For those unfamiliar with ITA Matrix, it was for a long time the go-to flight search tool for the most dedicated flight hackers, points hackers, etc.
It was built by ITA Software [1][2] in the early-mid 2000s (the earliest mention I can find of it is in 2004 [3]) to test and showcase the capabilities of their flight search platform. I once heard that ITA and other consumer-facing flight search companies had tested that kind of UI with ordinary users, but found that not enough people understood or liked it enough for them to justify making it a mainstream interface.
Hipmunk, a YC-backed flight search site that launched in 2010, was heavily influenced by the ITA Matrix UI, after co-founder Adam Goldstein had found Matrix to be the best way for him to find flights when travelling around the world for college debating competitions. And while Hipmunk did a good job of being more consumer-friendly and popular than Matrix had been, sadly they didn't gain enough traction to make it as a standalone company, and after being acquired by SAP/Concur, it was shut down last year.
It's an interesting, and perhaps depressing case of a product design concept being far superior to what's available in the mainstream for a certain class of user, but cannot gain enough mainstream acceptance to be a viable business or even a well-supported service for those who love it. And far more than most other product categories, flight search has huge infrastructure costs, so it's very difficult to economically sustain niche products (from grim personal experience of being part of a team trying to build a novel flight search product ourselves).
In this case it's just lucky that Google owns the infrastructure and has enough enthusiasm internally to keep it going to some extent.
Hipmunk was OK, one of "the better" free tools out there.
But I'm afraid it never had anything on ITA Matrix. ITA always had copious amounts of extra special sauce.
I extensively tried all competitors I could find (including Hipmunk) on a variety of real-world scenarios. Nothing ever came close to ITA and I was very worried indeed for its future when Google bought it.
Yeah, but you couldn't buy tickets on ITA which made its special sauce only go so far. What's the point of building the best schedule if its unpurchaseable, or unpurchaseable without a travel agent?
Hipmunk actually let you use ITA syntax to search for very specific route constructions, which you could then buy.
There's some sites that let you paste an itamatrix itinerary and show you places where you could potentially purchase it (eg https://bookwithmatrix.com/).
If that doesn't work and you really want a specific itinerary, I've had good luck with amex travel concierge, where I provided them with copy-paste of ITA matrix and they made the booking.
This was part of the benefit IMO, noobs couldn’t burn a ridiculous deal instantly. Our $900 business class (90% off error fare) YVR-HND-SYD roundtrip on ANA with free stopovers was the best one I ever booked with ITA’s help.
IIRC, ITA gave you the flight details in the special syntax (code) that travel agents use, and you could just give that code to a travel agent and they'd be able to buy that exact flight for you.
Google is sometimes the same - presents an option for either calling an agent (never worked for me) or buying same flight for $20k. Then you go to SkyScanner and get same ticket for maybe 10% more but via dodgy-ish website.
p.s. Google seems to be the worst at bait and switch, but that's different story.
Hipmunk had a great feature for sorting by “pain” and filtering takeoff / land times easier than anyone.
But ITA was so comprehensive you could find loopholes, like when you add an additional destination and your first class ticket drops in price by 50% etc. It is super missed in the mileage community!
Seems they will charge a subscription to access this - at first thought I wondered if this is the best option, and not just charge a per-leg fee like https://flightfox.com (who do concierge travel services and I love them) but I suppose, if you get the flight schedule you want, many people will instead jump and book direct with the airline. This can be good, if the flight aggregator is a behemoth and will not help you in case of problems, or bad if the airline is a behemoth.
We’re actually moving away from the subscription model - you can visit our homepage and get the extension installed for free now. The official announcement goes out Monday…
[and yes… that was why we went with a sub model over pay per use]
Between ~2000-2010 I worked for an international airline and I can share that we were testing a lot more innovative search interfaces for consumers. This was still pretty much the dawn of online ticket sales, and people were still either calling an airline or going though a travel agent. I remember our group for ‘online sales’ was a team of literally ten people and technology was mostly outsourced to vendors so we were initially more of a marketing group. I remember the year we joined we crossed $1M revenue for online ticket sales and that was actually a surprise to a lot of people in the company.
