todsul

CEO of Flightfox here. We still absolutely use both technology and humans (that will always underpin our value prop), but we moved from the previous competitive crowdsourced model to a one-on-one model. The short story is that travel search benefits more from depth rather than breadth (at least at the expert level). With multiple travel hackers working at once, they can only invest $fee/n-hackers worth of time and there is a ton of overlap. With a single hacker, they receive all of the $fee and can dig deeper and deeper to uncover better results. The crowdsourced approach was definitely more interesting to consumers, but the results were inferior, especially on the customer service side. Now, we’re actually transitioning behind the scenes from a one-on-one to a collaborative model, which is bringing us new benefits, but requires more systemization.

Today, we target corporate travel, but we still work with individuals; you just need to click the Get Started button and we ask if you’re an individual after that. This pivot of sorts came from the fact we can deliver significantly more value to corporate customers (more customer value = more conversions, retention, referrals = better business & happier team). Consumer travelers typically only want the lowest price. If their “price to beat” is on a low-cost-carrier, we can rarely help. That becomes a dissatisfied customer despite us explaining “we’re here to help with your next trip”. Corporate travelers have greater requirements such as convenience, comfort, miles, hotels, perks, expertise, emergency response, off-site planning, large groups… the list goes on. With consumer travel, we were using a small subset of our tech and expertise; with corporate travel, we use everything and constantly need to expand our tech and expertise.

Hope that explains everything. Happy to answer any specifics about finding travel deals, since that’s what we do every day for 1000s of customers.

There are certainly downsides to living in Finland, but you picked a poor comparison in taxes. Taxes in the US are NOT low. Income tax is only one of many taxes in the US. In some states/cities, your property tax can exceed income tax. My state has extremely high taxes on cars too. It all adds up to a lot of money and a relatively high total tax rate. I wouldn't be surprised it a significant number of people in the US have a higher total tax rate than the Finnish average. Of course you can choose low-tax states, but the US as a whole certainly isn't some sort of tax haven.

I'm a paying customer of Trustle, for a few months now, and absolutely love the service. I don't know the founders, I just work with one coach and couldn't recommend her highly enough. I proselytize to friends and family, but they never seem to understand and just give me blank stares as I explain how much she helps. Maybe I do a poor job pitching, but I don't think that's it.

If I had to guess, I think most people prefer to be reactive, not just with children, but in every facet of life. Whereas other people (especially on HN) are instinctively proactive and are always looking for new ways to invest in the future. The reactive people don't seem to understand why I need the help of a professional when my infant child seems calm and grounded. Proactive people understand immediately; they get that it's an investment.

When I signed up, I didn't even know what Trustle was planning to offer. They said they do "parent coaching". Huh? I just knew for $x/month if I could bounce ideas off a professional it would be more than worth it. Fast forward a few weeks and I quickly learned to trust my coach's advice more than any pediatrician, day care worker or family member. The reasons are long and detailed, but suffice to say I'm a serious fan.

I've spoken to my coach a couple of times about tough situations, like sleep problems (she was impossibly helpful), but mostly I see value in our discussions about learning, discipline, philosophy, independence, etc. I've come to love her pragmatic, balanced and evidenced-based approach.

We liked Berlin because it is cheap, has good diversity (I know, Boulder is one of the least diverse places on the planet in contrast), has lots of recent history to explore, public transport is good, a culture that's interesting to us, a decent amount of English spoken, tech scene, startup scene, lots of great places to visit only a short flight away (keep in mind we're from Australia), and most of all it just felt right the two separate times we lived there.

What ended up driving us away was the red tape running a startup in Germany and dealing with taxes, etc. Normally we wouldn't let this deter us, but we had a shortlist of other places we liked just as much.

After a few years we started valuing friendships more and more. I don't have any solid tips other than making it a genuine priority and treat it like an ongoing project. Learn how to make contact, get better at approaching strangers, etc. That said, it is nice to eventually settle down and build longer lasting friendships, though those you build on travels don't have to disappear if you keep in touch and revisit each other. I think I've learned it's better to have a larger and wider variety of friends even if some are distant than a smaller homogenous group of friends.

This is a favorite topic of mine. My wife and I spent about 10 years living on five continents and traveling extensively though six (~50 countries) looking for the perfect place to live. We define "living somewhere" as renting a home, connecting the utilities and exhausting our visa. Long story short, we decided to settle in Boulder, CO (USA).

It's worth mentioning we're pretty independent, probably to a fault, and have no interest in living near family, despite having children (sorry fam).

We've lived in the following places: Bay Area, USA (twice); Berlin, Germany (twice); Montreal, Canada (twice); Chiang Mai, Thailand (twice); Sydney, Australia; Bangalore, India; Cusco, Peru; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and a handful of other places for shorter periods.

We first settled on Montreal, but on our second visit, we decided to try somewhere else. The same happened with Berlin and it's still my wife's favorite city to visit. Boulder was just a major step above the rest for us personally: friendly people, very active lifestyle, some tech/startup scene, sunny weather, mountains, etc. We've been here three years now, which is our record for staying anywhere, and we've never once thought about anywhere else.

If anyone is at the beginning of a similar journey and search, get in touch.

If you get a chance, try the new(ish) A350.

The 787 is quieter than the A380 from the outside (fewer engines, less thrust), but a little louder on the inside (thinner fuselage, engines closer to fuselage).

The A350 is the best of both worlds and is on par (or slightly quieter) than the A380 on the inside.

For the best experience, try the A350 on Singapore or Qatar in business class.

Disclaimer: I work at flightfox.com.

What I think you’re asking for already exists. You didn’t mention price, which makes a big difference, but price aside, route data is available in both raw and GUI form. Check out flightconnections.com for a GUI tool.

Price is what consumers care about and without a perfectly efficient (or regulated or monopolized) market, there will never be a single source of all prices for all routes. This doesn’t exist for food, clothing or many genuine commodities.

Someone else replied with a link to ITAs white-paper that discusses the difficulty of the problem you’ve described. But, that only considers cash flights; what about fast trains, frequent flier miles, buying and using points, credit card bonuses, best rate guarantees, combining low cost-carriers, charter airlines, cargo flights, consolidator deals, local deals, company benefits, etc.

It’s a huge market that feels like it should be commoditized but is actually quite differentiated with significant barriers to entry.

My personal experience at Flightfox is overseeing the booking of travel for more than 60,000 people using travel websites rather than traditional GDSs (Global Distribution Systems - what travel agencies and online travel agents use). Our team has used most of the websites mentioned here and never relies on just one.

Most coders here could build a simple tool to make their searches much more effective and efficient:

  * Accept date/route/class input, like “10SEP DEN-FRA first”
  * Open tabs to 5-10 of the best and most varied travel websites
  * Skim the results and book

Doing this rather than sticking to a single site will yield much better results and make your search more efficient. The largest OTAs have real proprietary deals, the best of the aggregators search the best search engines, and the best search engines combine the most airlines (even LCCs) in creative ways.

If I had to choose 5 flight websites for such a tool: Kayak, Google, Orbitz, Skyscanner and Momondo.

Given this, you may wonder what’s the point of Flightfox. We started with a pure focus on travel hacks (much more advanced than searching 5 OTAs), but we now do our best work managing travel for businesses. For consumers, we can only use one skill: saving money. For businesses, we can become their entire travel department and put everything we know into practice. Not just saving many $1000s/month, but helping with finance strategy, loyalty programs, upgrades, 24/7 emergency support, super-cheap business/first, etc.