Adioso: have you talked to ITA Software (now part of Google) about licensing QPX? We solved the data issue, very painfully, over a 10-year period, by working directly with the airlines. (This was, in fact, one of my major contributions to the company as COO, and many people were involved.) Using QPX, you could implement exactly what you envision with stuff ITA already has running.
I'm a cofounder of ITA but am no longer affiliated with the company. But if you want to talk to people there, I can connect you. Just reply here with some way for me to contact you.
Many thanks David. We spoke to Jeremy very early on in proceedings (early '09), and it QPX didn't seem to be a fit (or at least, a cost-effective one) at that point.
But I'd like to think things have changed since then.
Hey Tom - have you checked out Vayant? I've been playing with their API for my upcoming travel startup and it's been really good. Results in less than a second for most of Europe and Asia.
My mother owned a travel agency, my father a pilot. I was an airline pilot too. We learned how to use various reservations systems that the author seems to just ignore existence.
Amadeus and Sabre pretty much offer all those functionalities and much more than that. I can do that exact search Dustin wanted on Amadeus with 2 lines on a terminal.
All those websites building frontends to Amadeus and Sabre really should stop stating they are doing something different from what already exists. Just because expedia is an awful website it doesn't mean there is something magical or impossible behind what you did.
I hope you guys are not just an Amadeus/Sabre/ITA wrapper, because if you are, you are not profitable.
Ah a GDS romantic. GDS systems suck at search. Tell me? Why can't you even do these type of searches on the Amadeus flight search page? http://www.amadeus.net Maybe you would be kind enough to do a search from somewhere to 'anywhere' or 'Europe' from 'any date' to 'any date' on sabre and post the video. Bet you can't. Great flight search only happened when ITA liberated search from the GDS dinosaurs.
ITA is even more expensive than those 'dinosaurs' and offer pretty much the same functionality.
You missed my point (on purpose, but anyway...), which is profitability. As I commented before most airlines are not even offering incentives to those travel websites anymore. In fact, some companies are CHARGING websites to make automated reservations into their systems.
Yep, so every decision we've made about how we go about building this product has factored in profitability, and aligning consumer incentives with supplier incentives.
I tried Amadeus.net's search, and adioso was better. It lets me search flights to a country instead of max. 4 airports, and it's a lot easier and simpler to use on the whole.
They offer systems to 3rd parties, they are not an actual travel company, that's probably why their website is so bad. In an 'API' level, all those system are somewhat similar.
My point is that those websites are just wrappers to ITA/Amadeus/Sabre and that is inherently unprofitable. Companies like Qatar Airlines are offering ZERO incentives to those kind of websites.
Rubbish! ITA's matrix site is probably the best air search site there is and is just a demo of their api. Yes ITA is expensive but you are paying for search, they don't do booking. But the search is awesome because unlike the collective GDS, they are purely a search company. Whereas GDS are reservation systems and they make their money via fees paid to the GDS by the airlines. Search as an api business is a secondary concern/revenue stream to them.
And why are they inherently unprofitable?Sites like Kayak, Skyscanner, Adioso are meta search sites only that make money by sending the user to another site to make a booking. They then make a small affiliate commission if the user then books their flight. Airlines actually really like good meta search sites because they acquire customers cheaply and avoid GDS fees altogether so are more likely to pay commission including your example of Qatar Airlines who pay 2% per booked flight to affiliates see http://www.qatarairways.com/ae/en/affiliates.page and not ZERO as you say. So they have zero need for the GDS unless an airline has no direct connect api in which case the GDS is that api source usually for availability (if you have implemented the schedules and fares locally) if not then a dumb search to the GDS is possible but a crap, slow, expensive way to include an airline in your site and no use to Adioso who need fast local graphed, cached data for expansive NLP searches.
An affiliate is an incentivised partner but I guess you are talking about how airlines pay travel agents online or offline. However, Adioso are not an online travel agent.
I think the issue is that ITA, Skyscanner et al who built their own tech freed themselves from slow old GDS platforms (which were ancient mainframes and designed for travel agents). They consume the schedules, the fare rules and then they will use 'direct connect' XML or JSON feeds directly from the airlines (if they are available, not all airlines do them), then a GDS, and sometimes they will have to scrape a website where a LCC doesn't use GDS or give a metasearch site api access to a) regularly check fares for a given flight, time & date and b) to do a 'live' search e.g on skyscanner, it will often say 'price was checked 30 mins ago' (which is the cached and stored in the db price) and then when you select it and a modal popups up it does an ajax call to check if that price is still live. But to more simply answer your question - many airlines love 'direct connect' as it bypassed the GDS who, remember, they pay fees to and have had them over a barrel for decades. And metasearch sites prefer it to. It's a direct relationship. It is a really complicated industry and I often read gross over-simplifications of x site versus y site.
If the slowness seen as being a problem for your visitors then why not flip it around? Change their expectations about what flight search is.
The search is obviously going to take a while because your site is so powerful and you're doing things that no one else can. Adioso isn't a dumb search engine that makes you do all the work - it's an automated travel agent that will churn through hundreds of flights and email you with a selection of the very best in a short amount of time. It even understands language like a real travel agent.