This was my first real job after graduating, and one of my roles was industry research and putting together a weekly newsletter of interesting technology to keep an eye on and when ITA released Matrix we loved it.
Long story short, we wanted to do a lot of things like this, but our airline (and most others) were not developing our own tech and instead using some technology from the major GDS companies (Amadeus, SABRE, Galileo). One project I was on was working to try and implement just a basic fuzzy date search (eg +/- 3 days of your preferred date) and our GDS was quoting us something like $3M and 12months to deliver.
Luckily we had an exec who understood business, technology, and design and got resources to build out internal technology team and we started building our own technology that freed us from some of the constraints of GDS to great success!
Others have replied well but I’ll add my own answer...
In order for your flight search product to be useful, you need a database containing effectively every flight in the world - all the airlines, all the destinations - and you need to update it every time a fare or seat availability changes. Then you need optimized routing algorithms to find routes that accommodate a vast array of consumer preferences. So, there are giant costs just to get access to all the data in the first place, then write the code and run all the servers.
ITA Software offered this as a service via an API, but since a couple of years after Google acquired them they stopped offering access to outsiders.
Now the GDS companies (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport) offer API products, but they are still very costly, so big transaction volumes are needed to justify it.
There is now one way small/niche businesses can offer flight search and transactions fulfillment; a YC company called Duffel. They still only offer a narrow selection of airlines, but it’s growing.
Some other companies like Skyscanner offer access to their API, but only if it’s in their interests (ie, if you generate sales for them; you can’t make much revenue for yourself that way).
The reason Google continued to offer API access after the acquisition was because a 5 year stipulation was in the contract to get it approved by the Department of Justice. Of course once the 5 years were up that was it. ITA had also built a reservation system for Air Canada. Air Canada never used it, but Cape Air switched in 2012. In 2013, Google discontinued it.
The whole acquisition was a huge failure on the part the DoJ Antitrust Division.
The answer above has some good information, but it's also munging together unrelated topics. Flight search APIs that aggregate other, existing, APIs (like the mentioned Skyscanner and Duffel) aren't the same thing that ITA flight search or the Amadeus/Sabre/Travelport flight search engines are.
The hard problem the flight search engines solve is initially for the airlines. They have aircraft of different capacities, ranges, seat types, and so on. Then, different tiers of fares based on seat type, advance purchase, refundability, add-ons like priority boarding, bag fees, inflight wi-fi, etc. Then, a "flight" is some combination of actual flight "legs" (single takeoff + landing).
So, airlines want to maximize revenue. To do that, they set available inventory levels for many of the unique combinations of all the variables above. Perhaps, for example, only 10 of the "deep discount" point-a->b->c coach seats, but 50 for the highest priced b->c leg. Oh, and the price is higher on day "X", because some popular sporting event is held in city "c" on that day, and the morning flights priced even higher.
If you extrapolate then, you can tell that someone wanting to fly from a->c has a lot of different possible fares, with each fare having a different number of available seats to sell. And all those variables are changing underneath your search, all the time. And, you're obligated to show actual fares, including taxes, fees, etc, which vary dynamically by airport, pax type, etc.
Companies like Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport, and so on did a reasonably good job over the years of exposing APIs to both airlines and travel agents to search these. ITA came along with a more computer science based approach and made the shopping part of this much faster, with more results, flexible, more tunable by the airlines, etc.
Sure, but plenty of those jobs still around. In fact they've been struggling with the rest of the market in filling positions. AmEx travel is constantly recruiting.
The graph problem is huge (NP-complete in the full case). You can't reasonably cache things because segment availability changes a lot. Latencies on searches through the GDS may be much higher than you're used to in other domains. Due to all these factors and more, cost per query is quite high. And then on top of all that, conversions for flight searches are quite low and the reward for converting a search is on the order of single digit cents.
