This is true when going through any third party portal for either flights or hotels.

No reasonable amount of savings is enough to convince us to ever use a third party portal.

My wife and I travel a lot as a hobby - mostly domestically with one or two international trips a year - and something is statistically going to change between the time we book and the time we fly on at least one of our trips.

It’s a lot easier to make changes directly with the airline/hotel especially when you have status than going through a portal

Just last month we had a flight to Vegas + hotel over Labor Day that we changed at the last minute to go see my mother in law who had been taken to the hospital by our older (adult) son. We were able to change our flights to another city (ATL instead of LAS) as an even swap.

This was Delta airlines.

Then two hours later we found out she had Covid and decided against it and were able to call and change our flight back all without any change in fees and get our hotel reservation back.

Good luck doing that when booking through a portal.

Seems likely if you imagine the producers just looked at an alphabetically sorted list of YC companies for name ideas.

I love hearing this! Makes it all worth it. Thanks for sharing :)

Great to hear! Thanks for saying so.

I still hope to rebuild it one day but only when I can do it as a passion project. You can’t make a living from a site like that.

It’s an ongoing tension. Direct bookings are ideal but are only adequate if your brand awareness and loyalty is strong, like AA and Southwest. To whatever extent that’s not the case, you need to be available via partners/agencies and on metasearch sites in order to be found.

Our pitch to airlines when we were trying to establish partnerships with them was that we could find flexible travelers to fill seats that would otherwise be empty, and we had unique ways of doing that (which is why the company was able to pivot to enterprise), but we weren’t strong enough for them to feel the need to partner with us (and they don’t want to help a small player grow into a big player).

Flight revenue optimization is an art and science at least as old as industry deregulation, and funnily enough is now something my old company is providing a lot of help with. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em as they say.

Same reason they offer deals in the first place, price discrimination and yield management.

One reason I could see is to keep perceived price level for the frequent flyers. If they don't see best deals they won't expect those. And the hardcore deal hunters are not loyal to you or your brand.

Giving frequent flyers very good deals make them expect them, thus not be so willing to pay "regular" price.

Once an airline schedules a flight, each additional passenger is 0 marginal cost.

Besides the people who have high status with an airline are usually price insensitive business travelers.

The people who aren’t penny pinching customers who do fly often on their own dime are either going to pay for business class or first class seats or are going to get auto upgrades for free once they book. At least that’s how it works on Delta.

They surely aren’t going to sully themselves by sitting in the “cattle class”.

For instance, Delta releases cheap economy seats to their partners like Virgin and KLM. I routinely book short flights between MCO (Orlando - current home) and ATL (former home) all of the time for 5500 points via KLM/AirFrance to fly Delta (cash price $230 one way) and to see my parents in small town south GA (MCO - ATL - ABY) for 8500 points (cash price one way $358).

The tickets that Delta releases to partners are the least desirable times and they take away even tho use three weeks before the flight because they can jack up prices.

As an example, there are at least 15 flights a day between MCO and ATL on Delta. Three of those flights may be available on KLM or Virgin

To fill empty seats ? Still better than nothing

> We didn't have any issues, but if we did I don't know if I'd worry about Expedia's customer service being much worse than an airline's own service.

The problem (speaking as someone who has to deal with Travel Agents many, many times) is that Expedia will say it's Cathay's problem, and Cathay will refuse to speak to you and tell you it's Expedia's problem.

One trick they use is to book via a different country. Flight from A to B when booked on the main English website in dollars can be a higher price than the same leg being booked on the Russian website in rubles.

Two reasons for that, one can be because the airline is less known in that market and whats to price more aggressively, and the other is that the ticket conditions are slightly different. For example your right to get compensation in case of a delay (and how much) may be different between those tickets.

One way I've heard is they don't book your ticket immediately but predict when the airline's price will go down and book in then. I imagine they have far better data to enable price prediction than the general public, and can spread the cost of getting it wrong over their other customers.

