[HN Gopher] I booked my cheapest one-month trip
___________________________________________________________________
I booked my cheapest one-month trip
Author : fagnerbrack
Score : 175 points
Date : 2021-04-29 15:24 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (benbernardblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (benbernardblog.com)
| imwillofficial wrote:
| As somebody who is traveling out of the US for the first time on
| a South America trip, I found this article both helpful, and
| technically illuminating! A great read!
| standardUser wrote:
| > So I booked my flight immediately. Knowing exactly when to book
| definitely felt like magic.
|
| This is the part I can't do. I never get the _best_ fare, let
| alone those occasional $300 round trip to Europe fares, because I
| care too much about the specifics of the flights.
|
| A bad flight time can lose you part or all of a day, leave you
| with a ruined sleep schedule, force you to start/end your trip at
| an absurd hour of the early morning, you can end up sitting in an
| horrific middle seat by the bathroom, or flying on a bottom-of-
| the-barrel airline and so on. If you can live with all of those
| compromises, it's great! If not, you end up paying a more
| "normal" price for your ticket.
| matwood wrote:
| Even just a little bit of flexibility can save you money. One
| EU vacation I was able to save $500/ticket by leaving early in
| the morning and flying to the hub airport, paying the $50pp for
| the nice airport lounge, and working all day (those lounges are
| built for business travelers are a lot like co-working spaces)
| from there. I finished working, had another 'free' snack, got
| on the plane to the EU, and started my vacation.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| is this about some excursion/idea from 2011/2012? I know it's
| just been posted but it's about a pretty old thing
|
| can mark it (2012)
| jspaetzel wrote:
| This type of thing stops being useful when you travel a lot, the
| loyalty programs wind up making a lot of things much cheaper then
| they would be to new customers and easier to find and book.
|
| And regarding flights this didn't try to take advantage of some
| of the common flight booking tricks which can reduce fares much
| deeper like stopovers, +/- days, and airline switching which are
| harder to search.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| As a travel newbie, any recommendations for loyalty programs or
| tips + tricks?
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not a hyper-optimizer but pre-pandemic I was traveling a
| good third of the time.
|
| Basically. Pick an airline and travel with them whenever you
| can. Enroll in all the hotel loyalty programs but they're
| mostly not worth over-optimizing around. If you travel a lot,
| premium credit cards may make sense.
|
| It doesn't matter much until you're travelling what most
| people would consider a lot. But then it can start to become
| significant in terms of money and/or comfort.
| waterside81 wrote:
| Checkout /r/awardtravel on reddit
| fossuser wrote:
| A lot must be really a lot - like large percentages of the
| year?
|
| I went through the effort to sign up for all the loyalty
| programs and I travel some for work (or at least I did) -
| probably 6-12 weeks a year?
|
| The loyalty programs were mostly negligible in value they
| provided. Some (like Amex Platinum rewards) were so hostile to
| get the value from it made me irritated to use it - not a
| direct hotel loyalty example, but a lot of them felt like this
| (calculated to give you the least value possible). Airline
| loyalty sucks and is a pain to use.
|
| The CSV card was probably the only exception to this that I can
| think of.
| newdude116 wrote:
| It really depends. It depends how much you travel and what
| you want to achieve.
|
| 1. Hotel benefits. Can be nice. I screwed out a few free
| nights out of the Accor loyalty program. Also, you start to
| get early check in /early check out/ free breakfast etc.
| which can be nice.
|
| 2. Free flights. This is a tricky one. Yes, I have done it.
| But most of the time it is difficult, except if you fly twice
| a month business class Europe<>US and are draining in miles.
|
| 3. Convenience. Gold status can give you convenience. You
| might get treated nicer, priority check in, extra luggage,
| and lounge access. This is much easier to achieve than free
| flights. As a word of caution: Getting gold elite status is
| an art. Make sure to have a look at flyertalk or another
| website to learn the peaks. Also, if you always fly airline X
| does not mean you have to be on their loyalty program but
| only in their alliance.
| zeroxfe wrote:
| About 7 years ago, I got an invite to the highest level of
| two programs for a year (platinum? vibranium? i don't know.)
| I used travel about once a month for work, which is not
| nearly enough to earn those levels.
|
| It was amazing -- lounge access, free upgrades, free limos,
| free food and drinks, front of the line, expedited service
| everywhere, endless gifts (who doesn't need more socks?) It
| was a pretty good year to fly. :-)
| jspaetzel wrote:
| For me I was able to extract value with maybe... 5-6 trips a
| year minimum. More then that and it just gets easier. But I
| guess it partly depends on what you're valuing.
|
| For instance... If you travel with no checked bags ever, and
| you fly on an airline that requires you to pay for checked
| bags. You won't see the value of having free checked bags
| when you achieve an airline status. There's lots of little
| things like this.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - I think that was the case for me.
|
| I didn't care about checked bags. If I have to jump through
| a bunch of hoops to get a limited (and expiring) $200
| credit it mostly annoys me more than helps.
| busterarm wrote:
| I save more money on my Amex platinum every year than I
| spend. Not even trying, really. If you use Uber, rent cars,
| and click the cashback program links in your emails it's
| actually quite easy to come out ahead.
