It would be neat if you could work in visa requirements as well so that it only includes visa-free or visa-on-arrival destinations.
I find easy visas a privilege that not many western travellers are aware of; If I wanted to travel somewhere most of the time I need to first apply for a visa (which can take several weeks). This includes a fee, photographs and fingerprints, and an interview. Not to mention the airline tickets and hotel bookings. When I talk with American friends they complain that their visa-on-arrival is only for 60 days instead of 90 and "it's so unfair". /rant
Visa requirements depend on a lot of things, including obviously what passport you hold (multiple selection), there's transit issues too -- if you hold an Afghan passport you can travel to Svalbard without a visa, but you can't fly there from Oslo because that requires a Schengen visa. In fact you can't even transit airside at Schipol. However if you hold a specific type of Canada residency permit you can.
And even once you clear the visa problems, you then get into yellow fever documentation. Do you need to take a yellow fever certificate if you transit via Addis Abiba on the way to South Africa?
For me it's an immediate turnoff if my browser tells me a site wants to show notifications. A notification means a site wants the right to bug me for my attention when I want to be doing something else. I can think of about 1 site that I think deserves that right. Especially because most content sites want to abuse that right to pull your attention back if you forgot to close the tab after you were done. So I always hit 'Block', and then I feel less warm about the site for asking.
Ditto the annoying Intercom popup that takes up way too much screen real estate. If I want to ask a question, I'll come to you.
It may be just me, but I suspect a lot of HN is has similar grumpiness levels about this sort of thing.
Plus.. 20 people looking at the same hotel, doesn't mean they are looking for the same dates. But for the non-detail-oriented people this forces them to make a hasty decision (that will most likely regret down the line).
I looked up flights from Windhoek, Namibia to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and there were 34 people currently looking at that route.
So, the site is just posting inaccurate information in an attempt to increase sales. I don't understand how a person or a business can think this is acceptable behavior, and they lost all my trust in a matter of minutes.
“Looking at this route” in context maybe means number of tickets on hold with the airline, or number of searches for that route in the past day on SABRE, as opposed to active users on that site right now.
Trying to give them the benefit of the doubt as to that number being an accurate count of something, though agree it’s a high-pressure sales tactic that turns me off.
I'm not going to give OP the benefit of the doubt. New York to Chicago only shows 18 people looking at that route, so unless this site is trending in Namibia, then the OP has some explaining to do.
As far as I can see, the OP is just pulling numbers out of thin air in an attempt to line his pockets with our money, and I think it's disgusting.
This is a dark pattern akin to booking.com, to create time pressure for you, not provide actual value.
If the latter were true, then sometimes it should say "You are the only one looking at this hotel. Take your time!"
But no. Travelling to the most obscure places across Asia I have NEVER seen anything but hordes people looking at my hotel in Kampong Cham. Probably different dates too.
I am willing to bet it is derived from /dev/urandom adjusted to the size of the establishment.
>Travelling to the most obscure places across Asia I have NEVER seen anything but hordes people looking at my hotel in Kampong Cham
Haha, this is so relatable. Not a long time ago I arrived at my "high in demand, better book RIGHT NOW" guesthouse somewhere in Mondul Kiri Province and had to wake up personnel in their hammocks. Turns out they had no bookings for some days …
> This is a dark pattern akin to booking.com, to create time pressure for you, not provide actual value.
It's only a dark pattern if the number is bullshit. If the number was accurate then it would be a helpful feature, especially if they also took into account conversion ratios on that route and gave the user a real time table for how long they could realistically wait before booking the flight/hotel.
It's a call to action. If you see that 18 people are looking at that route and there's 1 flight that's really cheap then it's an incentive to quickly book that flight before the last seat is sold out. It's also the reason why other OTAs will list sold out hotel rooms or say "2 seats left" for a flight and why Amazon will put "3 left in stock" for certain items.
While we're dumping, it's worth noting that there is no browser size for which that chat popup doesn't completely obscure at least one search result.
Since there are 3 search results above the fold, that's an issue.
Maybe move it to the left, or add space to the right for it to live. Or keep it minimized. Or give it some way for the user to minimize it on their own.
Also, it beeps at me. That's the signal for me to find and close whatever tab had the discourtesy of doing that.
It’s a marketing channel that increases conversion rate overall, you might deny access but a % of people don’t (maybe some even find it useful) and those people convert very easily. So basically if you enable push notifications you make more money.
