How data is changing flight search; it’s not just about paying and flying!

Searching for a flight can be tedious if you don’t know how to go further than price comparison. When booking a flight, a passenger might be concerned about their seat or the food on a long-haul flight. However, many people will still end up choosing a flight based on price or schedule.

The good news is that in the flight search category efforts are being made to differentiate flight by product attributes such as seats, in-flight entertainment, WiFi and so on. 

As a relatively new meta-search site, Routehappy, is trying to offer accurate data about planes, seats and amenities. For this it says it is “combing hundreds of data sources”.

According to Adam Gwosdof, Routehappy co-founder and VP of data, Flightpad, the company’s flight product attribute database, is populated using algorithms that reflect multiple years worth of programming and codification of the team’s airline domain expertise. However, the firm claims that price-related information is always derived in real time. This is achieved through integration the company has built with commercial vendors and also directly to multiple airlines’ shopping and booking APIs. “Routehappy never caches a single fare. Every single search on Routehappy returns fresh results that reflect up-to-the-minute fares and availability,” he says.

So how does the company source their data? EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta finds out.

EFT: What would you term as the strongest data source for both traditional service carriers and low-cost carriers today?

AG: Routehappy’s team of data experts spent years researching the data you see on Routehappy, and without a doubt, there’s no one exclusive strongest source for categories as broad as a ‘traditional service carrier’! We use dozens of different sources for airlines, independently verifying and cross-referencing each one and judging how reliable and accurate each source is likely to be.

While information direct from airlines is always useful, it’s not always fully accurate or comprehensive. This is why Routehappy has built a system of checks and balances to confirm and verify the data using additional sources, as well as a system for updating the data on a monthly basis. Only Routehappy’s expert team, Flightpad system and rigorous data methodologies are able to achieve the highest level of accuracy.

EFT: What continues to hamper the growth of the meta-search category as far as sourcing of airfare-related data is concerned?

AG: We strive to blend our proprietarily sourced amenity and happiness data with commercially available fare and availability information to provide our users with the lowest fare options regardless of their country of purchase, the country of flight origin, and how fully each airline in the market participates with the GDS. However, there continue to be specific carriers, regions of the world and country-specific fare filings that make it challenging for anyone, Routehappy included, to unequivocally find the very lowest fares in every single instance.

EFT: What would you like to see improving, especially from airlines, for the benefit of the meta-search category?

AG: The entire industry could usefully move away from pitch as a measurement of passenger comfort. With industry research suggesting that one extra inch of width is roughly equivalent to 1.6 inches of pitch in passenger perception, and slimline seating affecting the way that specific numbers translate to comfort, a new measurement is needed. Routehappy is working on that, and we’d be very interested to hear from airlines, industry groups or other organisations investigating this new measurement idea.

EFT: When it comes to sourcing data sourcing, how does the meta-search category differentiate its offering or search results? 

AG: We’ve overcome numerous challenges to bring you what you see on today’s Routehappy.com.

From a data perspective, it’s about having the level of expertise in-house to be able to develop categories, assign objective and relative scoring to each level within that category, research data, weigh up source reliability, and keep it fresh. We built our custom system Flightpad to ensure that our team of ‘Flight Genius’ data experts has the tools they need to maintain our demanding levels of accuracy.

EFT: Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say RouteHappy ‘unveils more flight data than any other source’?

AG: Routehappy uses a fresh, friendly interface to show people the information that’s relevant to them. We provide flyers with more data than they can find anywhere else, but we make it easily accessible for every traveller. Before Routehappy, travellers needed to visit numerous websites for each of the different ‘happiness factors’ we track, like seat pitch, seat width, entertainment, plugs, WiFi, cabin layout, and so on. But even then, it was deeply impractical for anyone but the most knowledgeable, experience-optimising traveller to track every data point.

Now, with Routehappy, every single passenger can find out which of the ten daily flights between two cities uses a more comfortable international-configured widebody plane. Or which of an airline’s five transatlantic flights has a full flat pod with direct aisle access in business class. It’s just a matter of eyeballing the ‘happiness scores’ for an overall comparison, and spotting the ‘happiness factors’ they care about.

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