|
| Hotel stays and checked bag fee waivers will put you way into
| the green.
| fossuser wrote:
| They dole out the uber money a tiny bit each month and if
| you don't use it that month it doesn't roll over
| (obnoxious).
|
| You don't get the airline credits by default you have to
| register with one through their shitty website. You also
| have to choose a specific airline, CSR lets you just use
| the credits on any travel by default.
|
| I don't like paying $550/yr fee for something where I'm
| supposed to be the customer and then have every feature
| feel like something I have to read the fine print for so I
| don't get screwed.
|
| I ended up just switching to the Apple Card. While the
| rewards are subpar, at least the software is best in class
| and they make GS agree to not sell your transactions to
| third parties.
|
| The best Amex feature was the Delta lounge access (only
| when flying on Delta) - the Delta lounges are really nice,
| particularly the one at SFO. The Amex lounges are great
| too, but there aren't many of them and they're often in
| terminals that are inconvenient (or United - which I try to
| avoid at all costs).
|
| I think there's probably an opening here for a startup with
| a credit card that's actually good.
| busterarm wrote:
| the uber money is $30/mo. You can use it with Uber Eats.
| It's more than half of your $550/yr fee. $190 for all of
| the other benefits that the card provides is INSANELY
| CHEAP.
|
| Most of the other programs you just sign up once. It's so
| easy, I don't understand what you're complaining about.
| If it's difficult for you to use the benefits, you
| probably aren't the target type of customer for that
| card.
|
| The merchant discounts and event ticket presales/reserved
| seating are a massive boon. I get just shy of front row
| seating at many events because of AmEx. There's usually
| at least $50 in merchant discounts available each month
| that I'll use.
| splonk wrote:
| Airline loyalty value depends heavily on how frequently you
| can travel on one carrier and how much you value things like
| upgrades.
|
| Hotel loyalty is a whole different ballgame because the
| margins that hotels pay to the booking sites are much higher
| (20-30%). For a long time hotels were contractually obligated
| to give the aggregators their lowest publicly available price
| ("most favored nation" - some recent EU regulation may have
| cut down on this, not sure what the current status is). One
| way of getting around that is direct marketing, so hotels are
| highly incented to get you to sign up for a loyalty program,
| give you 10% off, and keep the other 10% that would otherwise
| go to Booking/Expedia.
| JackFr wrote:
| The key to extracting value from airline loyalty programs
| is not being the one paying for the flights. Many programs
| now don't care as much for the number of flight miles as
| the dollars spent.
|
| Business travelers are much less price discriminatory and
| so airlines get fatter margins. They loyalty programs end
| up transferring value from your firm to you.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, airline loyalty is (was?) pretty much about focusing
| on one carrier (and its partners) wherever possible even if
| it's not always ideal. And flying a lot. I'd hit 60-75K
| miles a year on one carrier. Who knows if I'll ever do that
| again.
|
| Hotels were always something I signed up for and used when
| I could but I never did unnatural acts to do so. May be
| different especially if traveling domestically primarily to
| $BIGCHAIN which almost always has an option.
| darkerside wrote:
| It's not uncommon for consultants to fly weekly for long term
| projects.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I enjoyed this post however was hoping the result was going to be
| more interesting than the rather obvious "buy a few months early
| and keep looking at prices in the meantime."
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| What is the best time to buy rail tickets in the USA?
| thehappypm wrote:
| Almost uniformly earlier is better. There are some specials but
| you're almost always losing if you wait.
| eeixlk wrote:
| Amtrak tickets are sold in buckets and don't price fluctuate
| much. If you are booking in advance more than 14 days and Saver
| tickets are available those are the best deal. I have also
| bought train tickets a few days out and they were cheaper than
| last minute flights.
| thewizardofaus wrote:
| I often find that flight prices can be influenced by what you
| have looked at previously (other competitor, clear cache and
| cookies etc). It's quite a shady practice.
| cratermoon wrote:
| His results jibe with the advice I was given by a frequent
| traveler: book your flight about 2 months in advance.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| I thought ticket prices were also correlated to petrol prices.
| And that since airline companies buy petrol in advance, in order
| to predict prices you'd have to factor in petrol prices X days
| (months?) prior to flight date.
| petulla wrote:
| ymmv but I've found Autoslash to be by far the cheapest option
| for car rentals. Not sure it can be scraped though would be
| interesting to include it.
| splonk wrote:
| I worked for a while on dynamic packaging models (user clicks on
| "flight+hotel", books the flight, and then is presented with a
| list of hotels at their destination). We used time between
| booking and date of travel as one of the signals, and saw that
| there was a pretty clear correlation between planning ahead and
| being more price conscious. I don't think it was a huge effect
| but it probably bumped down the target price of our offered
| hotels by a buck or two.
|
| Unrelated side story about this: we also ran some experiments
| with bumping higher margin (usually meaning higher price) hotels
| into the top ranking slots to see how it affected conversion
| percentages. Normally the top slot has the highest conversion and
| it decays sharply from there. With these experiments running, for
| most countries you could see a clear change where the peak would
| move down to slot 2 or 3 or wherever the "natural" #1 hotel was
| (score one for our models, I guess). This effect was most
| pronounced with German travelers, and almost nonexistent for
| French ones.