I blocked* Intercom for all websites some time ago. The thing that annoyed me more than the actual widget were the tab titles changing to "<random name> says…" every second or so. That made me want to close the tab and never go back.
* – by adding this to uBlock filters, if you want it too:
I clicked on Philadelphia and the results pane wouldn't scroll - your comment is spot on (why would anyone want notifications from any application that isn't based on real-time communications) but I'm also irritated by the current trend of hacking out the browser's native behavior. Just let the content scroll (infinite scrolling is a nice DOM hack though).
EDIT: I just looked at what Ghostery, TrackMeNot and uBlock Origin blocked - it's a pretty big percentage of the non-image content.
I could not agree more. If my first visit to a website includes this popup asking to show notifications, my opinion of said website is instantly lowered.
Give me a service that makes me want to opt in, something I need, and then you won't have to ask me to show notifications, I'll be asking you.
In Firefox you can disable all notifications (and thus all popups asking for notifications to be allowed) in about:config, setting `dom.webnotifications.enabled` to false.
On the one hand, since I do live in San Francisco, taking a "staycation" is not a terrible idea. It might be fun to live like a tourist. But the first 5 options for me are 1) San Francisco, 2) Oakland, 3) Sacramento, 4) San Jose, and 5) Reno. For a site that is promising me exotic adventure, leading things that are so quotidian is a disappointment. Sure, put in the staycation options, but rank them lower.
I eventually just switched off the hotels and looked at flights only, as I wasn't confident that the algorithm would do as good a job of picking a hotel as I would.
It looks nice, but it feels a bit anachronistic to exclusively focus on air travel in 2018 considering the environmental impact of aeroplanes. Recommending flights from Schiphol (Amsterdam) to nearby Brussels or London without showing more eco-friendly alternatives (Thalys and Eurostar, or even ferries) is a bit disappointing.
Travel does not necessarily mean taking a flight somewhere (especially in Europe).
Agreed, that's exactly what I've been felt is missing. I'm not sure about flights+hotels, but for flights alone the tools already existed (Adioso, Google Flights).
Alas, I still haven't found any that let me do the same for trains and buses. GoEuro already lets you search, but you have to choose a specific destination.
Cheap buses shouldn't be too hard with the proliferation of Flixbus etc. (Amsterdam → Berlin starts at €29), but as a 200cm Dutchman travelling by coach definitely does not fall within my definition of an acceptable mode of travel for leisure (neither does flying for that matter).
Finding cheap train fairs is indeed a puzzle sometimes! It helps a lot to have some familiarity with the major European train companies, the major high-speed connections, and how to book the discounted tickets in advance (incidentally, Amsterdam → Berlin starts at €39,90 when booked two months in advance). Of course seat61.com is useful too as a general source of information.
What I really miss is a tool that shows me destinations that can be comfortably reached by a combination of day-time and sleeper trains on dates that still have discount tickets available. Nothing beats waking up early in the morning in Vienna or Munich in a sleeper train; it's like getting a free day of travel, and you arrive fairly well-rested instead of weary from travel. I'm not doing anything useful in my sleep (besides sleeping), so I might as well spend that time travelling.
Agreed on the need to include more than just flights especially when traveling through Europe.
However SkyScanner just updated their capabilities to include Train travel on their booking similar to GoEuro. I still believe SkyScanner to be the best travel website for finding cheap flights and also includes the option to just search a country name like "Spain" or even "Everywhere".
I'm excited to see SkyScanner merge the technology of including buses/trains with the ability to explore non-specific destinations.
tbh if the scope of your search is popular tourist cities a three hour train or bus ride from me, you probably skip the website for suggesting a perfect travel destination" you might not have thought of and go straight to the hotel/hostel booking site...
I strongly recommend Rome2rio (https://www.rome2rio.com/) for searching through a wider variety of transport means (as well as its fantastic ability to plot out a full route door to door, with suburban trains/buses/taxis at each end to get you to/from the airport/station/port).
That said, it's not really designed as a "travel inspiration" site - it's for people who have figured out where they're going and want to plan out the details of how to get there.
Anachronistic as in taking plane travel as the starting point for a trip without considering greener alternatives goes against the trend of being more conscious about your personal ecological footprint.
Is that trend anything less of some "urban vegan hipster" concern, that doesn't even do a dent in global flights, where in fact, more people fly now, more often, than ever?
