Hey gang - Andrew here, author of the article. Yes, apparently this news.yc post has brought our little site down. Working to get it restored. Who knew people would get so jazzed about a modified bed?
Yeah, this is actually an issue we've encountered with Tripeedo.
As a UI element, the calendar widget seems clunky and outdated -- yet if you don't know the exact date of your travel, it's nice to have a visual prompt. So there are cases where text input alone might not be sufficient. The user might need or want more guidance.
It's a challenging task to try to integrate both input mechanisms at the same time. We're exploring it though.
There's actually a lot more to it than that! For some services like Amazon and Yelp, we hook into APIs for quick retrieval/display of data. For others, we pull back data content from RSS feeds. And for others, like BestBuy, we do pass along parameters to their web services. It varies from service to service. But trust me, there's a lot of tech behind the app!
sorry you had such a hard time leaving feedback. we've been having sporadic issues with getsatisfaction lately. feel free to email any feedback directly to us at info[at]tripeedo[dot]com.
we'll also fix the frankfurt issue. thanks for the tip. :)
glad you like it, and thanks for the suggestion. time of day is a parameter we'll definitely be adding soon. (it's actually one of the trickier ones to implement).
agreed-- but until airlines open up their fare data via APIs, users can only truly get all data by actually searching individual sites. even meta-search sites like Kayak don't have access to all fares, which is why results often vary between the various sites. tripeedo is a step toward making that process more simple.
I am working in a startup that aggregates rental car rates, similar to Tripeedo using OpenTravel. Its all XML based, and can be a PITA--but the result are a better product and a better user experience.
I doubt this sort of scheme will gain real traction - much of the airline industry's scheme involves building consumer loyalty (e.g. "I always fly with XYZ Air, they have decent prices and I don't have to hunt around hard to use websites"). An open API destroys this, and makes airfare even more of a commodity than it already is. I've heard anecdotal stories about Kayak being constantly blocked by the sites they scrape.
Sites like Tripeedo are not geared towards loyal customers-they're geared towards bargain shoppers.
OTA is gaining real traction. By my count about 1/3rd of the companies listed on Tripeedo are members of OTA, while many more unofficially support some derivative of it. Most of these companies don't have open API's--they are very private and require NDA's and partnership agreements.
There are systems in place to handle use-cases like this. API's are in place for travel agents to search available rates and creating bookings. This is essentially the same concept.
Kayak is justifiably being blocked because they're scraping sites. If they had partnership agreements in place this wouldn't happen.
yeah, that's one option we're thinking about. we went with popups initially because 1) it's simpler and 2) it wasn't clear that loading up 10 windows in iframes would necessarily be a better user experience. it's something we're going to look at more closely. our approach to tripeedo has definitely been to try to keep things as simple as possible.
thanks. yeah, we see potential for a lot of compatibility between Wundrbar and Ubiquity. Nick will have a blog post about that soon. but we also think we have distinct advantages in certain areas -- multiple distribution channels, execution on the server instead of the client, etc. so moving forward there's a lot we can do with Wundrbar that might not be possible with Ubiquity. stay tuned...
