OMG, I've been waiting for someone to build something like this forever.<p>I've always hated the fact that all major travel sites work based on the assumption that you already know exactly when and where you're going, rather than at least giving you the option to explore your options.
Now that's just plain neat. And useful, since I'm currently considering where to go on summer holidays.<p>I do notice that it doesn't add extra destinations as you zoom in, though. For instance I can zoom in on Colorado as much as I like and it won't tell me that I can fly to Denver (even though there's probably twenty flights a day). Nor will it give me a price for Paris, but Nadi, Chennai and Oaxaca are much higher priorities.
Wow, talk about impressive. Just curious about the tech behind this. Do they just cache a bunch of average prices together between major airports and just set a max limit? Surely it can't do fully comprehensive search at the speed it runs at.
Adioso (YC W'09) does this too - See, for example:<p><a href="http://adioso.com/au/syd-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html" rel="nofollow">http://adioso.com/au/syd-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html</a>
<a href="http://adioso.com/us/jfk-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html" rel="nofollow">http://adioso.com/us/jfk-to-anywhere-under-aud350.html</a>
We built a similar proof of concept just this weekend, at London Startup Weekend. <a href="http://london.startupweekend.org/" rel="nofollow">http://london.startupweekend.org/</a><p>It doesn't contain any real information, and is targeted at people who want to take holidays, instead of just flights, but is the same concept.<p>It'll also do some analysis of your facebook profile to automatically sort results so you instantly get relevant places to go.<p>It's still purely a proof of concept, and a bit crashy on Heroku because of a bug in the facebooker ruby gem (don't facebook connect right now!), but that should be fixed when we have more time to work on it.<p><a href="http://www.zolidays.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zolidays.com/</a>
"Have Budget, Want Holiday"
This is great and I've been looking for something like this for a long time.<p>The only thing it needs now is to allow you to better refine the time period (e.g. only weekend trips, or only two weeks in October, etc). As it is now, it's great for people with a month or more off of vacation, but doesn't quite do it for the rest of us yet.
It's a neat tool (if you're in the UK check out the similar "I'll fly anywhere" option at <a href="http://flightchecker.moneysavingexpert.com/" rel="nofollow">http://flightchecker.moneysavingexpert.com/</a>) but the problem with it is that for most people the cost of the flight is going to be less than the cost of the hotel.<p>So if you're after a cheap holiday it's much more important to fly somewhere where you can get a cheap hotel than to get a cheap flight. Hopefully they'll add hotels to the calculation in the future.
Finally! I've been waiting for something like this.<p>I never care where I go. The more random the better.<p>I wish they could just plan the full trip for me. Flight + hotel + (maybe) car.
Hi,<p>Something similar, from big guys in the online travel business: Amadeus Affinity - <a href="http://www.amadeus.com/amadeus/x163551.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.amadeus.com/amadeus/x163551.html</a>
- accurate prices
- choice per price range, comparison of prices on date range
- destination per type of activity (beach, golf, whatever)
- etc.<p>The URL for a major air travel company using it is - wait for it - ...<p><a href="http://www.lufthansa.com/online/portal/lh/de/booking/affinity?l=en&blt_p=DE&blt_l=en&blt_t=Homepage&blt_e=Passinglane&blt_n=Quicklinks&blt_z=Lufthansa%20Trip%20Finde&blt_c=DE|en|Homepage|Passinglane|Quicklinks|Lufthansa%20Trip%20Finde" rel="nofollow">http://www.lufthansa.com/online/portal/lh/de/booking/affinit...</a><p>(Lufthansa <i>Germany</i> home page > Trip Finder)
Cool. Couple thoughts:<p>- Are prices one-way or round trip? It's not obvious to me.<p>- I tried to type a zip code at first, before realizing that it would only work with the City name.
Very cool, especially as I'm busy planning a trip (BCN-ROM-STR-BCN). There are ~4 possible airports for STR but most search engines don't let you choose them (aside from 'nearby' airports, which can be a bit moot with Europe's typically awesome rail infrastructure). And Kayak doesn't track many Low Cost Carriers. I normally a huge Kayak fan, but I've had to use www.skyscanner.net and www.wegolo.com a lot for this particular trip.<p>Finally it's a bit odd that there are "0" flights shown from BCN to Canada with zero filters. As a beta product it's still mega-cool. :)
Small issue: seems like the seasons are not hemisphere dependent. E.g., if you travel from Melbourne, Australia, then it shows Spring 2010 rather than Autumn 2010, etc.
For more visual intuitiveness, perhaps some isolines or a 3d, height based on price kind of thing? Probably just flashiness for no end though. But, using different colors for the labels along the price axis probably wouldn't be.<p>Seems to be &-ing the checkboxes, which is a bit odd for the languages.
i find skyscanner to be far superior. kayak's is a great overview but i didn't find it actually took me straight to when those cheap flights were - you still had to guess the cheap dates. when you know where you want to go and just want to find the cheapest time to fly: it shows you the flight costs over a month, and you don't have to hope that the fare is still available.<p>example of nyc to chicago over month of june:
<a href="http://www.skyscanner.com/flights/nyca/chia/june-2010/june-2010/cheapest-flights-per-day-from-new-york-to-chicago-in-june-2010.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.skyscanner.com/flights/nyca/chia/june-2010/june-2...</a><p>see smaher's comment for an even better idea!
Is there a contact link? This is neat but some obvious non-US improvements:<p>Colour-coding the prices would make it a lot more intuitive to read/scan for deals.<p>Detects me as being in New York (I'm in Switzerland) if I go to the base URL.<p>Only offers Fahrenheit... and dollars I think.
It even works for Iceland. That's neat. That's not the default with these kinds of services.<p>However, it doesn't work for India.. which kind of sucks, but I hope that will be improved over time.<p>It would be nice to know which reservation service this is using...
The UI is nice - but the slider doesn't need two ends, just the max end. It's also hard to dial in numbers <$1000 because of the range of the slider. Some +/- buttons would fix that up, or an old-fashioned text field.
I just wish it had the option to find all available flights under a certain price. I'm a college student and wouldn't mind just randomly going to a random local for a little while if it was cheap enough.
I like it, but one thing I noticed if if you select a starting date, it doesnt automatically set the return date to the next day. So if you select a date some time in the future you have to scroll twice
I have unknowingly been waiting for this for my whole life ... thank you so much !
It would be event better if there where some details added, like the possibility to choose one-way/two-ways flights.
Its not showing any flights to Buenos Aires???<p>I am going there in a few months and I have a ticket for $800 out of LAX but the system doesn't want to show anything..
whoa - it'll be cheaper for me to fly to Moscow (from DC) and travel to Eastern Europe by rail than actually flying directly in -- by about $420. This is dead useful; thanks for the link!
Copycats!
We already had this feature on <a href="http://qfly.com/" rel="nofollow">http://qfly.com/</a> (on <a href="http://qfly.nl" rel="nofollow">http://qfly.nl</a> to be precise) 10 months ago.