In other words, is this a non-trend, that only affects a tiny self-congratulating minority?
It might be a good thing, but until it is an actual thing, with mass impact and all, it's hardly an obvious critique on a new travel website that it lacks it.
Schiphol to London is a 4-6 hour trip by train though, and up until they started with a €35 ticket, could not compete with planes on price. It still can't compete on time.
It's a close call though. Schiphol recommends arriving at least two hours before departure for European flights (and in the busy seasons this has proven not to be an exaggeration!), and you still need transfer to London itself.
The Eurostar conveniently terminates at King's Cross St. Pancras. This year the direct London → Amsterdam Eurostar service is being introduced, with the reverse following soon after, cutting down travel time even further.
Also, legroom, comfort, and very few luggage restrictions (especially weight, and no restrictions on fluids either, so bring along that bottle of wine and make it a picnic!).
If Eurostar didn't have the silly security theatre or 30 minute minimum checkin (A BA flight from LCY to Amsterdam has a 20 minute checkin, BA from Heathrow is 35 minutes if you're handluggage only) then you'd be right.
For people traveling from Amsterdam to London. Want to go to Reading or anywhere west of London? Flight, no brainer. Want to go to Birmingham? Fly to Birmingham.
St Pancras is still a tube ride from most places you want to go to even in central London. If you're aiming at Docklands it's a long way. Crossrail will help a fair bit with Heathrow too.
That's not to say that eurostar isn't often the right option -- the wifi and mobile coverage isn't that bad, and most of the trip can be productive - especially if you want to get your head down in some coding, security is marginally less annoying than airports.
Can someone enlighten me what the „on a budget“ in the title means? Do they have some special deals? Feels like a booking.com with a „take me anywhere“ button on first look.
You are correct. Most of us are "on a budget" when we travel in the sense that we have certain price ranges in mind even if we tend to prioritize saving time over $$ and stay in fairly nice places. Budget travel or traveling on a budget carries the implication that you're looking for cheaper options like buses, hostels, free attractions, no-frills airlines, etc. Think the original Lonely Planet demographic (though not any longer).
Just as some feedback, it saw that I was based in London, auto-selected Heathrow as my base airport and the first trip it offered me was a $800 trip to London. Don't think I'll be taking you guys up on that offer.
And I would also like to see the code LON for all airports around London. If I am to take a GBP 5k trip to Fiji, I don't really mind if it starts from Heathrow or City of Gatwick :)
Had a similar experience where I live. It looks like the algorithm decides you don't need a flight to where you live, just a hotel, so the overall amount ends up cheaper. Switching from Flight + Hotel to Flight Only gave me a more meaningful result.
It's been a while since I worked with anything air travel related but why do all the flight search engine UIs operate very similarly? Is it just because it's the best way to do it or are these booking engines still tied to the GDS systems (Sabre, Amadeus, etc)?
Like the overall idea. One important feedback - needs the ability to specify a 'departure' city not just airport. E.g. London has 5 main airports, and most people would be able to fly from any of these. An umbrella search that is "London" and aggregates across all the airports for the city is key.
I would add that rather than a city, I would like to be able to specify a general area, or a list of airports. From my place, I don't care much if I must depart from Amsterdam, Paris or Brussels, and London is fine as well if it's cheaper. Every time I look for flights, it gets tedious to try every of these departure locations to check the flights I can take.
You got hit by a software filter that is based on past activity by trolls and had nothing to do with you. Sorry! I've marked your account legit so this won't happen again.
It's not our capital, but Haifa with some quarter million people has places like that right in the middle of the city. Small isolated house on a hill, dirt road and all.
It's probably Vlkolinec or someplace similar, definitely at least 150-200km from capital. Anyway it's not about precise location, more about 'image' of the place (best the place can offer is some dirt road with old houses).
Yeah we're not the touristic capital of the world although the country is really pretty in some parts, no big news, let's move on.
To be fair Bratislava isn't that far from Vienna (it's nearer than "London Southend" is from London), and BTS only has about 20 flights a day, none long haul.
Bug 1: After searching, I clicked to another tab for a couple of minutes, and then back to it. It popped up a dialog saying "it's been a while, we need to refresh your results", and then reset my search to the original form state. Quite annoying, especially since I'm on a VPN and location-detection therefore has me in a different state.
