What features would you like to see in a travel search engine?
What features would you like to see in a travel search engine?
I love traveling, and also enjoy planning for it. But I do often find that searching many different sites with basic filters becomes quite cumbersome. I had the idea of adding more advanced features to be able to better pinpoint what exactly the best option would be for each person specifically. It initially started with Flixbus having no "what is the cheapest connection somewhere in May" feature, like Google Flight does have. But I wanted to add more things. I have added that you can add how much it's worth for you to travel an hour less, or a transfer less, or not arrive/depart in the middle of the night. This will then be taken into account when sorting what is the best connection instead of the cheapest. It also already has a search for Flixbus on what the best connection is in a range of dates, and what the best connection is from a place to any place in the desired country. I want to add too that it takes hostel/hotel prices into account, so that you can say you want to go from Berlin to anywhere in Czechia, for 4 days, and it actually gives you the complete best route to a city with a cheap hostel too. I would love to add more things and am very curious about desires from other travelers for a tool like this, so what do you think and would you like to add?
My ideal method of travel would be to see a list of all destinations I can get to for less than a certain amount of money. If that means taking 3 layovers (or even chaining 3 different flights) that's fine. It would also be nice if it were aware of various deals available such as Chase's periodic 10% off Southwest flights or United's "Excursionist" perk.
I very rarely want to travel to a specific location, in lieu of allocating a certain amount of money to travel and seeing where that gets me.
Would this for you include accomodation? And do you think you'd prefer a lot of control over that or just a general view? Like a searchpage that has a budget, a starting location and a departure and return date. This would return only the places where the train/bus/flight + hostel/hotel would fit in the budget.
Doesn't necessarily have to include room and board. I can generally find something reasonable anywhere I've been.
I don't even need a specific departure date, just departure location.
This would be awesome. Cheapest place I can go on date x from n location.
Like the other guy said doesn't need to include hotel stays etc , just traveling to that location.
Privacy.
Trusted reviewers + dynamic review weighting. For example, so many times, some super crappy tourist trap or restaurant is rated very highly. Upon entering the restaurant, that Sysco smell is blatantly obvious: this place sucks. Being able to follow certain reviewers and have ratings recalculated according to my preferences would help people with less travel dollars get to experience more.
Trusted reviewers
There is always going to be people gaming the system.
Not only that places close down or change ownership and/or management. What may have been great one week may be awful the next and vice versa.
Agreed. I could have stated that more clearly. I mean specific reviewers with whose opinion I align. For example, maybe a bunch of people think a certain sandwich shop is garbage. But I think their sandwiches are my platonic ideal. I happened to notice that SandwichLover666 also thinks these sandwiches are perfect. I would like to see an adjusted review scores based on a preference for SL666's places.