To add to this, I'd suggest adding an 'email me' option if things are slow on the site. Waiting on a website longer than 20-30s is painful but receiving a well formatted email within 10mins (with the same info) can still feel like magic.
I'm working on something with the same concept but for a different market. There's no way for me to tap into 3rd party databases (for now). I'm setting it up so the results will be added to your own personal search-page where (only) you can view them after x-time. From there you can choose to view more details and/or close the deal. Not as fast as live-search, but I'm communicating it from the get-go.
Even if you don't take it to this extreme there are simpler changes you could make. The search timers on the result page could instead show a total count of searches performed. Then you're framing it in a positive (look how much work we're doing for you) instead of a negative way (see how much of your time we've wasted).
Thanks for this series Tom, you guys are trying to succeed in a really challenging technical sector (Travel) and I, for one, really appreciate your honesty. I think that some of the confusion & criticisms I see in other comments are that after reading your pieces we all rush off to try adioso and some observations predominate:
# The ui is quirky on different screen sizes
# The calls to Expedia are SLOW
# The natural language search is perhaps only one search interface and not necessarily the best
# The core bit you guys have worked on 'wingtip' is sort of lost in this version of Adioso because of trying to increase coverage
# You could have utilised existing api's like ITA's QPX, Everbread's Haystack, Amadeus, even Skyscanner's api and increased coverage whilst being much faster.
# The example link at the end that presumably is the answer to the question "For the first time, we’re seeing signs that the flight data we need is becoming available, in the right format" is totally misleading. Vayant are an ITA competitor not a raw data provider. They have managed to achieve in their price cacheing tech what you have only achieved for lots of low cost carriers.
# And this last point is my biggest confusion about Adioso and what I think is your internal confusion. Are you a tech platform for flight data or a consumer facing flight website. Because Kayak, Hipmunk (and previously Orbitz erc) are B2C consumer sites that get data from ITA, Amadeus etc. Vayant, ITA etc are B2B data platforms - tech companies. Only skyscanner truly is both I think. They are a B2C site that last year enabled the selling of over £2 Billion worth of tickets but which is powered by its own 'Graphite' Graph and price cacheing databases.
The embarrassment I feel for you is when you say that you are making a travel site 'even when it's impossible'. I cringe for you! You haven't built a site even as good as Skyscanner's and you're saying pretentious statements like that? I know startups are hard and this is for a book so poetic license is to be expected.
I say ditch the BS and get back to reality. You could attach your natural language interface to someone else's api (like Vayant's) and have a better B2C product or keep improving 'wingtip' but this all seems like a confused desperate fudge.
Incidentally, when are you going to talk in detail about 'Wingtip' it's the bit that most interests me. It IS Adioso. I really do wish you guys every success though. What you are doing is needed but ditch the slow ass Expedia api.
I'm happy to let it all stand unchallenged - there's a lot you're not aware of or not seeing, but we know what we're doing and we're gonna keep doing it.
And yes we will be writing about Wingtip sometime soon.
I tried the business trip I'm taking next week, and that I just researched on hipmunk earlier today.
"Boston to Tunis to Barcelona"
Big bag of fail. Adioso's trying to send me from "Boston, Texas" to "Barcelona, Venezuela", and finds no matching flights.
Even the simpler search "Boston to Barcelona" is sending me to Venezuela, not Catalonia. It's finding no matching flights.
I tried "Barcelona, Spain", editing the URL to be barcelona-es, barcelona-sp. Nothing worked. Maybe it's a corner case or maybe it's deeper than that, but I figured I'd send along the feedback. I do wish you the best, as airline "exploring" is a right pain in the ass.
Placename disambiguation is something we've wrestled with a lot lately. The way we do it now is: (a) find the most likely origin you meant based on proximity & size; (b) if we have historical data, choose the most likely destination given previous popularity, and (c) whatever the case, give prompts on each one to let you tell us you meant a different one.
Also, we don't currently support multi-city trips, so that would've confused the search parser.
But just running these searches now, they seem to give results:
This is fantastic -- I love everything about the concept; hopefully the speed issue can be addressed. But overall, fantastically designed product; kind of reminds me of a Wolfram Alpha for travel with interpretive responses to search
this is really highlighting the fact that there isn't one way to build one interface for all needs. Some people have to travel on certain days - they can't rearrange those days for love nor money, and existing interfaces (while not great) work within those parameters.
Other people want to say "2 weeks in Moscow in April or May" and have something find either the cheapest, or quickest, or longest flights around. Adioso is going for that (obviously), but I'm wondering what else they can do to perhaps market more towards the 'free and easy traveller' crowd vs the 'locked down scheduled days' crowd.
Or give them something to watch while the magic happens. A mesmerising animation, for example. The most important thing is to convey that nothing is broken, and progress is being made.
The Travel Site I want is a mixture of wikitravel and tripadvisor, only updated more often and not so narrow.
By narrow I mean that users on a site only go to restaurants that are mentioned on the site, potentially missing some hidden gems.