Bug 2: OK, so I stuck with the original $1000 budget. It offered me a trip to New York, NY, for several nights. I click into New York, and now it shows hotel rooms starting from $2500 and down -- i.e. it forgets the budget as soon as you start looking at details, making the entire premise of it useless. When you click into a "package" why don't you divide results into frugal ("save on accomodation to have more spending money"), on-budget ("here's what you can afford"), and spend-a-little-extra ("for a bit more, you can upgrade to...") sections?
Bug 3: And as said elsewhere, get rid of the dark patterns. It makes you look scammy.
I've noticed that nearly every travel website does this--you search within a budget, find something you really like, but once you go through the checkout flows, you realize it actually costs 25-50% more than what they said it did.
It's such an annoying dark pattern that me and my wife have been working on our own weekend travel website [0] that is upfront about all pricing, e.g. we include fees in the price when possible, e.g. deposits for rentals, cleaning fees, etc. And we won't show outdated flight information (some of these sites show fares from over 24hrs ago).
I like this a lot, especially the artwork/design. Can I make two suggestions?
1. Consider shortening the name, this is really just a subjective thing but a shorter name is easier to remember/type. Maybe just "Alpaca"
2. Load time is really slow after clicking "Find a getaway", the loading screen sat there for a while. Consider showing only first few results and dynamically loading the rest
Thanks for the feedback. We, and other people too, usually refer to it as "Alpaca", so we'll see where that goes. For now, I think the name is punny, but will keep that in mind for the future. As far as load times--I'm definitely working on that; sometimes it even times out and shows a Heroku error page, which is no good at all (Heroku has a hard 30s timeout). Hopefully that will be resolved within the coming weeks, and like you said, looking at showing results as they come in via websockets instead of waiting for all searches to complete.
It doesn't look like a memory issue--more of a latency issue with third-party APIs (some of them can take quite awhile to send back a response). But either way, I will look into upgrading the dyno and/or database to see if that helps. I think implementing websockets and rendering results as they come in would be my best bet, but it would add additional complexity, and I'm not a big fan of that at this stage.
Love this. I was going to work on something similar to this (and wander.am) but specifically for outdoorsy vacations.
I did some Google searches to find competitors and wasn't able to find anything. But I imagined the space was pretty crowded. This thread is proving my original suspicion true.
Anyway, I hope to use your site in the future. And I wish you luck [=
Not that I know of, other than sensible design. I used Slack's original 'playful' brand as inspiration by pairing a more rounded font with a vibrant color palette. But thank you!
Unfortunately, the owner of alpacamybags.com wants ~$2,500, which is a little too far out of this site's allotted budget at the moment. I've tried to negotiate other amounts. Will look into it in the future for sure, but right now I think it's fine. Most people that find us don't type the URL anyways.
Just snagged travelalpaca.com, though. Thanks for the tip!
If you can get in touch with the owner, I imagine they would be willing to drop that price significantly since it's a good fit for you but you clearly don't "need it."
$1,000 in the hand is way better than $2,500 that never comes.
I've actually already tried negotiations via domainagents.com--they don't seem to want to go below $2,000, which is unfortunate. But like I said, not a big deal either way. Maybe later on.
That's actually one reason why we've chosen to focus more on rental properties--they're usually in a better location, and they end up being more affordable. We still have a few hotels here and there, though, especially if the rooms are nice.
Small suggestion: the "what city" input threw me off because there was no autosuggest menu, like on most other travel sites. It felt like I was blindly typing in something, and that I'd only find out if you accepted that value after clicking "Find" (instead of knowing right away thanks to the autosuggest, what works and what doesn't).
Case in point: when I type "st petersburg" without an autosuggest, are you defaulting to Florida or Russia? What about "springfield"? :-) [0]
Second point: I entered "yul" instead of Montreal, and that threw a 400 error. An autosuggest menu would have helped here too :-) and I do think that you should support three letter airport codes.
Ah.. just saw "We only support US travelers" in small print. I hope you expand..! Cheers
---
Found small typo on [1]: "Casinoa" instead of "Casino"
Also: the underlined, but not hyperlinked text threw me off. I understand it as a design choice (it does look nice), but wondering if there'd be another way of conveying "this is important" without using underlining.
Appreciate the suggestions. An autocomplete menu is on my list, just haven't gotten around to it yet. And the complaint about the underlined text is something I've heard many times now, so I'm going to change that soon as well. Thanks!
