Flyspy Brings The New Web To Airline Ticketing

February 20th, 2006 at 12:55 am

Really neat idea!

February 20th, 2006 at 2:53 am

Seems similar to skyscanner.net, which does something very similar for flights on the European budget airlines (RyanAir, German Wings, etc). It’s very helpful–hopefully this will bring that same service to US airlines… Now if we just had the plethora of budget airlines…

February 20th, 2006 at 6:04 am

This is available in China as well. Go10000.com, a travel meta search engine based in Beijing, had release a tool like this a few months ago. In addition to 30-day price outlook, the Go10000 service also allows one to look at optimal booking lead time, i.e. the best time to book a flight for a given departure date. There are charts and graphs as well.

Airlines uses very sophisticated and expensive systems called yield management systems to forecast demand and help determine pricing and inventory control strategies. With services like Go10000’s and flyspy’s, travelers finally get some help figuring out the complicated airline pricing system.

February 20th, 2006 at 7:20 am

Very interesting. I would have liked to have had this before. The airlines and booking engines, like Travelocity, complain about their product being commoditized and their consumers only caring about price, but yet in booking engines you can only search by price, schedules and destinations. It would be interesting if airlines pushed out non-commoditized information like seat pitch, on time status and media on the seat back.

February 20th, 2006 at 9:26 am

This looks like a great service. I’ve wanted something like this to exist, but have never found anything like it.

Great memorable brand name too!

I’m looking forward to seeing it launch.

February 20th, 2006 at 10:57 am

Its a great idea, but could you explain to me how Orbitz, Travelocity and the rest of the major players won’t copy it if it takes off? It just seems to me that mashups, have so little value because they don’t create a defensible position through a core competency. Honestly, they are just vetting out neat features for large competitors who now don’t need to innovate, rather just follow fast.

February 20th, 2006 at 11:59 am

Could you please do some more research before publicizing these companies! This stuff has already been out there.

February 20th, 2006 at 1:30 pm

Am I the only one here bothered by the service “previews” that keep appearing on TechCrunch? (The most memorable of which is Nik’s own Omnidrive) When you have as much influence and power as can be attributed to TechCrunch, you should be beholden to a higher standard of journalism/blogging/whatever which includes the possibility of peer review and fact checking, something not possible for a service that doesn’t even have a beta signup. Or if you must publish such content, at least clearly designate it as “gossip” or “buzz”.

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Best of luck to Nik and the Omnidrive staff, and Flyspy looks to be a truly useful and innovative service, I just think everyone would be better served by a slightly more conservative and less sensationalist TechCrunch.

February 20th, 2006 at 4:08 pm

Full disclosure: I personally and professionally know the flyspy founder Rob Metcalf…no, not the other one. Haven’t talked to him in a quite a long time though.

I saw the basic concept of flyspy back in its infancy a while back over drinks and was blown away by it. I can also say that I know how smart this dude is. That’s not to say there aren’t a lot of smart people around, but we’re talking a guy who still owns “TheInternet.com”. Yeah, he goes back that long of a way. I’ve known him for 10 years.

Can someone else blow it out of the water? Eh, maybe. Are the brains behind it legit? Damn right. Be careful. The smart people win.

February 20th, 2006 at 4:48 pm

Skyscanner? Flybilligst? Are you kidding me? I hope they can soon make enough $ to hire a user interface designer. It took me forever to wade through that… and at the end I still didn’t know if I was booking the cheapest reasonable flight.

February 21st, 2006 at 4:49 am

Stick with the previews Nik, I want to read about stuff I haven’t already heard of elswhere when I’m on Techcrunch.

By the time everybody agrees a startup has a “viable business plan” it’s too late to influence it or invest in it. How many years was Amazon in business before everyone was convinced it was viable?

I want to hear about stuff before there’s a public beta so that i can apply and be first on my block to have tried it.

February 21st, 2006 at 11:34 am

By the time everybody agrees a startup has a “viable business plan” it’s too late to influence it or invest in it.

…and then they wonder why they lose their shirts!

February 22nd, 2006 at 3:25 am

Comparative air fare shopping comes in various degrees of transparency, effectiveness, and bias. For example, Expedia and Hotwire are owned by the same parent company. Kayak, SideStep, & Mobissimo do not access Expedia or Travelocity. Hotwire does not access AA.com.