| jedberg wrote:
| This was basically what Hipmunk did. Gather pricing data and make
| predictions on when it would be cheapest to buy. It happened to
| be hidden behind a beautiful interface.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Bing flights also did this with a very prominent message like
| "This flight is more expensive than usual...wait 6 days to buy"
| message....I wonder if part of that explains why bing flights
| is shut down now?
| w-m wrote:
| I sorely miss it - other sites may provide similar pricing
| information, but none even come close to match the lovely
| loading animation that was the joy of using Hipmunk.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Me2. It was so useful. The chipmunk swaying with the airplane
| arms. :D
| pudmaidai wrote:
| I routinely check several times before making a booking. I
| kept Hipmunk in my apps and bookmarks for years and never
| turned out a better deal. I deleted it probably only a few
| months before they closed up.
|
| The interface was cute but that was 'bout it for me.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Yeah, you pretty much have to browse every major price site
| and then the suggested vendor directly. And check them on
| desktop, mobile, and someone else's mobile just to be sure
| the deals are the best.
| hammock wrote:
| Kayak and Google flights do this
| 19h wrote:
| Reminds me that in 2019 I flew 17 times to the balearic islands
| from Germany and back for prices ranging from 1.99EUR to 6.99EUR
| per flight, it's about 20EUR to 200EUR right now. Missing the
| travel..
| stblack wrote:
| I'd be very interested to know how patterns changed between 2012
| and, say, February 2020. I bet watching such data as the pandemic
| eases will be vastly interesting too.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I don't have any insights into the post-pandemic picture, but
| up until early 2020 when I was working with flight tickets, the
| general pattern looked the same: roughly 90 days ahead is the
| best time to book.
| pudmaidai wrote:
| I think it generally depends on the market and on the route.
| I got some cheap flights in South East Asia in the week I
| flew, with prices being lower than average. This led to me
| postponing "what's next" decisions to the last possible
| moment.
| throwaway823882 wrote:
| Google Flights does this for you. It can both show you actual
| prices per calendar month, and predicted price rise/fall. It even
| highlights the lowest price dates. And you can sign up for
| e-mailed price alerts.
| pudmaidai wrote:
| Sigh downvotes on HN.
|
| This is correct. Google Flight is amazing at tracking flight
| prices over time and lets you see dips in the past on a
| readable chart.
|
| Something that they could make easier would be to forecast
| exact price changes based on the same flight flight on other
| dates.
| darod wrote:
| was all the work that went into this project factored into the
| amount of money that was saved?
| meepmorp wrote:
| I think he enjoyed doing it, which is added value to one's
| life.
| lozaning wrote:
| Yeah, I have a friend that spends hours a week planning this
| kind of stuff out. His hobby is putting together vacations
| from credit card points as cheaply as possible. TBH I think
| he actually enjoys the scheming part more than the actual
| trips.
| my_usernam3 wrote:
| My father still enjoys clipping coupons and views it as
| therapeutic. He also enjoys the act of saving a few dollars
| here and there because it gives him the same dopamine rush
| that it did when he those dollars were relatively important
| to his overall net-worth. To many of us, the act of saving
| money is more exciting than the money itself.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| I can definitely relate to this. I've spent countless
| hours optimizing my groceries and trying to get them as
| low as possible. I could easily spend several times as
| much without much financial impact, but I enjoy it as a
| way to derive satisfaction and mindfulness from what's
| otherwise just a mundane and repetitive chore
| okareaman wrote:
| I think the question is, if he didn't enjoy doing it, would
| it still be worth it, for examples for others that might view
| it as work
| stblack wrote:
| In the article, the author covers this, saying the technical
| facets of doing this were worth more than the money saved.
|
| In other words, the author tallies the work and learning that
| went into this as a positive benefit, not a negative, as you
| may be alluding.
| nradov wrote:
| The problem lately is that airlines are still cancelling and
| rescheduling a lot of flights. So even if you book a particular
| flight there's a significant risk that the airline will bump you
| to a different one.
| newdude116 wrote:
| Joh man. This makes flight hacks quite dangerous. E.g. relying
| on a connection flight with a different airline. I lost a
| flight leg and the next option offered to me was 2 weeks later!
| Clewza313 wrote:
| I believe the startup mentioned was Forecast, which was acquired
| by Microsoft and then nuked without (AFAICT) the tech actually
| landing in any MS product. Maybe it was just threatening Expedia
| or something...
| stevievee wrote:
| I think the environment has changed since this was project was
| executed. I am not familiar with the industry but it now seems
| like travel companies and airlines have more ad-hoc control of
| their online prices. Someone please correct me here.
|
| Back then (2012) I used a startup called flightfox to find the
| best travel deals for me (they have since pivoted to corporate
| travel management). I assumed they performed analysis similar to
| this article plus some other magic and it worked really well.
|
| Today, I find more deals through "deal spotting" - a community or
| algorithm scours for deals and then those deals are shared within
| a community or on a website.
