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by crazygringo 2766 days ago
Have you seen a site that does that really well, UX-wise?

I'd assume it's two reasons: first that it's hard to get the UX right. There are going to wind up being so many combinations of possibilities that I'm not sure how you'd even sort them in a meaningful way. (E.g. it's unlikely price from lowest to highest will be the most meaningful, the lowest price alone might wind up having 100 different date combinations, so figuring out how to present the options in a meaningful way might just be something we haven't figured out yet.)

But second, it might just be too computationally expensive. You see how slow sites already are just for searching a single date, because there are so many possible combinations of connections to consider, and so many fare rules to calculate prices out of. Now a 2-week range for both start and end results in taking almost 200 times longer. It just might not be feasible, or worth the programming effort. I remember a blog post a long time ago from Kayak (I think?) talking about the insane effort that was required to cache flight fares just so show simple fare comparisons across a few days... and it only worked for the flights that were more commonly searched for.

3 comments

adioso.com (no longer maintained as far as I can tell, but still online) does a really great job of this, UX-wise. It lets you create searches like "departing anywhere between February 10 and March 20 for about 2 weeks", and allows you to filter destinations by continent/region, which gives you a ton of flexibility. They then allow you to choose a destination (showing what I assume is the lowest price found per destination), and then let you sort the actual flights by cheapest, fastest, and "best" (a combination of price, duration, and number of stops).

I think the computational cost is a far bigger problem for these kinds of services than the UX.

I've seen a few airlines have grids where the outbound and return flights are shown on each access, which I think is great. I'm thinking of Air New Zealand as the last airline I saw it so maybe it benefits from a smaller network as you say.
Kiwi.com does this really well.