Feature request/idle question: is it in principle possible to build something like this:
I want to see a stack-ranked-by-price list of all international flights on arbitrary dates from my home airport(s), possibly with some filtering such as "exclude Asia" or "Europe only" etc.
This would be cool because it would let me decide "I want to go somewhere on day X, but I don't care where. Let's pick the cheapest place." I can see this leading to adventures.
Map view on Google Flights is probably the best option for this. It's kind of slow and wonky and probably has some stale data, but I haven't seen anything better.
In principle, yes you can build this. In practice, no air provider/aggregator wants you to be running that many low conversion searches across their inventory. So you can try to (very slowly) aggregate results yourself across a wide variety of free services to cover a sufficient number of airlines+destinations, or sign some paid deal with an aggregator to do it for you, and then probably still have to run a bunch of distinct searches for every destination you want to cover. This isn't particularly economical to provide as a service.
This is amazing - I can't wait to see it work on a larger scale, for overseas travel!
One suggestion - could you add some way to filter results? By state, by city, etc - searching from my hometown i see like a dozen results for the same city with different lodgings. Would be great to say "No, I'd rather not go to Tennessee", or "I want to go to casinos, show me the ones with that tag".
Correctly identified my local airport (Manchester), however failed to recognise my local currency (GBP).
Hilarious costs too for a "budget", and a default of 10 days away isn't spontaneous. My shortest short-distance flight booking was 82 minutes, my shorted long haul was 18 hours (for work), and 3 days (for leisure)
I built a business travel app a couple of years back.
I think budget filter is not enough to create enough value as most people set a budget for entire trip and not just travel. If you could crowd source data of avg expense for taxi, and stuff then this could get really interesting.
In our case we could map project budget for travel to trips using historical data(not so accurate but good for ballpark)
Switch off notifications, remove the "X people looking at this" (creepy), make sure to have city-wide codes not just airports, don't offer travel to the SAME city the user is already known to be in. (EDIT: didn't see that it listed it as car+hotel when in my own city - makes sense but was still surprised. Including trips to the same city should perhaps be an option in the search?).
Edit: also: rarely interested in flights with 2 stops for a 1 night holiday - "direct only" needs to be an option.
Also I'd like to see a savings calculator. If I'm in Oslo, a $500 trip to Copenhagen feels like I could find it almost every day (the normal might be $520) but next to it might be a $500 trip to New Zealand - that HAS to be a more rare deal that I really should jump on. Or is it?
The X people looking at this is something hotels.com and such do as well - mind you it's probably one of the many dark patterns that sites like that employ to create fake scarcity / popularity, similar to "x people booked in the last y hours" or "only x seats / rooms left at this price"
Exactly, it’s only used as a dark pattern elsewhere. Which it why it has creepy asociations. I know it’s fake scarcity there and here I’m not sure what it is...
>"The X people looking at this is something hotels.com and such do as well - mind you it's probably one of the many dark patterns that sites like that employ to create fake scarcity / popularity, similar to "x people booked in the last y hours" or "only x seats / rooms left at this price"
I have started to refuse to use sites that employ this "high pressure" nonsense such as booking.com/hotels.com. Even if you could trust this information who cares how many people are currently looking or have booked a hotel room in the last day? It makes for a really sleazy feeling experience and and a visual nightmare. It's like a virtual used car salesman.
Would you shop at a store that insisted on annoying you with such "pressure tactics" while you trying to buy food or clothes?
> The X people looking at this is something hotels.com and such do as well
This site was telling me that "54 people are currently looking at the same route" when I was looking at Perth to Singapore. That felt unlikely to me, were there really 54 people from Perth all viewing that page at once?
That was one reason I left the site, but the other was that the search results were taking forever to complete.
SkyScanner is still the king when searching for flights coupled with the "Explore" option which will return the cheapest flight destinations. You can also simply search for a country such as "Greece" and the results will rank the cheapest airports from your departure.
When including other travel options such as Trains, Buses (Flixbus), GoEuro shows these methods, but without the "Explore" capability.
SkyScanner just announced the ability to include train travel which hopefully will be a marriage of these technologies.
Flight search UI is janky as fuck, recommended I spend €4,000 on a hotel for a six night "budget" trip, and the FOMO notifications are infuriating. Hard pass.
Hotels, flights: Maybe. But not all of "Travel".
I was offered a flight to Amsterdam for 850 or so US$. Not living that far from there the cheapest train ticket to there is 40€. And that's from my train station a few minutes of walking away, not an airport an hour's drive away & with all the airport related hassles.