| splonk wrote:
| IIRC Flightfox was originally a market where you posted your
| desired itinerary and constraints and a price, and some travel
| points nerd could offer you a convoluted routing would meet
| those constraints for (this is why I ended up booking Star
| Alliance flights for years through a Colombian carrier's site).
| It was really helpful for me to spend ~$40 rather than try to
| learn the collective wisdom of FlyerTalk forums. I think they
| later pivoted to some more automated system where they'd try to
| sell the flights directly - I hadn't realized that they were in
| corporate travel management now.
| rockostrich wrote:
| Not really, at least as far as I know. Historically, prices
| have been set in a pretty ad-hoc manner by revenue managers at
| the airlines. I'm pretty sure that's where the "best deals for
| flights are on Tuesdays" thing comes from. Revenue managers
| would show up to work on Monday, spend the whole day reviewing
| the performance of their routes and then on Tuesday morning
| they would set the new prices for flights based on that
| analysis. In some cases, they mess up and you would get a
| really good deal because humans aren't perfect.
|
| What has changed a bit is airlines have invested more into
| machine learning and trying to apply revenue optimization
| models to programmatically adjust their prices. You still get
| those weird deals since there's still some ad-hoc price
| adjustment and also machine learning models aren't perfect, but
| the pattern is less predictable.
| Black101 wrote:
| I don't know why almost everything is more expensive Canada...
| It's about the same distance from Montreal-Vegas and
| FortLauderdale-Vegas but it only cost about 142CAD round trip
| when you come from FL. The food in Canada is also very
| expensive... I pay about 1/4th what they pay for a gallon of milk
| for example (and I won't talk about the gas).
| novok wrote:
| Taxes, a bunch of which are tariffs at the border or built into
| the price like the gas tax, protectionism, laws and a smaller
| market.
| Black101 wrote:
| Also, I guess milk is not a very good example because the
| government has a minimum price set on milk, at least in
| Quebec.
| novok wrote:
| It's a good one I'm thinking, because laws are literally
| making it more expensive. There are a bunch for other food
| items. The gas tax is higher so gas is more expensive, the
| cell phone market is an exploitative oligopoly even more
| than the USA and thus the prices are some of the highest in
| the world, and so on. The countries economy is now
| dependant on the RE sector, so that is even worse than the
| USA for many.
|
| TBH if the USA got universal healthcare, the advantages of
| living in Canada would be slim.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I don't think it's that simple. Even local produce is
| exceedingly highly priced these days. We've no shortage of
| produce, and there's no real protectionism going on there.
| And AFAIK there hasn't been any tax changes on those kinds of
| goods yet the prices are ever higher.
| dheera wrote:
| > This is when I wondered - could I make a startup out of it?
|
| Usually the algorithms change when you do that. I used to scrape
| data and get a lot of cheap flight tickets, but the difference is
| that I didn't blog about how I did it, nor did I provide services
| for anyone :)
| timdaub wrote:
| The annoying part about booking plane tickets these days is that
| most flight booking websites have very similar and limited
| functionality for querying and filtering. Sure, there's Matrix
| ITA and Google Flights is an upgrade too.
|
| But imagine what people could do if you gave them full fledged
| access to all flight data. The efficiencies!
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| A lot of flight prices are calculated upon a search query and
| only guaranteed for that query (and for a set number of
| minutes). There generally isn't just some sort of table you can
| look into and get prices unfortunately.
|
| The company I work at provides these sorts of search interfaces
| to airlines, but all the pricing data we show has to be
| estimates based on confirmed prices in the past. If you're
| directly on an airline website (not Google Flights, Kayak, etc)
| and see a calendar or something that lets you view 60 days of
| prices or more at once, there's a good chance that was
| developed by one of our teams. Unfortunately we can't totally
| guarantee you those prices, and we'll do things like not render
| those components if our estimate confidence isn't high enough.
|
| Getting a "real" price for a flight is not a particularly fast
| API call, and also costs the airlines a small amount of money
| from the provider (almost no airline directly generates their
| own prices, generally another company does). Fractions of a
| penny per call, but that really adds up if you just give free
| bulk direct access to that to customers.
| OJFord wrote:
| Is that not all totally bonkers?
| splonk wrote:
| There's a paper somewhere (I think from one of the ITA
| founders) about how flight search is actually NP-complete. I
| haven't looked carefully but I think these slides cover a lot
| of it.
|
| http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf
|
| "One interesting result not written up here is that even
| completely fixing the flights and fares of a ticket, so that
| the only remaining question is how to partition the fares into
| priceable units, is NP-complete. This is interesting because
| only flight and fare information makes its way onto printed
| tickets, not the grouping of fares into PUs. Therefore the
| problem of just validating a printed ticket is worst-case NP-
| complete, though it is rarely difficult in practice."
| lqet wrote:
| Ha, that reminds me of the time when we found a loophole in the
| European train ticket price system: Deutsche Bahn had (and still
| has I think) a "Europe Special" where you could buy a ticket from
| any town in Germany to any town in Europe for 39 EUR flat. Our
| idea was to travel through Croatia for a few weeks, and we wanted
| to book a train ticket to Zagreb, from where we would start our
| trip. Sure enough, bahn.de (the journey planer of Deutsche Bahn)
| offered us a ticket for a train ride of around 16 hours from our
| home town to Zagreb, through Austria and Slovenia. We would have
| had to change trains 2 times.
