[stevievee]

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.

[rockostrich]

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.

[splonk]

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.

[todsul]

CEO of Flightfox here. We still absolutely use both technology and humans (that will always underpin our value prop), but we moved from the previous competitive crowdsourced model to a one-on-one model. The short story is that travel search benefits more from depth rather than breadth (at least at the expert level). With multiple travel hackers working at once, they can only invest $fee/n-hackers worth of time and there is a ton of overlap. With a single hacker, they receive all of the $fee and can dig deeper and deeper to uncover better results. The crowdsourced approach was definitely more interesting to consumers, but the results were inferior, especially on the customer service side. Now, we’re actually transitioning behind the scenes from a one-on-one to a collaborative model, which is bringing us new benefits, but requires more systemization.

Today, we target corporate travel, but we still work with individuals; you just need to click the Get Started button and we ask if you’re an individual after that. This pivot of sorts came from the fact we can deliver significantly more value to corporate customers (more customer value = more conversions, retention, referrals = better business & happier team). Consumer travelers typically only want the lowest price. If their “price to beat” is on a low-cost-carrier, we can rarely help. That becomes a dissatisfied customer despite us explaining “we’re here to help with your next trip”. Corporate travelers have greater requirements such as convenience, comfort, miles, hotels, perks, expertise, emergency response, off-site planning, large groups… the list goes on. With consumer travel, we were using a small subset of our tech and expertise; with corporate travel, we use everything and constantly need to expand our tech and expertise.

Hope that explains everything. Happy to answer any specifics about finding travel deals, since that’s what we do every day for 1000s of customers.