The biggest problem whilst traveling for me is not flight info. That's not a problem I have, really. I buy a flight once and forget about it. But I spend a lot of time worrying about not getting ripped off, or walking around finding a safe place to sleep, choosing decent restaurants, selecting authentic places to see and things to do. Wikitravel did an OK job but again it was 'narrow' and also infrequently updated.
In summation, the perfect travel site for me would be basically a map telling me local places to sleep/eat/activity and the price and quality and rating.
Hmm.. couldn't resist inserting a plug here. But the site you mentioned is very close to what i'am building now http://www.kettik.com.
Like you i spend a lot of time before a trip researching on the kind of experiences i could have once i get there. And being an independent traveler i'am more interested in the kind of activities i could do by myself rather than having someone arrange it for me. So i designed the site along similar lines.
User experiences(blogs)/photos/attractions/activity/sleep/eat/
I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Especially on the way how the content is presented, there's a lot of scope for improvement there.
Very nice. This search works with the way I think. I remember being amazed when Kayak came out and again with Hipmunk. This might be next in that sequence.
On flysaa.com (Star Alliance member) I can get a cheaper direct flight. Not sure what logic was coded to determine which result receives preference (i.e. ranking) in the results.
I also usually use http://flisea.com/ to search for reward flights on Star Alliance airlines. Not sure what API to linking to - perhaps you could check it out.
Or perhaps, change the purpose of the site:
Find the best available reward flights on One World, Star ALliance and SkyTeam over a specific period of time. It's focused and a big need for frequent travellers
Tried it just now. http://flisea.com was confused when I entered "San Francisco" as the destination; I had to enter "SFO" when what I really wanted was "SFO | SJC | OAK" and it never returned any flights. Adioso has room to improve their price search but the user interface is just what I want to use - no error messages, just does the best it can with what you give it.
Results are buggy. "San Antonio to Caribbean for two weeks in July" displayed plenty of results, including Georgetown, except it was Georgetown TEXAS. My next search was for "San Antonio to anywhere in July for under $200". I get many results; however the price range is way over $200 on most of them. If I hit the back button I lose my search (can't see what I last typed to fix it). Also I keep almost clicking the giant PLAY button in the center of the page to start my search, probably because my search string ends right about where the big play button is. My eyes have to scan far right to see the actual search icon, which is somewhat obfuscated because it has no contrast with the search bar. I guess I can just hit Enter to search ;)
Kind of a misleading blog post. It seemed like exactly the site I have been trying to find (a way to give less specific queries when finding tickets). However, it makes you be as strict as any other flight search engine it seems.
All I want is to find the cheapest ticket from anywhere in Europe to California in the middle of June, and nobody can give that information to me.
EDIT: I'm sure this was modded down by one of the employees of this site. I included a link that proves what I said, instead of modding my comment down, how about explaining why the linked search is 'too broad'?
Adioso co-founder here. I didn't downvote you. I can't speak for the others, but I highly doubt it; they're all too busy working to improve the site and besides we're just not like that.
The post doesn't say Adioso can can currently let you search for anywhere in Europe to anywhere in California.
We're working towards that kind of capability, but as you say, no other site in the world can do it, and we can't either, yet, but I think we're working harder than anyone else to offer it.
That is what the blog post led me to believe I could do, and I was genuinely surprised that I couldn't do it.
I really don't see any queries I can do on your site that I can't do on Kayak already, except that Kayak seems to have many more sources of data and therefore fares at least as low and sometimes lower?
Kayak is a rigid form that doesn't fit how most people travel. Adioso is a "what would you like?" box.
If I want to find a flight next week on Kayak, I have to fill in at least two text boxes, think about the dates next week, pick just one out of a calendar, and then get an error about Kayak wanting me to pick "one way" from their box at the top. In the end, I get only flights for that day and need to go through the aforementioned process over and over to see flights on different days. Kayak is the same old travel search frustrations in a slightly nicer interface.
Adioso also found me a cheaper flight than Kayak did. ("sydney to melbourne next week" - Adioso gets $35, Kayak $57 for the same day)
Have a look at the scrolling search suggestions on the front of http://adioso.com, then try executing the same searches on Kayak, in a single search. All of them.
All of them? Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying, but if you mean that the random travel searches you scroll on the site are a feature, that is bordering on insane.
I don't need to go to some random place for some random duration at some random time.
So, since it would be insane to consider random trips to be a useful feature, I assumed that it was recommending certain trips because they were really good deals. Maybe your system figured out I live near San Jose, and recommended me a flight because it was just such a great deal it was worth my time to try that search and maybe go on a vacation on a whim. That would actually be an awesome feature, and I would probably use it a lot! So, benefit of the doubt.
So, the best fare that Kayak found was a $277 hacker fare. That's almost exactly half as much as what Adioso found. Sure, that's a hacker fare, and for a 10 day trip not 7 days. Fine, the best fare that is exactly comparable is $350 for a 7 day trip leaving next week round-trip on Delta.
I mean they're examples of searches you can do on Adioso, many/most of which take a lot of time and many repetitive searches on other sites.
The Hawaii search you tried came up with the same fares as Kayak when I tried it. It may well have timed out for you, which is part of the performance challenges this post is mostly about.
