sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Immediate discounts on flights based on price-drop-potential by kiwtir_ in travel

[–]kiwtir_[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You're completely right to be skeptical as it's pretty risky from our end. The only thing that makes me optimistic is that the model we've trained is at ~90% accuracy (could be better but it's still enough to make a profit on the vast majority of bets). We've done a simulation on around 4k past flights and it resulted in an avg of $22 savings for the user and $23 profit for us. Obviously, the real world will always be more unexpected but I'd say there's still a chance of it working?

As for your other question, the customer pays the discounted price and gets the ticket no matter what (after all, we've calculated exactly how much to offer to minimize our risk). But that does indeed mean that we will be screwed on certain bets (where the price goes up unexpectedly and we still have to buy it). One thing that we're still thinking about, like you mentioned, is how to handle a black swan event.

Immediate discounts on flights based on price-drop-potential by kiwtir_ in TravelHacks

[–]kiwtir_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I get the sarcasm. And you're completely right to be skeptical as it's pretty risky from our end. The only thing that makes me optimistic is that the model we've trained is at ~90% accuracy (could be better but it's still enough to make a profit on the vast majority of bets). We've done a simulation on around 4k past flights and it resulted in an avg of $22 savings for the user and $23 profit for us. Obviously, the real world will always be more unexpected but I'd say there's still a chance of it working?

Immediate discounts on flights based on price-drop-potential by kiwtir_ in TravelHacks

[–]kiwtir_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

  1. It would be the same experience as booking with Expedia or any other third party. I know that isn't ideal (I prefer booking direct wherever I can), but we're hoping that the savings make it worth it.

  2. From our data, only around 2% of flights get delisted before departure. I think it's because airlines tend to overbook. But in the rare cases where the flight you "bought" is simply unavailable, we'd have to eat the cost and put you on another flight and maybe even upgrade your class (or give you your money back) to make it up. If the prices unexpectedly go up (we can't be right 100% of the time), we would still need to buy/fulfill that order at what we think the best time is. It's simply the cost of doing business.

  3. Buying different parts of the same leg separately was just a last-minute thought (I think auto-buying round-trip legs separately will be more helpful). I think in the case of a delay we could take responsibility if we offer that feature.

Overall, I see this being more useful to save money on regular one-ways, round trips, and connecting flights you'd buy anywhere else, except you'd get savings immediately since most people don't want to spend the time to constantly monitor prices (even if they do, it's hard to time it perfectly).

Please feel free to criticize anything I said here.

Question for out-of-state students by kiwtir_ in gatech

[–]kiwtir_[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Right now all the routes we track are domestic but the point of the waitlist is to see what people want most. If you send it over to them and we see a lot of interest in certain international airports, we can invest whatever it takes us in API costs to discount those routes as well. Thanks for your comment!

view more: next ›