I've seen this kind of service before. It's not new. Flight search engines are common. Don't many already have something like this integrated?
That said: an actual "Travel spontaneously on a budget" site would be great, but it'd be much larger in scope.
You might want to team up with some travel site like TripAdvisor or Lonely Planet and integrate local budget (we're on a budget) offers like the DB Sparpreisfinder.
Agreed. I've spent a weekend in Paris, and the whole thing (travel by bus + two nights stay + 2 museum tickets) cost me less than their minimum budget.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadI find easy visas a privilege that not many western travellers are aware of; If I wanted to travel somewhere most of the time I need to first apply for a visa (which can take several weeks). This includes a fee, photographs and fingerprints, and an interview. Not to mention the airline tickets and hotel bookings. When I talk with American friends they complain that their visa-on-arrival is only for 60 days instead of 90 and "it's so unfair". /rant
And even once you clear the visa problems, you then get into yellow fever documentation. Do you need to take a yellow fever certificate if you transit via Addis Abiba on the way to South Africa?
Ditto the annoying Intercom popup that takes up way too much screen real estate. If I want to ask a question, I'll come to you.
It may be just me, but I suspect a lot of HN is has similar grumpiness levels about this sort of thing.
I know a lot of travel sites do it, but I don’t see how it adds any value for me to know that (if it is even true)
So, the site is just posting inaccurate information in an attempt to increase sales. I don't understand how a person or a business can think this is acceptable behavior, and they lost all my trust in a matter of minutes.
Trying to give them the benefit of the doubt as to that number being an accurate count of something, though agree it’s a high-pressure sales tactic that turns me off.
As far as I can see, the OP is just pulling numbers out of thin air in an attempt to line his pockets with our money, and I think it's disgusting.
If the latter were true, then sometimes it should say "You are the only one looking at this hotel. Take your time!"
But no. Travelling to the most obscure places across Asia I have NEVER seen anything but hordes people looking at my hotel in Kampong Cham. Probably different dates too.
I am willing to bet it is derived from /dev/urandom adjusted to the size of the establishment.
Haha, this is so relatable. Not a long time ago I arrived at my "high in demand, better book RIGHT NOW" guesthouse somewhere in Mondul Kiri Province and had to wake up personnel in their hammocks. Turns out they had no bookings for some days …
It's only a dark pattern if the number is bullshit. If the number was accurate then it would be a helpful feature, especially if they also took into account conversion ratios on that route and gave the user a real time table for how long they could realistically wait before booking the flight/hotel.
Since there are 3 search results above the fold, that's an issue.
Maybe move it to the left, or add space to the right for it to live. Or keep it minimized. Or give it some way for the user to minimize it on their own.
Also, it beeps at me. That's the signal for me to find and close whatever tab had the discourtesy of doing that.
* – by adding this to uBlock filters, if you want it too:
EDIT: I just looked at what Ghostery, TrackMeNot and uBlock Origin blocked - it's a pretty big percentage of the non-image content.
Give me a service that makes me want to opt in, something I need, and then you won't have to ask me to show notifications, I'll be asking you.
I don't miss it at all.
Curiously, first recommended city to visit is the one I set as the home base.
Also, when going for eg two weeks, it might be interesting to suggest to spend the first and second weeks in different places.
On the one hand, since I do live in San Francisco, taking a "staycation" is not a terrible idea. It might be fun to live like a tourist. But the first 5 options for me are 1) San Francisco, 2) Oakland, 3) Sacramento, 4) San Jose, and 5) Reno. For a site that is promising me exotic adventure, leading things that are so quotidian is a disappointment. Sure, put in the staycation options, but rank them lower.
I eventually just switched off the hotels and looked at flights only, as I wasn't confident that the algorithm would do as good a job of picking a hotel as I would.
Travel does not necessarily mean taking a flight somewhere (especially in Europe).
Alas, I still haven't found any that let me do the same for trains and buses. GoEuro already lets you search, but you have to choose a specific destination.
Finding cheap train fairs is indeed a puzzle sometimes! It helps a lot to have some familiarity with the major European train companies, the major high-speed connections, and how to book the discounted tickets in advance (incidentally, Amsterdam → Berlin starts at €39,90 when booked two months in advance). Of course seat61.com is useful too as a general source of information.