But it occurs to me your approach to travel doesn't make you the intended customer for this product, so I won't try to persuade you further :)
Who exactly is your intended customer currently? I'm honestly curious. Your site currently doesn't support things like "I'd like to leave from anywhere in CA and go to Europe sometime in August and have a really great experience and a really good deal" and you're also claiming it doesn't work for the style of the person you're responding to... so... who exactly is it that you think is the target user of Adioso?
I'm not just giving you a hard time, either. I'm planning a trip soon and we've got a lot of flexibility in a lot of ways combined with some whacky constraints in others. Is Adioso right for me?
I honestly can't tell. It seems like I should be able to.
Usually! But I know people whose idea of a geographic starting point would be a lot larger than you'd think and would just treat it as an excuse for a roadtrip.
Also you could have a schedule where some days I know I'm going to be near city X and others near city Y, but I wouldn't mind beginning from either.
This is my history on your site. It took me 5 tries before I even saw the page that is the entire point of the site. I would take the negative feedback people are giving you here and accept that some of it comes from an honest attempt to give feedback to a fellow traveler, and use it to improve your shit.
Here is my search history on your site:
"Europe to California":
Error: Too broad.
"France to California":
Error: Too broad.
"France to San Jose":
Error: Too broad.
"Frankfurt to San Jose between June 11 and June 14":
Tried to find flights between Frankfurt and San Jose Argentina, even though there are no such flights.
Forgot about the June 14 completely, limited my search to just June 11.
By now I'm only holding on because, you know, I love arguing with you on the internet and I need more ammunition. So I keep driving on.
"San Jose to Frankfurt":
Hey, I finally see some flights! I'm not sure why I would use this instead of literally any other flight search engine, but at least it didn't just have an error.
"San Jose to France in August":
Oh my! Now it's actually doing something interesting, loading fares to many, many destinations at once. Suddenly I see the point of the site.
That's a really funny search, though, does that kind of thing come up often? Is it for people doing "Interrail" in Europe (travling Europe with a train flatrate)? Because otherwise, it can take you a day to get from one place in Europe to another place, so it might be cheaper to just get a more expensive fare to the US from wherever you are at the moment?
Maybe it's better on the desktop, but the site is unusable on the iPad retina. Even typing into the search box is laggy. The resulting search results don't fit the page, have things on top of one another. Basically unusable and for me any travel site has to work on my iPhone and iPad. My desktop is for development, mobile for everything else.
It seems as though google flights is a lot better at finding cheaper flights. I don't want a search box that attempts to guess my query.
For me google flights, kayak and skyscanner meet all my travel needs.
This is the kind of website that wows those of us on HN, because it is a very well executed site.
But it does not solve a need, from what I can tell, that Kayak or other meta-searches solve. And at first glance, it seems slower than Kayak and has fewer options.
Visually, I think some people would debate whether your layout is more useful than the clutter of Kayak/Priceline/etc. It certainly meets the guidelines of attractive typography and whitespace but it took me some time to interpret what's going on.
In one real sense, I think the width of your site is a real problem. There's a reason why content sites, like blogs, usually fix their content width to 600-700 pixels: because it's hard to go from left to right and back to left across a wide width. Your current layout forces this upon the user in a way that's not very easy to read. Most people might say that Kayak is ugly and cluttered but it is much much easier to figure at a glance. Sometimes, ugly/cluttered is better...kind of like the debate between HackerNews and DesignerNews.
I'm sounding too harsh here...but only to be helpful. This was a site I showed all my coworkers because I thought it was pretty cool. But "cool" or different isn't enough in the travel space, unfortunately.
> But it does not solve a need, from what I can tell, that Kayak or other meta-searches solve.
I'll give you my last flight search (and ticket purchase) as a direct counter-example.
I want to go to Europe for two to three months. I'll fly wherever is cheapest and I'm willing to go for any period between March and July.
This is theoretically one search on Adioso. It is impossible on Kayak or any other website I've seen to date. And when I say impossible, I don't mean impossible in a single search, I mean I would have to do several thousand searches to cover the full matrix of options which would actually be impossible.
Not to mention, the carriers listed by Kayak actually was quite limited (not sure about others).
Then flip between to the Map and lowest fare icons (top right of map). I find this much better at zeroing in on a good fare, with loose travel requirements.
Sure, I think the discovery flexibility is great. But are there enough people who think that way?
And how many compared to people who think:
- I have the week of April 25-30 off. I can visit my best friend in Phoenix
- What flights are available for Boise, ID on July 2, when my friend gets married?
- time to find a flight for that conference next week
- Time to book a flight to go home for Christmas
I'm guessing: very few. And so even if Adioso's flight finding ability was as good or better than Kayak, I still have the habit of checking Kayak whenever I need a flight. And that is very hard to overcome.
But let's say I overcome my reflexive Kayak visit for special summers when I can just explore...how many of those special summers does anyone have, and is it enough to give Adioso enough traction?
We're betting that there are - or that there would be if they were given the option.
Think about it this way: if you were to build the perfect online travel product from scratch today, would you say "it will be a better product if we only let people search narrow origin/destination/date options; it's fine for people who have flexibility to just spend hours submitting hundreds of different searches"?