I'd be very careful with Kiwi. They don't have official OTA agreements with all the airlines they resell; at least Ryanair at one point was actively hostile towards them, and Kiwi was working with personal Ryanair accounts to get around their roadblocks. This in turn meant I couldn't access Ryanair's mobile boarding passes and had to find a printer on short notice at the airport.

While airlines can apparently not legally completely prevent such "uncooperative" third-party resellers, and I do have some sympathy for the business model, it's not great to be stuck between travel agent and airline when things go wrong.

Other OTAs like Experian actually take the role of a good old travel agent (the entity historically doing much of the ticketing work the airlines are now doing directly) and will usually only sell you itineraries of interlining (i.e. cooperating) airlines, and also only of airlines that accept travel agents as business partners in the first place.

I have bad experiences with Kiwi and ctrip and a bunch of other ones. The support is indeed terrible and if anything goes wrong, the airline will tell you to contact the 3rd party agent... which has horrible support so there you are, stuck somewhere in asia. I had multiple occasions in which I just booked another ticket because of their incompetence, losing a few $100 as I could not take the risk of being late. Now I only book directly at the airline: at that time the company was booking and they just took what google flights gave them, which is often not directly at the airline.

Expedia still offers refunds within 24 hours. At least for every flight I've booked originating from the US in the last few years.

I thought it was because of the DoT rule, but apparently they wouldn't be subject to that.

Has to be worse than that. 20 is still way too many degrees of separation if every region operated on a hub and spoke model.

I would imagine we're seeing two to four groupings of sequential routes which are subsidized access. A floatplane which hits every island in the archipelago, like a bus route, before reaching the international airport with jets. Likewise with bush planes in Arctic villages, and regional turboprops that hit a sequence of rural airports because they only attract a few passengers a day on their entire route.

The next line specifies:

> typically this will be a small airport in Alaska or Canada to another small airport in Africa or Indonesia

It's still mind blowing to me. Surely any Alaskan airport would be within 5 hops of Anchorage (or not have scheduled flights at all, fine, but that can't be the case here), likewise surely any Indonesian airport is within 5 hops of Jakarta, and Anchorage-Jakarta can certainly be done in 3 hops in a multitude of ways. But one of those assumptions is wrong by 7 hops!

There aren't even that many airports to consider, the same presentation gives 4000 as the number included in the analysis.

Maybe the graph topology is something like a series of tiny airports that each only connect to the next airport in the series, probably by the same flight that makes multiple stops (not unknown in island hopping, and maybe then in Alaska/Canada too). So you don't really board 20 planes but you do require 20 takeoffs and landings.

Canada is too rich - there are more likely to be flights.

Yeah though not all flights are daily

Fun fact: sometimes Google Flights will show a (lower) fare on United that doesn't exist on United's own site. But if you click though to United from Google, it magically now does exist, and can be ticketed. I don't know if this happens with other airlines (I look for and book mostly United).

> third party (online travel agent)

I've used Google flights ~50 times and hadn't seen too many recommendations for flights booked through OTAs, but hard agree with avoiding them (and booking directly with the airline).

Granted I only travel with hand luggage, I never had any issues with cancelled or delayed flighs when booking separate tickets. Even so they are relatvely cheap. It is even cheaper if you book your return flight ticket separately.

Yeah, due to thw Fly America Act, I (usually) have to book through a US carrier even if it's a code share for work travel and run into this problem often...

I've also never booked a flight through one of the 3rd parties where I couldn't access the booking on the airline's website.

Some time again (as discussed in this thread), Ryanair had some spat with resellers. So I had to upload a picture of my ID to the Ryanair website in order access my booking that way.

I used Kiwi.com for this a few weeks ago (combining multiple European carriers, including Ryanair) and it worked rather well.

My first flight was delayed, and it seemed likely I would miss the second leg flight, so they sent me an email with a list of options to reschedule. I'd purchased the 'Premium Protection', so I think I could choose a new option up to €250 (+ hotel if overnight) without paying any extra.

I decided to risk taking the first flight, as the second airport was much bigger so figured there would be better flights from there. Fortunately the flight on the second leg was delayed too, so I didn't need to change anything.