What I really miss is a tool that shows me destinations that can be comfortably reached by a combination of day-time and sleeper trains on dates that still have discount tickets available. Nothing beats waking up early in the morning in Vienna or Munich in a sleeper train; it's like getting a free day of travel, and you arrive fairly well-rested instead of weary from travel. I'm not doing anything useful in my sleep (besides sleeping), so I might as well spend that time travelling.
However SkyScanner just updated their capabilities to include Train travel on their booking similar to GoEuro. I still believe SkyScanner to be the best travel website for finding cheap flights and also includes the option to just search a country name like "Spain" or even "Everywhere".
I'm excited to see SkyScanner merge the technology of including buses/trains with the ability to explore non-specific destinations.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/skyscanner-adds-train-trav...
That said, it's not really designed as a "travel inspiration" site - it's for people who have figured out where they're going and want to plan out the details of how to get there.
"Anachronistic"?
As if plane travel travel got out of style?
In other words, is this a non-trend, that only affects a tiny self-congratulating minority?
It might be a good thing, but until it is an actual thing, with mass impact and all, it's hardly an obvious critique on a new travel website that it lacks it.
The Eurostar conveniently terminates at King's Cross St. Pancras. This year the direct London → Amsterdam Eurostar service is being introduced, with the reverse following soon after, cutting down travel time even further.
Also, legroom, comfort, and very few luggage restrictions (especially weight, and no restrictions on fluids either, so bring along that bottle of wine and make it a picnic!).
For people traveling from Amsterdam to London. Want to go to Reading or anywhere west of London? Flight, no brainer. Want to go to Birmingham? Fly to Birmingham.
St Pancras is still a tube ride from most places you want to go to even in central London. If you're aiming at Docklands it's a long way. Crossrail will help a fair bit with Heathrow too.
That's not to say that eurostar isn't often the right option -- the wifi and mobile coverage isn't that bad, and most of the trip can be productive - especially if you want to get your head down in some coding, security is marginally less annoying than airports.
If I may make a comparison, kinda like a half-baked Expedia without the $£€ limit filter.
I would add that rather than a city, I would like to be able to specify a general area, or a list of airports. From my place, I don't care much if I must depart from Amsterdam, Paris or Brussels, and London is fine as well if it's cheaper. Every time I look for flights, it gets tedious to try every of these departure locations to check the flights I can take.
Is this something which applies to my whole user account, or just this particular comment got flagged up?
Maybe questions I should send to the mods really.
I think I'd send an email to the mods, as I have no idea what got you flagged.
Also, when I click the picture (it's for Bratislava), I see mismatched cities:
Looks like there's still some QA to do.Yeah we're not the touristic capital of the world although the country is really pretty in some parts, no big news, let's move on.
Bug 1: After searching, I clicked to another tab for a couple of minutes, and then back to it. It popped up a dialog saying "it's been a while, we need to refresh your results", and then reset my search to the original form state. Quite annoying, especially since I'm on a VPN and location-detection therefore has me in a different state.
Bug 2: OK, so I stuck with the original $1000 budget. It offered me a trip to New York, NY, for several nights. I click into New York, and now it shows hotel rooms starting from $2500 and down -- i.e. it forgets the budget as soon as you start looking at details, making the entire premise of it useless. When you click into a "package" why don't you divide results into frugal ("save on accomodation to have more spending money"), on-budget ("here's what you can afford"), and spend-a-little-extra ("for a bit more, you can upgrade to...") sections?
Bug 3: And as said elsewhere, get rid of the dark patterns. It makes you look scammy.
It's such an annoying dark pattern that me and my wife have been working on our own weekend travel website [0] that is upfront about all pricing, e.g. we include fees in the price when possible, e.g. deposits for rentals, cleaning fees, etc. And we won't show outdated flight information (some of these sites show fares from over 24hrs ago).
[0]: https://travelalpacamybags.com
1. Consider shortening the name, this is really just a subjective thing but a shorter name is easier to remember/type. Maybe just "Alpaca"
2. Load time is really slow after clicking "Find a getaway", the loading screen sat there for a while. Consider showing only first few results and dynamically loading the rest
Nice work!
Definitely shorten the URL. But I second the other comments - really nice UI, looks great!
I did some Google searches to find competitors and wasn't able to find anything. But I imagined the space was pretty crowded. This thread is proving my original suspicion true.
Anyway, I hope to use your site in the future. And I wish you luck [=
Just snagged travelalpaca.com, though. Thanks for the tip!