We think we have sound basis for believing there's huge demand for a more flexible search product with a company culture that excites people, but it's pointless to debate it here; we're very happy to let the market decide.
The argument that Expedia/Priceline/Kayak etc have the market sewn up is one we've lived with daily for the 5+ years we've been in the space.
Once you examine it closely, it's surprising to find how small a share of the total travel market these companies have, and how little affection and loyalty they command from ordinary people, even within the US, but particularly outside of it.
Not true. Skyscanner as just one example lets you search to 'Everywhere' depart 'Any Day' and arrive 'Any Day' and have nearly all the airlines including low cost carriers including ones Adioso don't like 'Ryanair'
While Adioso looks good and started off with promise, it appears to have fallen into the trap trying to be and stay cool.
Adioso has a lack of useful data. So working on whatever dreamy idea of natural language processing and making life easier for people isn't going anywhere fast.
I like ugly websites, they are useful and have lots of data so I can make useful decisions.
Adioso is not ugly. It makes decisions for me and then I go to Kayak to check the options. I want everything in front of me at once and Adioso moves away from that.
I only hope that Tom Howard has the sense to check the criticisms rather than just voting them down and pretending they don't exist.
Maybe it's time Tom showed off some of the criticisms about Adioso on his posts instead if all the roses. If people aren't complaining about Adioso then people aren't using it.
I only hope that Tom Howard has the sense to check the criticisms rather than just voting them down and pretending they don't exist. Maybe it's time Tom showed off some of the criticisms about Adioso on his posts instead if all the roses. If people aren't complaining about Adioso then people aren't using it.
You kidding me? I put the major criticisms right in the post. And we welcome criticism - one of the major reasons we publish posts like this is to attract criticism to help guide us in what our priorities should be. And I've never downvoted a polite/civil critical comment fwiw.
The criticisms I see in the article are;
1. Something from Paul Graham - It is his job to criticise.
2. “But it’s so slow!”
Otherwise it is overwhelmingly about personal problems and how Adioso is everyone's darling.
I can easily get 20 people to say my site is great, but to get 20 people to tell me it's a load of shit... that's the hard part. I don't need people to tell me that it's good, I need people wanting more.
What are you improving? What are you working on?
Don't get me wrong;
The ongoing soap opera about Adioso is a wonderful read, I wish more people had the guts to spell out all the bullshit that is involved in trying to make money from travel.
How you intend to get traffic/make money from Adioso is far beyond my comprehension.
I get 5 results searching New York to Singapore, and only 3 fit on the page at a time. Looks nice, but fucking awful to use as a tool.
FWIW, I think it's great you shared your troubles, it's not a discussion that's easy to have in any context. I think you and your team have a good eye and mindset and I hope you find the solution/pivot to your current problems (or else I wouldn't waste time with writing out criticisms)
It's reasonable to take the speed hit in order to make it more useful to more people, but the UI seems to be designed with fast searches in mind (for which it'd be perfect), rather than for the necessarily slow searches that actually happen. It'd be a lot nicer to use if you typed your query and something happened to reflect the immense amount of stuff going on behind the scenes rather than just sitting there for a few seconds...
Any plans of releasing an affiliate API ?. I'am current creating a travel media site (think Tumblr + Tripadvisor mashed together) and i would love to integrate a intelligent, accurate & unobtrusive little flight search widget to the site.
For instance when a user visits a page under any destination (say Bangkok) I would like to present him with something like 'Flights from {Your Location} to Bangkok starting at {xyz}$" to get him to start his flight search.
Here the 'xyz$' pre-search number should be a real price that the user would see in the search results and not some unrealistic number that sites like Tripadvisor and Expedia use as link bait. The start location should be the user's current location and the destination should be from a list of options (e.g {dest: "Ko Phangan, Surat Thani, Thailand, Asia"}) specified while calling your API.
A few months back i explored various options available at that time and gave up on the idea as being impossible. But now, since you are making the impossible possible.. maybe you could do something about it? I'am sure that many other publishers would be interested as well.
Mostly because it's natural to type a word longhand in the form of a sentence. So it's not that you should be able to do one or the other, but that you should be able to do either. A user shouldn't be coerced into doing something unnatural for them if your premise is to make it conform to a user's natural language rather than forcing a query type language.
Great website, love the idea! One thing I still don't get is why exactly it is slow? How come you can pre-load some data, but not other? The first thing that comes to mind is caching, but I guess I am not understanding the problem correctly.
Side note: 2 weeks ago there was a hackathon at our university (Edinburgh) and in the Travel category one of the teams tried to do exactly the same thing. However, they only implemented the NLP part as they were using data via Skyscanner's API. Our entry[1] had a similar flavour, but rather than typing, one could select their cities and we did the planning for them.
They have their own fast, local price cached graph 'wingtip' but it only has data from selected low cost carriers. With this redesign they have felt the need to fill in the gaps via calls to Expedia's api's which are slow.
