Comments | maradydd: Never mind the bollocks, here's the search engine

maradydd

Never mind the bollocks, here's the search engine

Dec 06, 2008 17:14

Courtesy foxgrrl, ITA Trip Finder, the best flight search engine ever. It is not pretty. It provides no upselling tie-in deals with hotels, car rentals or cruises. It will not alert you to low fares to destinations you don't care about that you might have missed.

What it does do, and that right awesomely, is provide hands-down the best search interface ( Read more... )

but meredith i hear you say, the man who likes strawberries, travel

Comments 23

vatine December 7 2008, 01:45:57 UTC

ITA Software are a very, very cool outfit. Well, at least as far as I can tell from community reputation and what I hear from employees of ITA. Lots and lots of Common Lisp under those hoods.

maradydd December 7 2008, 01:46:54 UTC

*swoon*

vatine December 7 2008, 01:50:28 UTC

Mmmm. Amusingly enough, I've known about ITA for, erm, half a decade or so (I think). They are the peeps that wrote the Orbitz engine, for a while the best flight-booking via the web. I believe the engine you linked to is (essentially) the same one, with (probably) the same data.

They also seem to sponsor the Boston lisp user group monthly meetings, thouhg I seem to recall that's wrong-coast for you.

maradydd December 7 2008, 01:53:49 UTC

Yeah, Orbitz used to be great until suddenly they sucked, and I never did figure out why. I've been using Kayak this last year or two, but although their price comparisons are among the best and their interface is pretty flexible, it's still not this flexible. I had gotten used to the hassle of having to try out a bunch of different date combinations every time I looked for a flight. No more. I am ITA's target user.

And, yeah, wrong coast, alas.

Thread 6

m4dh4tt3r December 7 2008, 01:53:05 UTC

awesome! thanks for sharing. :-)

barbarienne December 7 2008, 04:24:41 UTC

My sister twigged me to this some while ago. Her employer, which is a giant company, uses this.

ephermata December 7 2008, 04:56:30 UTC

Yes, I love these guys. They saved me approximately $1000 on flights within Europe once. Didn't realize you didn't know about them or would have mentioned them earlier. The only caveat is that occasionally I've had a little trouble converting their booking codes into tickets via the airline's web site.

(The comment has been removed)

andyhat December 7 2008, 05:46:40 UTC

Unfortunately, ITA does not include Southwest. I've never noticed any other budget options missing, though.

maradydd December 7 2008, 05:49:34 UTC

If you click through to the larger version of the first image, you'll see the full list. It's missing the usual suspects (Southwest, JetBlue) and, unsurprisingly, the European regional carriers (Ryanair, Easyjet, Air Baltic), but I think that has to do with how the airlines publish their fare info. It's probably limited to what's available in Sabre, though I wonder whether that's their only source of data; Sabre got into a bit of trouble a while back for cooking the rankings of their results and not applying competitors' fare discounts when presenting prices.