August 5, 2005
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Daytrading Airline Tickets
Later this month I have to take a 1-day flight to Rochester, NY for
work. In the last four days, the flight I want (US Air, nonstop,
9AM departure, 5PM return on the same day) has gone from $800 to $200
to $500. With those price swings, you’d think the mafia would
want in on the action! Here’s what I think happened:- Prices on this flight are normally expensive ($800)
- US Air decides to open a nonstop flight with a few cheap flights ($200)
- Word gets out, and those cheap tickets are snatched up (leaving only $500+ seats left)
What a messed-up system! Here’s how the mafia should get in on
it: they should monitor prices, buy up cheap seats, and resell them
with fake ID’s.Or here’s how normal people should take advantage of these
inefficiencies: someone should write a program that scans plane flights
with the parameters you want, and then notify you when the price drops below a certain point. Like the tools day traders use.Yahoo Best Fare Tracker and similar schemes all suck. Sure, the
best deal on a listed round-trip may be $200, but it requires a redeye
with 2 stops, and tickets aren’t available except for 2 Tuesdays in
October…Does anyone know of such a program? Why hasn’t Apple written
one? And if someone wants to write one from scratch and can do
back-end coding, I’ll design the UI.
Comments (18)
i believe qixo will do this for you.
how does reselling airline tickets even work? I thought they didn’t let you do that… I’m interetested!
The best travel website that I know of is “sidestep.”
isn’t sidestep an install that pops up whenever you visit a travel site?
scratch qixo, i was wrong. checked my travelocity account…it can’t monitor for specific dates or # of stops. this is an interesting idea, but is there any kind of regulation that preventsyou from doing it?
make it run on my Treo600 and i’ll be your first customer!!
http://www.orbitz.com/App/InitDealEdit?z=jzgl&r=7n
http://www.cheaptickets.com/App/InitDealEdit?z=63qn&r=1n also seems to be what you want (I haven’t tried these–just did a quick search).
Eddie: they don’t let you resell. Hence it would have to be the mafia (illegal), who would also provide fake ID’s so you could travel as the original purchaser. I guess they would have to be bought under the name “Pat Lee” who could be male/female and white/black/asian.
Thanks, Bryan. Those two links seem to use the same engine — even the UI is exactly the same, with different fonts and colors. They do come close to what I’d like, but they don’t let me specify the level of detail, like flights at certain times. I guess what I want is a database of flight prices and then the ability to run my own search algorithms on them.
Hmm, maybe I should write the algorithms and then try to sell them to Expedia / Orbitz / Cheaptickets.
Actually, pretty much all airline reservations are controlled by the companies Apollo, Galileo, Worldspan, Sabre, Amadeus and System One. Sabre, Apollo, System One and Worldspan are the ones that control the U.S. reservation system. They don’t have much incentive to give you what you want since they are an oligopoly and don’t have to deal with consumers–just travel agents like Travelocity. And, they also have an incentive to bias your search results. Sabre, for example, is owned by American Airline’s parent company.
Haha, I know exactly the feeling….sometimes I wonder if those “special” deals from travelocity, orbitz, yahoo travels, are really deals. Because when I compare, they’re all pretty much the same. Whoever writes a program like that will be like the next “google” phenomenon.
Yeah, start your own business!
i interviewed w/ this company, ITA software, that does airline reservations. i was rejected but that’s not the point of this post.
the point is that finding the best airline itinerary is extremely difficult which is why ITA is full of PhD’s and the top programmers in the country. since the problem requires complicated algorithms, the programming is all done in Lisp.
on the other hand since your problem is more constrained it might be considerably less difficult. but i think your frustration in finding a solution illustrates the difficulty of the problem. another factor, possibly more important, is that gaining access to the airlines databases is very difficult and expensive.
Orbitz has a “deal detector” which sends you an email when the price drops for a ticket from your current lowest
search price, or when the ticket reaches a certain price. I just checked on a flight to Vancouver and it dropped
$60 in six hours!
hmm… what are you going to be doing in rochester?
Bryan/Frank/Augie: Thanks for the references and links! I’m doing more background research now.
Leslie: I’ll be talking to some color science professors at the University of Rochester.
ahhh… i forgot to check back – did you get to visit wegmans?
Nope — in Portland we did some walking and shopping downtown near the courthouse / courtyard? We also ate at King’s Buffet near Camas, and wandered around some random places like a lake near there. I missed going to Powell’s Books too.