|
| Then things escalated.
|
| We discovered that we could book the same trip, for the same
| price, but with a different route, making a 500 km detour inside
| Germany over my parent's town. Then we discovered that bahn.de
| allowed us to specify a minimum time to change trains. We set it
| to 24 hours at my parent's town, letting us stay at my parents
| for a night. Then we found out that we could set an additional
| via option in such a way that we had to change trains in
| Ljubljana. We set the minimum time to change trains there to 24
| hours. Then we found out that the ticket price was the same if we
| travelled not only to Zagreb, but to Split (at the coast), which
| required a change of trains in Zagreb. But we wanted to stay a
| few days in Zagreb, and the maximum minimum time to change trains
| on bahn.de was 24 hours. We then discovered that (at least 5
| years ago) _all_ foreign tickets were valid for 30 days in
| Croatia. Effectively, this meant that we could stay in Zagreb for
| 30 days, and our ticket to Split _was still valid_.
|
| We got the ticket. After a week of visiting my parents (1 night
| stay), Ljubljana (1 night stay), and Zagreb (5 nights stay), we
| arrived in Split without problems. It was a 1,500 km, 7 day train
| trip for 39 EUR.
|
| The only minor problem we had was the German conductor in the
| first train after we visited my parents. He just stared at the
| monstrous ticket in disbelief and had to finally conclude that it
| was valid.
|
| After 10 days at the Dalmatian coast, we took the bus home.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| That's really awesome.
|
| But why would the system allow for detours like that? I know
| multi city is a thing for flights, but would have figured the
| utility less for trains, but I'm not European so for all I know
| it's common to make big not-salesmen-problem paths.
| lqet wrote:
| It's pretty common in Europe for train journey planners to
| offer a "Via" option. This is often used to select a specific
| route if multiple options to go from A to B exist (for
| example, to get a scenic route).
| treeman79 wrote:
| Somewhere a coder with a deadline was happy the system
| worked.
|
| Dealing with insane scenarios is out of scope for current
| sprint.
| amelius wrote:
| Or management gave imprecise requirements, and coder
| implemented them in the most customer-friendly way without
| asking any questions.
| gpvos wrote:
| It's not so much the distance, but which trains you take, how
| fully booked they normally are, and how much in advance you
| book. Sometimes a detour is cheaper than the direct route.
|
| If you don't mind sitting in the train a bit longer, one
| possible trick (of many) with the German system is to book
| most of your trip using regional (non-long-distance) trains,
| and only a small bit in an IC or ICE. That way you can
| usually get across the entire country for 39 EUR (or less
| with a Bahncard) even if booked a few days in advance.
| Extensions into neighbouring countries often come for
| (almost) free.
| newdude116 wrote:
| Will check it out. Until last year, you could use a neighbor
| country to buy train tickets to and from Germany. Since you did
| not have to start using the ticket in the first station but can
| basically board the train wherever you feel on the booked trip,
| you were able to buy all bullet train tickets for about 20
| Euros (e.g. Berlin>Hannover, Leipzig>Cologne etc.). Best thing:
| Not bound to a specific train on that day and they were
| reimbursable until 24h before your trip started. Good times.
| But all good times come to an end :-(
|
| Just for a comparison: These 20 Euro rides would set you back
| 150 Euros otherwise.
|
| And for train ride information, there is always:
| https://www.seat61.com/
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Until just a few years ago international train tickets were
| valid for two weeks. That was really useful, since as long as
| you travels towards a destination you could get quite cheap
| tickets for tours through Germany or Europe with multiple
| stops.
| cigaser wrote:
| For EU and Asia traveler, that trip seems very expensive. My
| cheapest trip ever included 7 flights between 3 continents for 90
| euro.
| pomian wrote:
| Because Canada! Canada is often more expensive in almost
| everything. If you think about the size of the country and
| population density, then it makes sense.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| This is what https://www.hopper.com/ does. Didn't quite work out
| when I tried, prices only kept going up!
| taneq wrote:
| I'm guessing you had a pretty strong prior that 'prices go
| down'?
| carabiner wrote:
| It got me LAX-JFK for $361 during Xmas holiday... usually it's
| like $600.
| rockostrich wrote:
| Hi there, Hopper engineer here. The blog post is pretty
| accurate from my experience (lowest prices ~3 months out) but
| if you apply any of this logic to the past year then you're
| going to have a bad time. The pandemic caused the entire
| industry to lower their average flight prices and now that
| things are starting to return to normal, so are prices. Because
| of that, predicting price trends based on historic data is a
| bit tougher.
|
| If you use iOS (not sure if we have it on Android just yet)
| then I'd recommend looking for something called "auto-buy" when
| you search for a flight. It's basically a limit order for
| flights and it'll allow you to set a price that you would be
| comfortable buying at. If the fare dips to that price then
| it'll book for you. We've seen some insane deals get booked
| through this product. Just looking at some of them from
| yesterday there was a round-trip flight from NFO (Norfolk,
| Virgina) to MCO (Orlando, Florida) that we originally price
| quoted at $284 for the user and it was booked at $166.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Why do you have some features on ios but not android? Why
| isn't this on your website.
|
| Maybe I am old (possible), weird (probable), and out touch
| (definitely). But I couldn't imagine the case where I am
| planning on doing research for travel and I would go to an
| app over a website. For looking at data, typing things in,
| comparing prices, etc. A phone app really is the worst form
| factor for that.
|
| I am not sure how big your company is, or how its done. But
| your product owners are dropping the ball in my opinion. I
| backed out of the website as soon as I found I couldn't do
| anything from the website.