Adioso began as a single source for price search to low cost carriers and the low cost carriers are not in the GDS because they won't pay the prices.So I presume they scrape (spider at regular intervals) the low cost carrier prices from the airline websites but possibly they have api direct links. Tom could tell us. (Tom I really want an in depth post on wingtip!) But to do fast real time search for hundreds of airlines you need more than a fast schedule (time dependent graph) you also need the complex fare rules worked out and programmed. All of that data is available but costs. The last bit is you then need to check availability via wherever you can book the ticket (GDS or direct to airline) and cache it for speed. I think that the fact that Tom links to Vayant's price cacheing api it is an admission that it isn't raw data that's lacking it's a higher level api where fares and availability are already worked out. Because seriously to do that yourself is a huge time & engineering challenge. It took ITA years. Adioso have the fast Graph and can get the schedule data. Vayant is offering an off the shelf solution to do fares and availability. Could work.
Right, makes a bit more sense now. Thanks for the thourough explanation. Also, I would too be interested in a post which gives more insight into Wingtip as it sounds quite interesting.
But I prefer Skyscanner's 'whole month' search. I can see flight prices for the whole month to a whole country on a single screen. With yours I see seven days at a time. And it takes an age to see the next seven!
I'm sure it's a difficult problem getting accurate 'fuzzy' flight info fast, but Skyscanner have it cracked and have done for some time.
I like the idea of your somewhere warm search, but again it's dead in the water if it takes 30 seconds to start returning results. Just because you offer powerful search doesn't mean you can sacrifice speed. You've still lost my attention in spite of the novelty.
Yeah, it does sound tough and kudos for pushing through. You should really dissect Skyscanner though.
I've just done a search for London to Denmark in April on both your site and Skyscanner.
Skyscanner: I'm shown all available cities and their best price in < 2 seconds.
Click through to the entire month grid where I can play around with out and in flight dates in a nice compact chart.
Best price Copenhagen £26 on the 24th.
Adioso: The search snaps to Denmark, AU (can you weight destinations by population?). The correction option you offer is nice though.
It takes around 10 seconds to start returning prices and 30 seconds until complete.
Once I select a destination I'm not a fan of your results. The slider to see more than 7 days really gets on my nerves. Having to wait again after I thought I was done with waiting is exhausting.
When I want to select a return flight I then have to decide from three options: I have to think too much. With the Skyscanner grid I can play and see 'okay Wednesday to Sunday seems to be cheapest, I was going to go Friday to Monday but I'll stay longer'.
Best price Copenhagen £26 on the 16th.
I'm impatient especially when shopping around for the best price. I really think unless you achieve the performance comparable to the Skyscanner guys you'll be dead in the water.
You have something here and have clearly achieved a lot. But essentially I think you've overstretched and sacrificed a very important quality: speed and UX.
Explaining it doesn't help your users deal with it ;)
I'd suggest making it a bit more asynchronous, or returning whatever results you can first. Allow people to save searches, perhaps, and come back to them in a few minutes.
"That’s slow, especially when you have to do dozens or hundreds of searches to deliver a single set of results."
This seems like a simple communication problem. If this information was displayed to the user ( "36 Searches Completed" or something, ticking up while they waited ), watching that number quickly grow would make me feel crazy productive. "I just waited 5 minutes for a search result" turns into "Oh my god, it would have taken me an hour to do all those searches, this is awesome! Oh, I just did another 3!"
Of course, this is exactly what is happening. You just need to communicate that to the user.
Great! I plan on using Adioso all the time once I get past grad school and have some money. The "Anywhere" destination is exactly how I would love to travel, but no other site allows that.
I have a hypothesis. If the results are exactly what I want and are so good that I don't need to do multiple permutations of the same search, it won't matter one bit that the search takes a long time to complete.
The challenge is that not only do you have to really nail it with the "one bullet", but you probably also have to prove it as well. Just coming up with the best answer might not be enough, because people don't trust travel sites to do that. How do you earn trust? You have to convey the sense of an exhaustive search encompassing all the best-known airlines (especially the budget ones), all the available fare types, and flight times. It's almost like putting together a business case for the trip. "Here's the recommendation, based on all these different things we considered."
The site looks beautiful, and the UI for the search results is really flexible & powerful. Just a fantastic job.
But the search box, it requires educating the user, and this is your initial and most important functionality on your site. The funny thing is, you allow your user to type in the search as if they are speaking to a person which is a great idea and obviously the way it should be, but that is not how users have been trained to interact with random websites. I am sure you are aware of this, I am sure the search box is very important to you, but I think you should revisit the search box and homepage.
Here are some ideas, feel free to love them, hate them, praise them, trash them. I hope they are good and if not I hope they give you some new ideas.
* Home page - plain white & bare, logo centered, add airplane or luggage to logo so you don't need to describe what you are offering, text "Where do you want to go?", text box, and nothing else. (Format it like google and people will be more inclined to use it like google)
* Automatically figure out where they are coming from. Google analytics knows already, so I am sure there is some way to grab that info. Assume this is their starting point until they tell you otherwise. It currently is defaulting to LA.
* The first question anyone answers when traveling somewhere is "Where", thus the only text on your page asks, "Where do you want to go?".
* As the user types in his destination / search, the website immediately responds informatively and aesthetically.
* Once you have matched a destination, the background of the page changes to a beautiful image of that location, the vacation doesn't start once you get off the plane, it starts now. Going from plain white bkgd to a destination image bkgd ideally will slowly start to pull your user into a vacation mind set.
