from UK)
- xsmasher 16y agoThe UI is nice - but the slider doesn't need two ends, just the max end. It's also hard to dial in numbers <$1000 because of the range of the slider. Some +/- buttons would fix that up, or an old-fashioned text field.