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| I am young, and decline to comment on the others, but fully
| agree. It irritates me to try to do such things on my
| phone; I often give up and reach for a 'real' computer &
| keyboard to start again and wish I hadn't bothered with the
| phone to begin with.
|
| If I didn't need a WhatsApp app on a phone in order to use
| WhatsApp on a computer, I probably wouldn't have a phone,
| (maybe an emergency use classic Nokia brick) or at least
| use it extremely infrequently.
| Accacin wrote:
| I guess I'm also old, weird, and out of touch :) I cannot
| begin to describe the annoyance I experience with filling
| in forms on a mobile device, especially if I'm hunting for
| a good deal `to -> from` and need to keep going back and
| slightly modifying my search params.
|
| Phones just aren't good at this use-case.
|
| Being (very) cynical, the only reason they're providing a
| mobile app is because of all the data they harvest
| (https://www.hopper.com/legal/privacy-policy/).
| drewg123 wrote:
| This. I also lost interest as soon as I saw the website
| just re-directed me to an app.
| roachpepe wrote:
| Yeah, same. Guess the old saying "if something's "free"
| then you're the product" hits home here too. Forcing the
| mobile app is a deal breaker.
| rockostrich wrote:
| While that saying applies for things like social media
| and such, it isn't the case for Hopper because you still
| have to pay for travel. The app is free, but you still
| have to pay for any flights or hotels that you book.
| Usually when an app or online service is free, then
| you'll see ads serving you content associated with your
| search behavior because that's the only way that service
| could monetize itself. Hopper's founder has been pretty
| adamant that we'll never serve advertisements in the app
| and we wouldn't be selling user data to 3rd parties and
| at least in my 4 years at the company that promise has
| been kept.
|
| I would hand in my resignation if we started serving ads
| in the app.
| rockostrich wrote:
| Thankfully there are millions of people that prefer to
| use their phone for searching and booking travel and
| we've been able to build a business around it.
|
| I feel your pain around filling in forms and managing
| context on mobile devices which is why we've tried to
| make the process simpler and deliver to customers what's
| actually important. This article was written by our head
| of design back in 2018 about why we chose the search
| parameters we chose for flight search:
| https://medium.com/life-at-hopper/users-dont-want-
| filters-th...
|
| He's now leading design at a start-up called Fast trying
| to apply similar principles to paying for things online.
| Accacin wrote:
| > Thankfully there are millions of people that prefer to
| use their phone for searching and booking travel and
| we've been able to build a business around it.
|
| How do you know? It's not like you gave them the option.
| Anyway, like you said, I'm not your demographic and I
| realise you are helping a lot of people travel more
| cheaply so I do wish Hopper all the best :)
| OJFord wrote:
| And who knows how many more untapped because they don't
| want to use your app?
|
| Every time I've (tried to) use the RyanAir app to book
| (or browse prices for) a flight, for example, I've given
| up and used a 'real' computer to go to the website.
| That's not (just) because the app's bad.
|
| Having app-only features and limited functionality
| website is just infuriating. Things go wrong with phones,
| websites are sort of a 'lowest common denominator';
| you're not locked out because your phone broke and you
| had to borrow someone's old one but it's $OS and you're
| used to $OTHEROS, etc.
| rockostrich wrote:
| Not sure how much I can say, but it mostly comes down to
| engineering capacity. We're still a relatively small
| engineering team (100-200 engineers) and for a long time
| were more like 30-50 engineers. There's a lot of moving
| parts in travel and we chose to focus on iOS mainly since
| it's the has the biggest market share in the US for mobile.
| rwmurrayVT wrote:
| Norfolk's airport is ORF.
| atdrummond wrote:
| A shame that the flight wasn't between NFO and MCO; I would
| love to book a ticket between Orlando and Tonga for only
| $166.
| rockostrich wrote:
| Ah you're right. Looking at that slack message again it was
| ORF. Not sure why I wrote NFO.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Some cities have their own (not really official AFAIK)
| codes that represent "any airport in this city", such as
| "NYC" meaning LGA, JFK, EWR, and maybe also HPN and/or SWF.
| I think these are mostly created by app/site developers but
| I could be wrong.
| rockostrich wrote:
| You're right, but it was just a brain fart on my part. It
| was ORF and I don't think Norfolk has a city IATA code.
| splonk wrote:
| They're metropolitan area codes (https://en.wikivoyage.or
| g/wiki/Metropolitan_area_airport_cod...). They're not
| consistently useful across sites because different sites
| connect to different backends (GDS) that may or may not
| accept them, but it's nice if you consistently use a site
| that does. Back when Hipmunk was alive QSF was useful to
| me because it used Sabre as the GDS and would translate
| it as {SFO, OAK, SJC}. Other sites would show you an
| airport in Algeria.
