What is wrong with air service interfaces and how to fix it: Aviageek project approach

It became easier to travel: until recently, only professional agencies could get access to the schedule of world flights, and now anyone who wants can find tickets to any part of the world in a couple of clicks.

Interfaces of air services have become familiar and have hardly changed for five years already: it is enough to enter information about the cities of departure and arrival, travel dates and select the most suitable offers for booking from the table.
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This scheme certainly proved its viability, however, it is not without flaws. We tried to rectify the situation in the Aviageek project.

Strange pizzeria

Habitual air services are like a strange pizzeria. The menu of such an institution consists of thousands of options, compiled by a mechanical combination of ingredients. Dorblu cheese is used in pizza No. 585, feta in No. 586, and mozzarella in No. 587. And so to number 12 432.

In fact, visitors do not need such a choice at all - it is much easier for them to indicate the desired ingredients than to dig into the list of all possible options (but with the right choice of the cheapest or fastest pizza).



Similarly, the traditional (tabular) issue of found flights consists of tens, hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of similar combinations of flight parameters, for the analysis of which the user has to spend a lot of forces.

To understand that two neighboring tickets differ only in a minute five-minute difference in departure time, a potential passenger must compare all the conditions between themselves, each with each.



At the same time, no one will provide him with a convenient and easy way to select a city for transfer, fixing the desired departure time or taking weather conditions into account when planning a flight.

How to fix it

The process of searching for tickets can be made more intuitive and much simpler, but for this you need to rethink the usual interface of air services. This is the path we took in our project of the Aviageek new generation airline ticket aggregator.

We decided to allow users to choose their own flight settings as pizza ingredients.

Using a simple graphical interface, a potential passenger can, for example, indicate that he prefers a departure from Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, or request a “long” transfer in Amsterdam to spend half a day in the city at the price of a regular ticket. Another example is the search for a cheap morning flight arriving in Beijing no later than 12:00 local time with a transfer in Istanbul.

Here is the first prototype of the service:



The user can select the “ingredients” of the flight by clicking on the options and fix their favorite parameters by clicking on the “lock” icon.

Such an organization is convenient in cases where it is necessary, for example, to get to a specific airport or transfer to Madrid. In this case, the service will offer only those departures that take into account these requirements.

In the city of transplantation, you can choose the duration of stay - suddenly the traveler wants to spend several hours in Florence, or vice versa, immediately fly to the final destination.

Current status and plans

Currently Aviagik is working in test mode, and access to the service is by invitation. Habras users can get to the site by typing the HA9HCIN promo code on the page www.aviageek.com .

The project is written on Ruby on Rails (backend), on the frontend - Backbone.js, jQuery, Slim. PostgreSQL is used as a database (we agree that relational databases are well suited for startups ) - a more detailed story about the project infrastructure will be presented in the following topics very soon.

At the moment, the search for air tickets itself is carried out through our partners who have direct contracts with GDS and airlines - this is a temporary solution for the testing period, in the future all new suppliers will be connected, which will allow to find the most profitable offers on the market.

That's all for today, we will be happy to answer questions and listen to suggestions or comments on the work of the test version of the service in the comments.

Thanks for attention!