* Once you have matched a destination, the text on the homepage changes from "Where do you want to go?" to "When? You could type next week, or 03/22".
* If the user deleted the destination before entering "When", repopulate the input field with both the destination and when they want to travel text, he will now understand that you just keep entering information into the field as if you are talking to a person, or searching on google.
* Once you have matched when, introduce new imagery of activities you can do there and/or native food dishes. You are continuing the theme of providing your user with an vacation experience now, not later.
* Once you have matched when, the text on the homepage changes from "When? You could type next week, or 03/22" to "For how long? You could type a few days, or a weekend"
* After you have all needed search data, proceed to results, and if possible continue vacation now theme
* The search box should still work as originally intended as well.
Keep up the good fight, don't let them leave the home page without thinking "This is cool!", and I would love to one day hear people say "I need to adioso!"
Hello, I'm the designer behind the homepage and search box. Thanks for the great feedback! As you could have guessed, there's been a lot of thought and iterating over the homepage and the orange search box, both on a functional level and a branding experience.
It's been a really interesting exercise. Searching (at least from a Web interface POV) is a really robust paradigm and a space that is challenging to innovate in. While I agree that we haven't quite 'nailed it', I feel like we're constantly moving towards the promised land while adhering to the plethora of backend and frontend contraints.
I like your idea from a story telling perspective, but it feels a little step heavy. We're trying to be patient in educating users on the breadth of queries we can handle. Understanding what you could put into the Google search box was a very gradual discovery experience.
I too am hoping we can turn a proper noun into a verb :)
Here's my take on the search box- I'm a parent flying with a young child, and I just finished booking flights last week.
While the capabilities of the open-ended design of the search is amazing, when I search for flights, I find that I am looking for something very specific. I know cites and dates, direct flights only. Even before getting married and having a kid, I generally think about where and when I want to travel well before I start searching online. I don't know if other people are more spontaneous than I am, but I am constrained by PTO days, other people's schedules, etc. At the most I want the flexibility to change the leave/return dates by a day or two.
Since I already know the parameters of my trip, I find that the input that most travel sites have settled on (To, From, Include nearby airports, Leave date, Return date) gets me to what I'm looking for faster. The open-endedness of the Adioso search box was actually slower, since I tended to type too little and did a lot of filtering afterwards. It felt like my choices are either I type too much and the computer doesn't understand, or I type too little and "fix it myself".
From my biased perspective, I think it would be a big win to have the traditional search inputs be the default but with the open-ended search as an alternative input (not "Advanced search" but maybe the link is "I'm flexible"). As an alternative search, it's no longer a limiting search but it now feels like: you can type anything and the computer just figures it out! Sweet! Also, user education no longer is a problem- everyone knows what to do with an "I'm flexible" search box.
The other big speed advantage of the traditional search input is: often I will return to a travel site weeks later and my trip details are already pre-filled and all I need to do is hit the search button. You can't really do that with a search box. (When I hit back from the Adioso search results page, I lose everything and the search box is empty. That seems like a bug, I think I should be able to save at least that little bit of typing.)
BTW, I didn't feel like Adioso search (getting back the initial results) was slow at all. It felt just as fast as any other travel site and definitely faster than the worst of them that leave you staring at airplane animations for 10s of seconds.
Great work, I'm really interested to see what happens with Adioso. I'll definitely be trying it more in the future!
> when I search for flights, I find that I am looking for something very specific. I know cites and dates, direct flights only
I'm pretty much the same if I'm going on holiday - I usually chose an exact city well before looking for flights rather than a country or an area.
If I'm flying back to my parents though, it's a bit different. There are a number of airports around them:
- one has flights daily but requires a 3 hour train journey
- another has flights twice a week and is a 1 hour drive
- another has flights daily, is a 1 hour drive, but is usually more than twice the price of the others
- another has flights daily, is a 2 hour drive, and the price varies
For this I usually just open SkyScanner (Adioso doesn't seem to have many low cost airlines in Europe) in 10 tabs or so and compare the results myself...
That might be the case for you both, but I certainly have a use case for this style of searching. I often want to go on a break over a set weekend/week with no set destination in mind, and very flexible with dates. This type of things is perfect for when your not explicitly looking for a specific date range or flight path.. more just experimenting with options.
Hats off to you guys, like the semantic query style rather than the traditional mould!
Absolutely agree that there is a use case for the open-ended search- it's powerful, cool, and not yet addressed by anyone. My point is that the "traditional" search also has it's strengths, especially when the trip is not going to be open-ended: travelling to a wedding or graduation, travelling for business, travelling with a group of friends where the schedule and destination is agreed upon.
In fact, thinking about it more, I strongly suspect that personality (in a Myers-Briggs J/P way) has a lot to do with how we prefer to travel. Some people plan everything out ahead of time down to the hour, some people close their eyes and spin the globe.
I think the other factor is how often you fly. If you don't travel/vacation very often, you are more likely to be travelling for a specific reason where dates and destination is known. If you travel very often, you will probably have more opportunities to pick a random place to go for the weekend.