Basically the problem is the airlines don't want good flight search so they erect barriers, right? Airlines prefer to have pricing and route info be opaque so they can keep people using higher price options. So the infrastructure costs are about fighting to get the information from people who don't want you to have it.
On the counter-side, if there are 300 seats on a plane, worth $100 each, and everyone does 10 flight searches before booking a flight, that means that your database needs to hold a few hundred bytes about prices, the plane, and departure time, and handle 3000 queries, and for that you get a chance to make a commission on $30k in revenue.
There aren't many computing platforms that could offer a higher profit margin per byte stored or queried!
Every single one of your numbers can be orders of magnitude off. Many people search without buying, there can be hundreds or thousands of fares for a single flight, and industry margins are razor thin. If you're lucky enough to actually get a commission (unlikely), your percentage will still be junk. Skyscanner (much bigger than you) is earning in the single digit percents and I have no doubt there's a cap in many of their agreements.
Pretty much any other computing service has a better ROI.
When I do 10 searches, each of those searches hits a substantial subset of every flight that could satisfy my travel need. Suppose I want to fly BOS to LAS for re:invent. For the outbound leg, I’m probably searching for Sat through Tues, every carrier, every leg, every cabin. That means a leg BOS-SLC, BOS-ORD, BOS-ATL, BOS-LAX, etc are all considered.
You can’t easily prune the tree on cost or time because you don’t know my preferences. You might notice that most pruning is done only on segment count, with (almost?)no one by default showing itineraries with 2 additional segments over shortest. I might prefer a carrier (I do), but even if I do, I still want to see the other choices, because my preference isn’t thousands of dollars strong.
Rather than 10 queries per seat sold, I’d not be surprised if the actual query count was 10K or more.
Airbnb's customer experience team used Hipmunk as a fallback for a long time. The last resort before just hanging up and promising a check was HotelTonight, until Airbnb acquired that.
How did Hipmunk mess it up so bad? It was seriously one of the most pleasing web apps to use, even under time pressure.
The comment you replied to seems to have a fair assesment of why it failed
>It's an interesting, and perhaps depressing case of a product design concept being far superior to what's available in the mainstream for a certain class of user, but cannot gain enough mainstream acceptance to be a viable business or even a well-supported service for those who love it. And far more than most other product categories, flight search has huge infrastructure costs, so it's very difficult to economically sustain niche products (from grim personal experience of being part of a team trying to build a novel flight search product ourselves).
I feel like mess it up implies by default all businesses have product market fit that they "fumble" when in fact that's the hard part in the first place.
It was built by ITA Software [1][2] in the early-mid 2000s (the earliest mention I can find of it is in 2004 [3]) to test and showcase the capabilities of their flight search platform. I once heard that ITA and other consumer-facing flight search companies had tested that kind of UI with ordinary users, but found that not enough people understood or liked it enough for them to justify making it a mainstream interface.
Hipmunk, a YC-backed flight search site that launched in 2010, was heavily influenced by the ITA Matrix UI, after co-founder Adam Goldstein had found Matrix to be the best way for him to find flights when travelling around the world for college debating competitions. And while Hipmunk did a good job of being more consumer-friendly and popular than Matrix had been, sadly they didn't gain enough traction to make it as a standalone company, and after being acquired by SAP/Concur, it was shut down last year.
It's an interesting, and perhaps depressing case of a product design concept being far superior to what's available in the mainstream for a certain class of user, but cannot gain enough mainstream acceptance to be a viable business or even a well-supported service for those who love it. And far more than most other product categories, flight search has huge infrastructure costs, so it's very difficult to economically sustain niche products (from grim personal experience of being part of a team trying to build a novel flight search product ourselves).
In this case it's just lucky that Google owns the infrastructure and has enough enthusiasm internally to keep it going to some extent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
[2] https://xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/17/ita-software-the-trave...
[3] https://www.fodors.com/community/europe/customs-question-sea...