Not Another Round The World - Diary of a Strange Dream: 2015

In this post, I will not just show some pictures of a previous trip, but rather share some ideas I've had on the travel world. (other ideas can be found as comments here or here)

They may not be all realistic, but who knows :)

Get automatically notified when you are entitled for a compensation/tax refund for a flight delayed/cancelled.

This idea comes from a friend of mine, whose flight schedule was changed 1 week prior to her return to France from Bangkok. The mail from Air France was just saying her interontinental flight would leave approximately 3h later than originally planned, and thus her new connection in Paris would make her land at her final destination 4h30 later than scheduled.

And that's it.

FYI.

Up to you to manage your agenda with our new schedule.

But what the airline "forgot" to tell her, is that according to European regulations, she was entitled for a compensation : less than 2 weeks prior to departure, a schedule change is considered as a delay...

Upon my advice, she contacted Refund.me, a website dedicated to claiming passenger compensation, taking a ~15% comission if claim is successful (and nothing if not). 6 weeks after her return from Thailand, she got refunded of 250 Euros (300E - 16%), without the hassle of setup up a file, chase the airline service desk etc.

A very good feature/customer service tool would be for GDS/Travel Agencies (who are warned of such schedule changes, or flight delay) automatically contact the travellers to propose them to claim the compensation in their name (there is no free lunch, so they could gain a fraction of this money). Of course, this would annoy (a lot) the airlines (which count that not 100% of the customers will claim their money).

And if the flight is not entitled for such compensation (i.e. outside the EU), another option would be to prefill a form, in the name of the customer, to the travel insurance company (some people select travel insurance at booking time). The cleverest option would be to also check the credit card number used for the payment (for example via this service travel agency could guess the CC vendor : Visa, Mastercard, normal, gold ,black as it's coded in the CC number) and prepare a claim letter the traveller would just have to sign & send.

Same could apply for Tax refund.

There is no cheat here, just ways to enforce passenger rights.

Heatmap for last minute bargain holiday.

There are already some sites using massive computation that helps you to be inspired to buy your next ticket/find cheap tickets for last minute holiday (like google flights), some sites even taking activities that can be done at destinations as a criteria of choice (like lufthansa), but there are other desiderata future travelers take into account to choose the next destination.

From this European Union Study, almost half of the decision criteria are Value for Money and Price.

According to a US Bureaux of Labor Statistics Study (leisure travel) and a JP Morgan study (corporate travel) 40% of a trip cost is due to transportation. That's why using a tool to find bargain in airline ticket for a last minute holiday break could be nice to save few bucks...

But these stutides also show that 60% of the budget is spent at destination, and so far, there hasn't been an easyway to spot where it's cheap to go.

A couple of days ago the Swiss central bank unlocked the rate CHF<>EUR (20%drop in one day): it became a clear bargain for Swiss citizen to travel/buy in Eurozone. This gave me the idea : exchange rates can vary a lot, and offer way to improve the value for money and/or price on the 60% of the budget spent on local currency...

A possible good idea would be to combine last minute flight search and historical currency conversion rate to provide result on a heatmap, spotting the best places to travel to and stay ).

Example : a US backpacker tourist (=very money concious) would like to spend holidays now in SE Asia, after a quick study prices for last minute tickets to Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia are almost the same. A decision factor could be how much value for money this traveller could get:

USD versus Philippine Peso, Malaysian Ringgit and Thailand Bath over the last 6 months (base 100 12AUG2014)

We quickly see that this US traveller would get 10+% more for her/his USD in Malaysia rather than Thailand or Philippino.
A tool combining these factors could create a map highlighting this information:

Another example : Finding a cheap ticket to the US today from Europe can be a false good idea as EUR has lost 15+% in the last 6 months against USD.

Last but not least, the color coding could be an overall mark, with average temperature/rainfall, culture/food/relax interest ratio and several other factors to find the best destination for the customer.

Automatic check of cheaper price for same service

The idea is, after your booking, check if the service you've bought is offered cheaper by the vendor (it is very plausible in travel domain where yield management can change rapidly prices), and if it's the case, rebook it at a lower fare. I've used this method manually (and sucessfully) on a car rental and a room booking (saving 10-15%). On Air booking, my experience wasn't that successful :).

There is already a player on this market for hotel (where room with no cancellation fees are still quite numerous) : http://www.tingo.com/
For Car, I'm not aware of similar website (so to be created !!). Same as hotel, there are many car providers or OLTAs offering no cancellation penalty.
For Air, there is this company or this one (dedicated to business travel).

Anyway, this idea could easily be automated.

edit 21 JAN 2015 :

Out of the box air itinerary search

The idea is to try to find a "good" solution to the itinerary (=pricing) optimization mechanism (which supposes as hypothesis the future passenger has already an idea on her/his destinations).

Asking every traveller to have travel agent skills is not possible, so sites like Darjeelin allow travellers to put in competition home based travel agents/expert travellers but it's then an offline request, and comes at a cost (still affordable).

There are sites like flynous or Holiday Pirates that list bargain tickets, often made of open jaws, but this is a niche market, because such requests can be time consuming and you don't alway have bargains for your wished destination.

As I've seen for my round the world and my trip to Costa Rica, selecting manually providers, mixing traditional and Low cost carriers has already saved me money (150 EUR in the case of Costa Rica).

For example : travellers very money concious/not in hurry, it's possible to fly from Paris to US West coast for ~340EUR, combining a RyanAir flight to Goteborg with an open jaw ticket with BA (Goteborg>San Francisco / Los Angeles>Paris).
A shorter trip with a legacy carrier (like British Airways) cost 840 EUR : more than twice the price....

The "out of the box" air itinerary search would

1- (try to) combine all the above (round trip/open jaw + low cost carriers) and provide set of possible itineraries.

The idea would not guarantee to find THE cheapest solution, but propose possible cheap itineraries based on massive computation + hypothesis on cheap routes from origin/to destinations (where there are Low Cost Carriers)

Example a traveller going from NCE to LAX could be proposed to connect via GVA, BCN, LAS or LGW because:
- the system know there are LCC available on NCE>BCN, NCE>ORY, NCE>LGW, NCE>CPH,NCE>FCO, NCE>GVA, SAN>LAX, SFO>LAX, LAS>LAX (but may not have the prices)
- via massive computation, system would know that the cheapest way to go to LAX is from GVA, BCN or LGW, or a NCE>LAS + LAS>LAX

It would be up to the traveller/travel agent to manually search for these flights, but at least it would reduce drasticly the breadth of searches. As more and more Low Cost Carriers file their fares in the GDSes (most of the time without boooking capabilities), optimizations could be done to select the LCC itineraries where the prices are actually cheap.

2- Venture in the complex itinerary split and mix world

As the fare computations can be faster and cheaper due to new algorythms/travel search players, it may become economically affordable to automatically find the cheapest fare by splitting the itinerary into various sets of legs and make the computer study which combination is the cheapest among these sets of legs.
It comes at a price (travellers have to collect and check-in more frequently their bags, meaning longer connections) but savings can be significant.

In both cases, future options could be "allow overnight connections" and 'limit the number of connections", or even add more providers (Rail).

Not Another Round The World - Diary of a Strange Dream

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

The good sites to find cheap holidays

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

The more or less dummy ideas related travel in the future