When I write “do not,” you should interpret that as “legally prohibited.”

The list of incestuous and bastard relationships among travel service providers (airlines, hotels, etc), comparative shopping engines (SideStep, Hotwire, etc.), online agencies (Orbitz, Expedia, etc.), and Web travel retailers (Yahoo, Amazon, etc.) goes on and on.

Follow the money to best understand screen bias and lack of comprehensive information in all of the above business models.

Advertising, screen placement fees, works-best-with agreements, unpublished fares, and many more innovative ways to dupe the traveling public render all of the existing comparative travel shopping engines nothing more than marketing gimmicks.

If Flyspy can remain financially independent from the current online travel community, it will have taken an important first step. The second step, however, is battling the legal departments of all of the above mentioned entities to get fair and unrestricted access to fares. That, my friends, just ain’t goin’ to happen.

February 24th, 2006 at 6:47 am

Kudos to Rob and flyspy.com. We believe there is a lot of opportunity to improve the way consumers research and shop for airfare. Others innovators of note in this area are: Expert Flyer, Farecast, Kayak, FareCompare, and ITA Software.

February 24th, 2006 at 3:53 pm

“…but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest days to fly nor the cheapest destinations to fly to…”

Maybe I am missing something, but this is simply not true. And I am not sure I understand why this is such a big deal. ITA Software has had this feature for many years.

Granted, it sounds like flyspy has greatly refined/improved the interface, but the idea of having flexible dates and/or destinations and being able to query on those to find the lowest price is not new.

Can someone please explain this to me?

February 25th, 2006 at 1:26 am

Interesting. Not unlike the ITA Fare Matrix http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/ but with a prettier interface and, presumably, click through to purchase.

For now ITA has the benefit of being (i) live and (ii) globally comprehensive.

March 10th, 2006 at 8:21 pm

looks like an innovative ui solution.

but…let’s see flyspy in action. the big travel sites have all done this functionality (sans excel like chart comparison n the ui) and either shut it off or scaled it down (by adding a search box to search +/- # of days beyond specifiec search dates) due to capacity issues. few questions:

-how will flyspy handle availabiliy exceptions (large travel agencies like orbitz first search against ITA then reprice against airline systems)
-how will searching work? most online sites search against a cache like ITA and then reprice against the airlne systems. this is pretty complicated stuff, since flight availability changes per second. flyspy might show comparison of fares that isn’t valid (since the fares themselves might not be valid). if flyspy is scraping sites (like kayak or mobissimo), friendly scraping agreements will need to be established with each site so that flyspy won’t be shunned.
-how will booking work? will flyspy hand off user to the affiliate site via deep link

i think this kind of ui innovation is great stuff, but don’t minimize the amount of minds already trying to solve these problems within the travel industry.

April 29th, 2006 at 4:37 am

Agreed with jeff, this is an extremely complicated problem, I expect without the really costly software solution that you will discover a great many hurdles with your partner’s APIs. There are certainly a fair few minds on this subject already.

November 11th, 2006 at 1:25 am

Services like flyspy.com and farecast.com have been around for many years - but have only been used by the airlines themselves to monitor competitors and set the price - it’s a neat thing that they now are getting available to the consumers.
It will be interesting to see the impact they will have on pricing. Price transparency is an nasty thing for highly competitive markets like the airline industry. Low cost search engines/web 2.0 mashups for cheap flights in Europe like http://www.momondo.com and skyscanner.net that searches all low cost flights in Europe, or the US sites like http://www.kayak.com, http://www.sidestep.com, http://www.mobissimo.com are all making a great job making it far easier for the consumer to compare and find the cheap airline fares. They are undoubtedly changing the landscape of airline business.

Together with web 2 community sites like http://www.travelistic.com, http://www.tripadvisor.com they are forming the new shift called Travel 2.0. And will be challenging the old school I-want-to-sell-a-flight-ticket sites like expedia, travelocity etc.

November 23rd, 2006 at 4:07 am

A very popular engine in Europe is a site called Trabber that aggregates data from low cost companies, tradicional airlines and travel agencies web sites.

Check it at: http://www.trabber.com

January 25th, 2007 at 4:41 pm

online propecia.