|
| Edit: I should note that you should be careful when using
| these - at least once I accidentally booked a ticket that
| left from SFO and returned to SJC.
| nerdponx wrote:
| That's the term, it's been a while since I had to work
| with this stuff. I don't remember if I ever was able to
| use the metro codes to look up data from a GDS, but I do
| remember that I once ended up with a dataset where I had
| to heuristically disambiguate those codes from proper
| IATA codes; that sucked.
| rwmurrayVT wrote:
| That would require Norfolk to be big enough for two
| airports :/ The next closest is Williamsburg/Newport News
| and then Richmond.
| novok wrote:
| Why don't you have a web interface?
| _boffin_ wrote:
| Why do you not allow for functionality on your website, but
| force users to use an app?
| SpikedCola wrote:
| They actually tease you by pretending to show results on
| their website [0] but when you click on any of the flights
| it just takes you to their homepage.
|
| [0] https://www.hopper.com/deals/best/from/city-toronto-
| YTO/to/c...
| _boffin_ wrote:
| yeah... i find that a bit disgusting.
| rockostrich wrote:
| I'm impressed you even found that. AFAIK there's no link
| to it anywhere from hopper.com. It was a little SEO
| project that one of the engineers that's been here a
| while worked on using our internal prediction APIs.
| Something like it existed in the app at one point, but
| the engagement we saw with it was pretty miniscule.
| SpikedCola wrote:
| Appreciate the kind response. Those pages are linked
| right on the homepage, I clicked on the Paris[0] one.
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/7ey6spH.png
| rockostrich wrote:
| Oh wow, goes to show you what I know... I assume when we
| were working with the company we contracted out to build
| that fancy website they asked if we had anything to link
| to for flight deals that we were just like "this engineer
| had a little pet project you could link to". The funny
| thing is a new hire just asked why we didn't have
| anything in the app for "best deals in general from my
| city" and I responded by linking to that project.
|
| It used to exist as its own separate app called "Get The
| Flight Out" but for some reason we removed it from the
| app store. We also had a feature devoted to something
| similar for "flexible watching" but it never got much
| engagement and it didn't warrant the infrastructure cost
| it required to keep up.
| auslegung wrote:
| Assuming good faith, the business decided that mobile apps
| were more valuable to their customers so they've spent
| their (inherently limited) resources improving the mobile
| apps. Assuming bad faith it's because they want to get
| whatever data they can off of you while using the mobile
| app. But due to Apple more clearly exposing what
| permissions an app uses, that is not quite the concern it
| used to be.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| I'd bet anything that the business didn't decide that a
| mobile app was more valuable to their _customers_. Maybe
| more valuable to them, but not to their customers.
|
| It is very rare that an app will provide more value than
| a website. And most of the time when it does, it's just
| because the website is shit, and they spent more time on
| the app. But if they focused on the website, it would be
| way better than whatever experience the app is giving
| you.
|
| Here's something to think about: would you download and
| install a desktop application for every random website
| you come across? No? Then why do it on your phone? People
| must just make better websites.
| rockostrich wrote:
| Yea it's not like you would ever use your phone for
| anything that you couldn't just use a website for. Before
| the pandemic when I was at a bar and needed to get a ride
| home I would just take out my laptop and find the number
| for a taxi company to call to pick me up. This is the
| perfect solution to the problem and a mobile app could
| never be more useful.
| splonk wrote:
| Yeah, the parent comment is unnecessarily cynical. I've
| worked at multiple travel companies that have
| independently either built an app or considered it based
| on user feedback. I'm not the biggest fan of the idea but
| I've come to peace with the idea that other people
| interact with their devices differently than I do.
| rockostrich wrote:
| Because there was a vacuum in the mobile travel space when
| Hopper was trying to find its main value proposition and we
| tried to fill that vacuum. Millennials (and now Gen Z) tend
| to be pretty price sensitive and they also tend to be a
| higher share of the mobile user space so it made sense to
| apply our "you can watch for flights and get notified when
| the cheapest flight hits what we think is the lowest price"
| feature on a platform where sending notifications that
| users actual on is actually feasible. On web, the options
| are email or web notifications and neither of those are
| very actionable in a timely manner.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| They did preface the post by saying they're an _engineer_.
| Most likely that wasn't their decision.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| I fully expect that it wasn't their decision, but also
| presume that they'd have insight into why a decision like
| that would be made.
|
| Also, it allows me to express my disdain at such a
| decision and if enough other people did too, said
| engineer has the ability to go up the flagpole and inform
| the decision makers that there are many people who are
| displeased at their decision.
| brianwawok wrote:
| To make more money. Like most "dark" patterns.
| dageshi wrote:
| Just a thought, perhaps it's something to prevent
| scraping.
| rockostrich wrote:
| This actually is one of the benefits of being a mobile
| only product! It makes it a lot harder to scrape the data
| that we produce (prediction and such). I don't think
| that's ever been the main reason though, just a side
| benefit.
