At the Mashup Camp pre-conference dinner tonight there were a number of demos, all of which were interesting. A non-public service that stood out was flyspy, a search engine for airline tickets that will change the way we all travel. Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, 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. Flyspy reverse engineers some of the mystique associated with the airline industry and makes it extremely transparent.
Tonight I got a look at the service, and while it is still in it’s early stages it is very cool. The way it works is that I give it a departure city and a destination city and optionally a departure date and length of stay. The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple.
If I am trying to decide which destination is cheaper, I can overlay another airport on the graph and then compare the results. In the screenshot you can see that it has plotted the prices for arriving in both San Francisco and San Jose. The end result is that in very little time I can find the best day to fly out, the best price and also the best destination.
Flyspy has all the right elements – a good idea, a simple user interface and an immediate value proposition for the user. Even better, it takes an industry that is stuck in the old times and shakes it up (I was going to say blown to bits).
Flyspy was founded by Robert Metcalf (no not that one) who has been working on the problem for 2 years after experiencing frustrations with the airline booking system (someone pissed off the wrong programmer). Even though he had no previous experience in the industry Robert was obviously very knowledgeable on how it all worked and how to build a business from what he has built so far.
Flyspy will have an API that will allow other developers to tap into its technology and to integrate it with other services. Robert is expecting to move out to the valley sometime soon and has been self-funded to date (though he is in the process of seeking investment). Overall a very cool service that epitomizes what the new web is about. Flyspy should go public in a few months – you will hear more about it here and probably feel the distruption.
Really neat idea!
Yes this has been available for A LONG time, just that it’s very heavy on the systems that’s why it’s not available to the “public” it’s been around the web for 2-3 years or so, just that only people who travel A LOT finds these things, similar to seatmap for all flights etc.
Only problem last time i heard a license like this costs $2 million, which makes the startups a bit scared. But services like kayak and mobissimo could do services like this if they wanted, travelocity used to have it 2-3 years ago.
Martin it is a combination of the graphing features and the simple interface and other aspects (API etc.) that made Flyspy more interesting to me. Yes in theory any of the big guys can turn around tomorrow and start creating graphs, but it’s the little guys like Flyspy who are doing what users want.
Good news for the US but europe have had a similar website for years - see http://www.skyscanner.net/
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…
This is available in China as well. Go10000.com, a 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
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.
I worked with a major North American airline for several years on their dotcom team. Transparent pricing, and the illusion of transparent pricing, is something that we talked about incessantly.
I’m familiar with skyscanner.net and think it’s a great site. It will be interesting to see how the travellers in this country receive flyspy and how it’s marketed. I agree with Ravenel, we DON’T have enough budget airlines in this country and somehow the major airlines continue to survive, which is a double-edged sword.
Great summary of Flyspy. I included it in my most recent post! Cheers!
http://www.thinkair.blogspot.com/
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.
The service at http://www.flybilligst.com has been open for a while and includes the five most attractive budget airlines that operates in and out of Norway. Great service!
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.
I just want to say while I still can that if they use that html in their product, they will lose a lot of bandwidth really fast.
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.
[it if it takes off]
Great choice of words Bradley!
Could you please do some more research before publicizing these companies! This stuff has already been out there.
Sam - Could you please work on better comments? I’d like to see those links you have and be able to see how it is “already been out there.” I just haven’t seen anthing that will let you have so much pricing context and be able to compare flight pricing verses time so easily.
I’m a pretty frequently flyer and am really looking forward to Flyspy. Thanks for the heads up, Nik.
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.
@Drewl:
No, you’re not the only one. I subscribed to this site’s feed to help keep myself up to date with other new startups, and so far, I feel like I’m back in 1999!
A lot of “neat” ideas, few actual working products, and nothing actually making any money with viable business plans.
It’s unfortunate, but I for one would be more interested in seeing some “after the fact” startups; rather than more ideas that barely have a website up at this point.
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.
Andrew, I second your remark. I’ve known Rob for about 5 years now and I can attest to the brains behind this application. I’ve also been loosely following flyspy through its progress and I don’t believe it’s vaporware. I think Robert is really on to something, but when you’re dealing with airlines and airline politics, it does take a while for an idea like this to gather steam, get funding, avoid pitfalls caused by major competitors, etc. I know, I’ve had a couple of my ideas quashed/stolen by the machine. I applaud TechCrunch for showcasing services like FlySpy. If enough of us got behind efforts like FlySpy and learned more about them and offered constructive criticism, it will only make the product and the reality of its delivery stronger.
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.
DrewL: I hear you, I have a long queue of private companies but am looking at releasing news about products going live or news.
As for Omnidrive - the private beta is going along well and people who signed up early are flowing in. We will be out to the public in April.
I understand the frustrations of reading about something and then not being able to use it.
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.
Personally, I’d like to see a chart of price vs. legroom for a given date.
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!
It’s fashionable to question if these companies/services have “business models” but we should really be taking a more thoughtful look at them on a case-by-case bases.
When you look at Flyspy and Zillow, for example, these are two services that are operating in very large markets where there is a definite tendency to exchange money for value.
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.
Looks like a great tool for the frequent business traveler. I will talk about it at http://www.landingthedeal.com
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.
Sadly, the site’s gone dark for now. Too bad–it’s exaclty the type of site I need.
“…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?
Also dohop
http://www.dohop.com/
From the site:
“dohop.com searches more than 660 airlines around the world for the best flights and connections. Find the fastest route, check the latest price, find links to airlines and travel agents.”
Scott
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.
Lots of new activity and innovation in online travel coming in 2006. Thanks for writing about an interesting new service.
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.
I can’t wait for this to go live. I am so tired of spending hours of my time looking for the right flights to the right cities.
Bring on flyspy!
Kevin
Rock is Dead - Long Live Paper & Scissors!
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.
In order for flyspy to put conent in their solution they have to query a lot of combinations, the idea of knowing the pricing for so many city pair combinations on so many different dates means they must request some system repeatedly. The issue will be that they must have alot of sales to pay for all the queries for availablity. They will have to cache the data and that will result in dead recomendations and false data.
ITA software is who they should try and use but their barrier to entry is significant.
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.
This blog just opened. It is a forum for airline software users and enthusiasts. I don’t have anything to contribute yet but wanted to share as it appears many here might benefit from it.
Have a good one!
Chris
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
we invite you to try
http://www.smart-travel.tk
the aggregator of aggregators
finally someone got it right!
online propecia.