[buro9]

Looks nice... so I tried it.

Starting airport: There are 4 around London, can I select any?

Destination airport: There are 2 around Lisbon, can I select any?

Already I have 8 permutations of things I don't want to think about.

Got a search result but it didn't render correctly... I use noscript but this is a privileged tab and there's nothing to allow and I don't see what else it might need.

Tried sorting to see if unlocks the blurred results... it doesn't work, I try to go back, but there is no back button as this is an embedded SPA within an extension talking to a web based API somewhere. I reload to see if I can get it working, it's blown away all of the history and state.

Is there a reason this has to be a Chrome extension rather than a web page?

PS: Loved Hipmunk, so I do want this to work.

Update: It was NoScript. FlightPenguin opens other browser windows behind the browser window you're in... and those all need to work, meaning you need to enumerate them and approve all applicable JS for those sites to work. Once you've done that then FlightPenguin works, and to answer my own question it's probably to get around the aggressive scrape protection that flight sites put in place.

[maxmorlocke]

Re: airports. You can select any airport or the city - which should grab them all (e.g. City of London (LON), London Heathrow (LHR), etc.).

Re: Noscript. I haven't tested with noscript, but have with most major adblockers. We do use the chrome extension API to open windows in the background to collect flight data and eventually to redirect you to for booking. I'll get it installed and see if I can replicate it. Might take a little bit, but I'll get there :)

Re: extension vs webpage. One of the biggest problems Hipmunk faced was that as the airline industry consolidated, they required OTA's and metasearch sites to sign highly restrictive agreements that prevented the site from showing all flights. We find this highly objectionable. By operating as an extension, we do not need to sign agreements to provide this data.

[repiret]

I really prefer the Hipmunk interface to anything else, but being able to select multiple airports is a killer feature of Google Flights for me, and Flight Penguin won't be able to get my business without it. Being able to select a metro area is not a viable substitute: I live in the middle of nowhere, but about equidistant to two airports - one to the East and one to the West. But they're not in the same metro area (or the same state, or the same time zone).

[maxmorlocke]

I tested locally with noscript installed. After giving the extension permissions to run scripts, everything worked for me. If you've blocked FlightPenguin, chrome extensions, or any of the sites we collect data from, you're going to have issues. Chrome extensions unsurprisingly rely heavily on JavaScript.

[scoot]

> You can select any airport or the city - which should grab them all

Not everyone lives equidistant to all airports. Heathrow and Gatwick are close to me; Luton, Stansted and City are not. I'd want to see options for both of the former. Loved HipMunk, so glad you are back (why was it killed off to begin with?), but don't understand why it's a browser extension.

Edit: seems you can only select one airport in any case, not a city. (But you knew that, right?)

[scoot]

Okay, I see the issue, it describes London as "City of London", which is not the same thing. That's a bug. (The City of London is a square mile near the centre of London [0].)

It's also frustrating not being able to see the departure/arrival airports at a glance so that I can ignore the airports that are not close to me (given that you can't be selective about which airports to include). It shows connecting airports, so why not departure and arrival?

For Paris to Tenerife, for which there's (surprisingly) no direct flight, it's missing Easyjet via London. For options with one connection, some list the two airlines by name, others say "multiple airlines", when there are only two, so you have to invoke the tooltip to discover them.

I don't appear to be able to select a currency to display prices in.

It seems there's still some work to do on UI/UX, so the announcement here might have been a bit premature! Hope you have better luck with this than HipMunk, but for now it's not especially useful.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London

[maxmorlocke]

Our latest release should have more clear language on airports and 'All London Area Airports' as opposed to 'City of London Airports'. The point about multiple airlines should also be addressed.

Your point about at a glance determination of the departure/arrival airport is really good. I expect to have a UX enhancement for that next week. Currency and manually selecting multiple airports are still a fair ways off.