| rockostrich wrote:
| I do have that ability, but I also have the sense to know
| that HN readers is not who we're building the product for
| and when you look at the travel industry as a whole the
| SEO/web advertising game is not one you really want to
| play. Two of the biggest spenders on Google AdWords are
| Expedia and Booking.com. They spend our annual marketing
| budget in every like 10 minutes or something like that.
| We literally can't compete, especially when you consider
| that Google is doing their own with Google flights and
| hotel search which favors themselves.
|
| So the smart thing to do (at least in our opinion) was to
| not even play the search engine advertising game and
| focus on building mobile apps that users will come back
| to after using. We tend to see really high retention
| rates with users because they like the experience and we
| don't have to pay for the ad impression every time they
| feel like searching for travel destinations.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| If you're going somewhere anyhow, housesitting is a way to get
| paid to live in someone's pad. Cheaper than airbnb. :) Hostels
| otherwise.
|
| Freighter cruising is slow-paced, DIY/BYO entertainment,
| interesting, and cheap, but you'll typically have to live without
| as much internet.
|
| Eurorail young adult pass if you're younger.
|
| Get paid as a vehicle courier to drive cars from one place to
| another.
|
| If you fly a lot a lot... https://www.prioritypass.com for near
| universal airport lounge access
| sokoloff wrote:
| I had Eurail part of one summer when I lived in Germany. I was
| between broke and cheap so would sleep on overnight trains,
| even taking them partway out of the way and then back. I think
| I travelled something like 23 nights and paid for 5 nights of
| hostels in total.
| newdude116 wrote:
| Just as a word of caution: There is Eurail/Europass and
| interrail. Interrail is supercheap but only available to EU
| citizens.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Do you have any resources for someone interested in doing
| freighter cruising? I imagine right now with the mess that is
| international shipping, things aren't so good.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| I came across:
|
| https://www.freightercruises.com/voyages.php
|
| https://www.freightertrips.com
|
| https://www.langsamreisen.de/en/freightertravel/
|
| http://www.seaplus.com/mainmenu.php
|
| https://juddspittler.com/freighterbum/faq.htm
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| PriorityPasss is free with certain credit cards.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Which?
| frockington1 wrote:
| I know Sapphire Reserve offers it, have to remember to
| renew it each year though
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Yup. $550/y. Also interesting perks:
|
| - Pre check fees
|
| - No foreign currency tx fees (like my uni's ATM card)
|
| - Lyft pink & bonuses
|
| Other cards:
|
| https://thepointsguy.com/guide/all-about-priority-pass-
| progr...
|
| The Select version is pretty sweet, almost like Prestige.
|
| https://www.loungebuddy.com/blog/priority-pass-the-
| ultimate-...
| splonk wrote:
| It's free with so many credit cards that the value has been
| somewhat reduced - partly because lounges have gotten more
| crowded, and some partner lounges will reject Priority Pass
| holders if they're at capacity (since they'd prefer to serve
| ticket holders on their own airline first).
| drewg123 wrote:
| I used to have Priority Pass as a perk of a corporate card. I
| was unimpressed with the priority pass lounge in SJC. Filthy,
| bad food, mediocre service. Far worse than Centurion and Delta
| lounges.
|
| Their lounges in other aiports seemed to be closed whenever I
| was in need of them.
|
| Based on that, when we switched to a different corp card, I did
| not try to get a personal card w/Priority pass access (nor did
| I buy my own membership).
| rallison wrote:
| Priority Pass is great internationally. In the US, the lounge
| access is usually fairly mediocre, but the airport restaurant
| access they have at some airports is great - up to $56 credit
| for food and drink each visit if you're there with another
| person (e.g. https://www.prioritypass.com/en/lounges/usa/los-
| angeles-ca-l...). It's been a while since I've last been on a
| plane thanks to the pandemic, but I was generally getting a
| few hundred dollars worth of value from the restaurant access
| alone each year.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, Priority Pass lounges are generally more useful
| internationally given I (normally) have a Star Alliance
| lounge pass anyway.
|
| Dining is very hit or miss. For example, there is (was?--
| who knows) a specific breakfast option at my usual home
| airport/terminal that's a great deal but I've not really
| found a use for it otherwise.
| busterarm wrote:
| When you're coming back from a busy trade show or
| convention like Defcon in Vegas, that Centurion lounge is
| almost essential for a decent place to sit, eat or nap in
| McCarran.
|
| And using Delta's lounge would mean having to fly Delta.
| Ew.
| rallison wrote:
| It just depends on one's use cases. If you're primarily
| traveling to large conferences such that airports are
| especially packed, just Priority Pass is probably a poor
| match. But that's not everyone's scenario.
| carabiner wrote:
| Housesitting opportunities in places you'd like to visit are
| extremely rare. I used to live in a mountain resort town, and
| there were posts in our housing FB group every week seeking
| "housesitting opportunities" (read: free lodging during their
| ski vacation). No one ever replied.
|
| Freighter cruising is much more expensive than flying for the
| same distance, but cheaper than an actual cruise. You could
| probably simulate the experience by living in a motel 6 with a
| stranger (since you won't get your own bunk) and getting food
| from Denny's 3x a day.
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