I almost never use anything other google flights when searching for a ticket. The UI is just so much better and easier to use than the ridiculous bloated crap that most travel sites are (especially when they are trying to shove car-rental and hotel deals in your face).
The one drawback is sometimes they are missing local / smaller airlines from their list of flights (which can be a major price difference from the major ones) on short flights.
>I almost never use anything other google flights when searching for a ticket. The UI is just so much better and easier to use than the ridiculous bloated crap that most travel sites are
Funny, I was just thinking of how dissapointing the Google UI was: it took me three clicks and two page loads to see where and for how long a layover was. Have you tried Hipmunk[0]? Their interface for flight listings is the best I've ever used.
What are you talking about? The layover info in Google Flights is right there in the right-hand column of the results list, "1h 48m in IAD".
I don't see how it could appear any sooner unless it telepathically, I mean, machine-learningally knew your destination and dates before you entered them.
Hm, yes in the case where there's only one layover it does say where and for how long. It doesn't show you that detail for 2+ layovers, and it doesn't show you what the length of the legs are or the local arrival/depature times on the comparison screen.
It takes one click to unroll the flight details which show the layovers and arrival-departure times. The fact that hipmunk doesn't have a monthly calendar with prices makes it significantly worse than google flights for me.
Not to mention a few other missing features, such as google's explore nearby destinations map, which is very handy.
Indeed, I decided to try it out (having never used it before) and was very impressed.
Historically my flight booking priorities were pretty much 100% price related, but now they're a combination of price and duration.
Alas most sites only let you order by one or the other (literal example: 35 hour flight for $1850; change the sort to duration; 15 hour flight $3300, scroll through the list for _ages_ to try and find the best combination of the two).
Then select the best option outbound, only to find out the return flight is 36 hours... Or that the 16 hour option adds another $800 to the price.
The HipMunk UI was really nice for finding good duration flights in both directions, whilst also making it clear the price implications of which return leg I used (which to me is uncommon, because so many sites treat them as disparate steps, so a change in return flight means you get kicked back to step one.
Not strictly comparing the experience to Google Flights (as I haven't really used it), but to a lot of other flight search sites I've used (Kayak, SkyScanner, WebJet, Airline sites, IWantThatFlight, HelloWorld, among others).
The HipMunk UI actually facilitated that search really well. Very impressed :-) (And it seemed to have equally good prices for the flights I looked at compared to other sites.)
To reply to myself, yeah, Google Flights UI leaves a lot to be desired vs Hipmunk. The visualization of flights and layovers on Hipmunk is vastly better.
I like how prominent Google Flights makes the layovers in text form, but it's not visual, and you can't sort by agony.
These days I pretty much only fly nonstop or the shortest possible route if a layover is absolutely necessary. Looking at flights right now, the cheapest flight SFO-Frankfurt is 15h of travel and goes through Dallas (!!) vs 10h of travel for the nonstop. No-brainer, especially when you factor in getting on and off the planes, the risk of missed connections, etc.
I think Hipmunk wastes a tremendous amount of space, in a project timeline type view that is just plain unnecessary. Google Flights, is a simple list, with filters, and it's fast. The calendar view with the pricing is ridiculously helpful.
> The one drawback is sometimes they are missing local / smaller airlines from their list of flights (which can be a major price difference from the major ones) on short flights.
Not to mention they're missing Southwest, but that's Southwest's fault -- they seem to have some sort of policy against allowing any third parties to list their flights. In addition to being really annoying since I have to make two searches rather than one every time I want to book a domestic flight due to a lone holdout, it also makes zero sense to me. How could not having all that free advertising from flight search engines possibly be a good thing for Southwest? I care enough to go to the trouble of searching in two places, but I doubt most people do.
Short Answer: It costs money to be there and they can control the variables and environment better on their website.
Long Answer: It dates back to Southwest's routes in competing with the car for travel. In order to be price competitive, they did not want to pay travel agents a 10% commission. (This was the 1970s) So they sold tickets by the phone, at the airport, or at their office, but always direct.
As computers evolved, travel agents began connecting to an airlines fares by computer, rather than books and a phone. Airlines began developing proprietary systems for managing ticket sales, allowing other airlines to be in their systems for a fee. The biggest were Apollo (United) and Sabre (American). Southwest still refused to pay the distribution costs of the tickets.
When the internet became more broadly available to consumers, Southwest jumped on the opportunity, becoming the first major airline to sell tickets online. Other airline followed and soon after, 3rd party sites came to be, using the GDS' (Global Distribution Systems) like Sabre and Apollo to display all of the flights and fares. Acting like modern day travel agents, and putting many travel agents out of business.
Today, while Southwest has become a much larger airline, it still does not want to pay the GDS' for access to their systems. However, today Southwest has a much stronger brand which can drive more people to their website. And by having the website as the primary channel of distribution, they can control a lot of things that they could not within the confines of a GDS.
It has been debated whether the GDS' are really necessary anymore as middlemen. And besides Southwest, other airlines are trying to bring more people to their controlled distribution channel. In the past few days, Delta and American have removed their flight from several 3rd party websites.
I'd be very surprised if Google Flights wanted Southwest to pay for inclusion. It already lists Southwest flights with a note "Prices are not available for: Southwest. Flights with unknown prices are at the end of the list." Instead it really sounds like it's Southwest not wanting it to be easy for people to comparison shop.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on an unrelated project.)
Even then, though, I'd still be very surprised if Google would respond to an offer of seat availability data from Southwest with "sorry, we won't let people search it unless you pay us".