$1,000 in the hand is way better than $2,500 that never comes.
Hope it takes off. Such an awesome name and simple format.
So a "$100/night" room can easily end up costing $125 or more.
Small suggestion: the "what city" input threw me off because there was no autosuggest menu, like on most other travel sites. It felt like I was blindly typing in something, and that I'd only find out if you accepted that value after clicking "Find" (instead of knowing right away thanks to the autosuggest, what works and what doesn't).
Case in point: when I type "st petersburg" without an autosuggest, are you defaulting to Florida or Russia? What about "springfield"? :-) [0]
Second point: I entered "yul" instead of Montreal, and that threw a 400 error. An autosuggest menu would have helped here too :-) and I do think that you should support three letter airport codes.
Ah.. just saw "We only support US travelers" in small print. I hope you expand..! Cheers
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Found small typo on [1]: "Casinoa" instead of "Casino"
Also: the underlined, but not hyperlinked text threw me off. I understand it as a design choice (it does look nice), but wondering if there'd be another way of conveying "this is important" without using underlining.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield#United_States [1] https://travelalpacamybags.com/bookings/new?listing=6b0c1c8d...
Especially like the design and color palette.
I want to see a stack-ranked-by-price list of all international flights on arbitrary dates from my home airport(s), possibly with some filtering such as "exclude Asia" or "Europe only" etc.
This would be cool because it would let me decide "I want to go somewhere on day X, but I don't care where. Let's pick the cheapest place." I can see this leading to adventures.
In principle, yes you can build this. In practice, no air provider/aggregator wants you to be running that many low conversion searches across their inventory. So you can try to (very slowly) aggregate results yourself across a wide variety of free services to cover a sufficient number of airlines+destinations, or sign some paid deal with an aggregator to do it for you, and then probably still have to run a bunch of distinct searches for every destination you want to cover. This isn't particularly economical to provide as a service.
One suggestion - could you add some way to filter results? By state, by city, etc - searching from my hometown i see like a dozen results for the same city with different lodgings. Would be great to say "No, I'd rather not go to Tennessee", or "I want to go to casinos, show me the ones with that tag".
Hilarious costs too for a "budget", and a default of 10 days away isn't spontaneous. My shortest short-distance flight booking was 82 minutes, my shorted long haul was 18 hours (for work), and 3 days (for leisure)
I think budget filter is not enough to create enough value as most people set a budget for entire trip and not just travel. If you could crowd source data of avg expense for taxi, and stuff then this could get really interesting.
In our case we could map project budget for travel to trips using historical data(not so accurate but good for ballpark)
Edit: also: rarely interested in flights with 2 stops for a 1 night holiday - "direct only" needs to be an option.
Also I'd like to see a savings calculator. If I'm in Oslo, a $500 trip to Copenhagen feels like I could find it almost every day (the normal might be $520) but next to it might be a $500 trip to New Zealand - that HAS to be a more rare deal that I really should jump on. Or is it?
Otherwise - great idea and neat execution.
I have started to refuse to use sites that employ this "high pressure" nonsense such as booking.com/hotels.com. Even if you could trust this information who cares how many people are currently looking or have booked a hotel room in the last day? It makes for a really sleazy feeling experience and and a visual nightmare. It's like a virtual used car salesman.
Would you shop at a store that insisted on annoying you with such "pressure tactics" while you trying to buy food or clothes?
Vote with your wallet if possible.
This site was telling me that "54 people are currently looking at the same route" when I was looking at Perth to Singapore. That felt unlikely to me, were there really 54 people from Perth all viewing that page at once?
That was one reason I left the site, but the other was that the search results were taking forever to complete.
When including other travel options such as Trains, Buses (Flixbus), GoEuro shows these methods, but without the "Explore" capability.
SkyScanner just announced the ability to include train travel which hopefully will be a marriage of these technologies.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/skyscanner-adds-train-trav...
I've seen this kind of service before. It's not new. Flight search engines are common. Don't many already have something like this integrated?
That said: an actual "Travel spontaneously on a budget" site would be great, but it'd be much larger in scope.
You might want to team up with some travel site like TripAdvisor or Lonely Planet and integrate local budget (we're on a budget) offers like the DB Sparpreisfinder.
In Europe, I can go from cold to the beach with EUR15 with Ryan Air, and AirBnB for as low as EUR20/night in a decent apartment in many towns.
That's on a budget European style! :-)