That seems a bit of a bold claim, but I tried it and yup it does seem to work :) It isn't particularly useful for the scenario I described above as I already know how to get there, I just want to know the cheapest price, but I'll definitely remember it if I'm going somewhere new!
It does however suggest I walk across water to start with (there is a bus stop further distance wise that doesn't involve this that I usually take): http://i.imgur.com/FxhVhxj.png
I love the website, it is really useful. But I love more the idea of "We identify a problem people have, and we won't give up until we solve it!" That is very motivational.
a) It needs an 'OR' operator. If I enter from as 'Western Europe', I'm told it's too broad, which is ok - but I'd like to be able to choose a few convenient starting places rather than do a separate search for each.
(To those who say a random starting location is a bad idea: actually, in Europe, it's a pretty good one. Depending on my destination, I've found it useful to travel up to 8 hours by train to catch a decent flight, and I'd consider taking a low-cost flight pretty much anywhere in the continent for a particularly fun-looking and decently-priced flight to far enough away...)
b) It needs better data. http://www.ltur.com/de/flug.htm?omnin=TopNavi-FL currently would let me get from Brussels to Punta Cana (Dominican Republic) for 411 Euros if I left tomorrow. Adioso starts at 490, and the second cheapest is already over 1000.
It's nifty; if it gets better data and a bit more flexibility, I could see using it. I travel a lot and have a pretty flexible schedule. For now, I'll be sticking with edreams, easyjet, etc.
Guys there is an easy way around your problem. if your results are as good as you say they are then its just a matter of tweaking your ux. offload the result delivery to email and pubsub the actual search. If you have thought of this I would be interested in hearing why it doesn't work. If not then please at least include it as an option.
Have you thought about treating it as more of an agent query and bringing the user back to the site with an email notification? The searches I tried were so slow I'd probably forget about them and my stale-tab-killer would close them before I'd see the result.
Plus then you could potentially update them if better results came along (and they agreed to that).
The reason this product doesn't exist "already" is because it's not the type of searching airline's preferred customer need.
Airlines prefer business class customers (routine flights, willing to upgrade to expensive business class tickets) and those customers typically search for small 1-2 day windows.
Even if this was true, it hasn't stopped many/most airlines being financial disasters.
We know airlines want this as much as consumers do, if it gives them a better ability to manage their capacity and market their products more efficiently.
We also hear it's a myth that airlines prefer business-class customers; on a dollars-per-square-metre basis they do better out of coach.
EDIT: Also note, most of the newest/fastest-growing/most profitable airlines in the world are low-cost and don't have business-class.
Also, 80-90% of people in business or first are using free or mileage upgrades. Almost nobody actually pays to be up there. That's exactly why so many new and/or low cost carriers don't even have business class.
Presumably you've had some discussions with GDS companies: what reasons have they provided for not offering [affordable licences for] such flexible search parameters?
Nah, in modern flight search, ITA & Vayant take all the raw flight data like schedules, fare rules etc which they buy from companies like OAG and Innovata & IATA. GDS increasingly are nothing more than a source for cacheing prices when a 'direct connect' connection to the airline is not available or where the end consumer (an ota or travel agent for example) will be purchasing via GDS. Certainly no GDS has tech that does open ended real time Graphed queries like Google Flights, Adioso's Wingtip, Vayant, Skyscanner can do
The cached prices are the hard part of the search though (anyone with a licence to schedule data from Innovata or OAG can build a tool that searches for "all return flights from California to Europe in summer"). In theory it should be possible to grab current price/availability for that set of flights from a GDS and filter it to give "all return flights ... under $1500" (minus some LCCs that don't accept GDS bookings) which is the more interesting part of the problem from the consumer's point of view.
Presumably if Adioso are finding it worthwhile building their own price scraping/caching engine the GDS companies aren't willing to allow their systems to be [affordably] queried on that kind of scale. I'm just wondering whether they're claiming it's impossible for technical reasons, IP reasons (they sell price data back to the airlines) or just weren't willing to quote Adioso an affordable rate.
This is what I've been looking for - trip ideas based on a vague spec. Speed isn't actually as important to me getting a comprehensive list of options. If you take my order and then email me the results in 30 minutes, that's better than 30 minutes wasted on Kayak and the like.
hmm, adioso team, just wanted to say: your blog is set to meta robots "noindex, nofollow" which does not make to much sense for a public blog. (p.s.: no, i do not stalk your blog, i just use this obtrusive-testing plugin www.f19n.com/b/canonical-robots-meta-user-script)
For what it's worth I think you've managed to improve the speeds quite dramatically recently. Still a bit slow, but I've found Kayak on my iPhone can be pretty damn slow about returning a full set of results depending on the time of day.
Hey I'm the guy behind the video. The song was actually produced specifically for the video by my music partner Derrick Calloway. We produce under the name Enso (www.ensoofficial.com)
Not unless Southwest opens up their flight data, as it's currently closed to everyone. AA tried this once and pulled Orbitz's access (Expedia followed in support of Orbitz), then AA realized no one had any brand loyalty and "patched their differences" with the companies.
I'm a cofounder of ITA but am no longer affiliated with the company. But if you want to talk to people there, I can connect you. Just reply here with some way for me to contact you.