Google works with a few airlines that don't pay them anything. However, Southwest (probably rightly) thinks that if people get used to finding Southwest fares on Google, they'll visit Southwest.com less frequently, increasing Southwest's reliance on Google in the long term. I'm nearly certain Southwest has sent a specific cease and desist to Google to NOT include its fares in results.
Isn't Google sending customers directly to airline websites to book?
So the way this is working is: Google, Hipmunk, etc. use GDS for queries, and then send customer to airline to book? Does GDS have any ability to sell tickets?
Has Google tried to scrape data directly from Southwest website and Southwest won't let them? Or is it just that Southwest will not provide APIs to make it easy for Google to pull the data?
I wonder if it's because people already associate them with being the cheapest, they want people to just default to going to their site and be too lazy to check the comparison sites. If they made it easy to compare, they would lose out on that crowd for any time they weren't the cheapest. Maybe it also allows competitors to beat their prices algorithmically.
Does Southwest selectively offer access to different sites? I know Momondo lists Southwest flights when I search through there. Or is Momondo crawling Southwest's site for prices?
Almost all flight searching / pricing tools have comically bad user interfaces. It's as if the product designers at these companies deliberately went out of their way to limit my options and make me search over and over and over and over.
When's a cheap day to fly to and return from Las Vegas? Sorry. Can't answer that, you need to specify the exact day you want to depart and the exact day you want to come back, and we might let you look at results + or - 3 days, unless you don't specify the exact departure airport.
These sites all seem to be geared toward business travelers who must travel on particular days from and to particular airports. Anything off that beaten path is an exercise in frustration.
When's a cheap day to fly to and return from Las Vegas?
Sorry. Can't answer that, you need to specify the exact
day you want to depart and the exact day you want to come
back, and we might let you look at results + or - 3 days,
unless you don't specify the exact departure airport.
The user interfaces are poor because the quality of the underlying data is poor. The GDS I worked with simply did not offer any useful queries so it was impossible to get good results. A GDS usually charges per request so it quickly gets expensive and slow to aggregate multiple queries into a view that would be useful to the user. Also the terms and conditions of a GDS usually prohibits caching that could be used to make the user experience fast and inexpensive.
Finally the pricing models are non-intuitive and different airlines have different administrators who all type in their respective pricing slightly differently. To get the the best prices you have to tune each query to the particular style used by the administrator.
>These sites all seem to be geared toward business travelers who must travel on particular days from and to particular airports.
Yep. They're pretty clearly designed for the 99% or so case and just (ungracefully) throw their hands in the air for the other 1% or so.
As you say, it's hard to really make the system do the work around finding a cheap flight within a set of parameters.
I've also spent hours booking complicated multi-destination flights, especially in Asia when you need to use multiple carriers. Simply booking as a series of one-way flights can end up costing thousands of dollars more than something more optimized. So you need to end up manually trying various combinations of one-way and round-trip flights and then piecing together the separate itineraries at the end.
Yeah. I actually have broken down and used our company travel service for this. Then at least it's out of my hands. But usually I have too much sunk cost :-) and have sufficient preferences that I just motor through on my own.
I don't think its just business travelers, most people in full-time jobs tend to want to leave and return on specific days - i.e. fly out on Friday night, return on Sunday night (not necessarily in the same weekend).
> When's a cheap day to fly to and return from Las Vegas?
Hopper, an app on iOS, has exactly this. You give it a date, and then it gives you a month view with each day color-coded according to how expensive it will be to travel.
It also gives you recommendations about whether to buy a ticket now, or wait until prices go down.
I've bought tickets a few times through Hopper and it worked well. I have no business relationship with them at all--just a happy customer.
I always use SkyScanner - similar UI with options for "find the cheapest flight in a month," but usually way cheaper prices. Also includes Southwest, which Google Flights is missing, if I remember correctly.
Whenever I compared prices, SkyScanner hasn't been cheaper than Google Flights for me (domestic flights in the US and flights to Europe) and their website is much, much slower than Google Flights. Do you remember what kind of flights were cheaper?
SkyScanner is often either cheaper or more accurate than Google Flights.
Accurate: Google Flights often leaves out the mandatory "additionals" such as booking fee/credit card free, etc.
Cheaper: SkyScanner has more third party companies offering flights. This depends on which language/country you've set SkyScanner to. Try setting it to the country you're departing from. Flying from Amsterdam? Set it to Dutch! Suggest to try it now, sometimes difference is surprising. Though check out if that third party is trustworthy.
I often do e.g. a long trip (+flight) and then various short trips / flights after that. I book the first one early when on discount. The short ones much later.
I prefer Kayak Explore for flexible itineraries since it basically just shows you the best price everywhere and you can filter by price, time of year, flight length: https://www.kayak.com/explore/
EDIT: And here's a ridiculous itinerary it found for reference:
SO good; thank you. Will start visiting random places.. thinking the formula is AirBNB + friends + random interests (tennis/spin) and long walks at the very least.
Hitlist (hitlistapp.com) is also designed specifically with flexibility in mind - we don't have every single route on every day, but we let you set an alert with whatever criteria you have in mind - from 'SFO to London on these days +/- 3 days' to 'a beach in southern Europe for 7-10 days between January 8th and 31st' - and can ping you when fares that match come up.
I just gave it a try because of this comment. Found the UI rather confusing actually. It only showed me one flight? And, that was almost double the price of what I booked yesterday (and found via http://hipmunk.com which is my personal favorite tool that I think has an excellent interface)
The one drawback is sometimes they are missing local / smaller airlines from their list of flights (which can be a major price difference from the major ones) on short flights.