Thursday, January 05, 2006
Searching on another plane with dohop
dohop is a fairly recent entry into the specialized flight search arena, but with its December 2005 upgrade to include 660+ budget and full fare airlines, it really has become an incredibly useful one.
The features I like best about it include:
Once you have a list of flights, you can filter them by time, airports involved (including for transits), airlines, and number of stops.
The site makes good use of AJAX to provide a snappy experience, but unfortunately there are a few technical problems with the implementation. As you navigate around the pages, the url address displayed is locked to the homepage, since you are really only navigating an inner frame, yet its easy to get to a state where that outer frame is inaccessible, so all the AJAX stops working. In fact the site does not degrade gracefully if Javascript is unavailable - it simply stops working at all.
The features I like best about it include:
- as you type a destination, it provides a dropdown of matching locations
- it recognizes that for many cities such as London, Paris, New York you have a choice of airport, and that you probably want to search all of them at once. (This feature could do with some tuning - it brings together all 5 major London airports, but only 2 New York ones; it also does not include the budget airlines secondary destinations, which are often in neighbouring cities, but still convenient for many travellers).
Once you have a list of flights, you can filter them by time, airports involved (including for transits), airlines, and number of stops.
The site makes good use of AJAX to provide a snappy experience, but unfortunately there are a few technical problems with the implementation. As you navigate around the pages, the url address displayed is locked to the homepage, since you are really only navigating an inner frame, yet its easy to get to a state where that outer frame is inaccessible, so all the AJAX stops working. In fact the site does not degrade gracefully if Javascript is unavailable - it simply stops working at all.
# posted by zmarties @ 1/05/2006 08:15:00 am 
Comments:
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If you type in New York, the top 2 values are the grouping of JFK and LGA, and New York, Newark. Since you already identify Newark as a New York airport, I'd expect it to be avaialable in the New York grouping as well.
As for the budget airlines, an example is Ryanair who fly to both Girona and Reus, both of which they call Barcelona, yet neither of which appear in your definition of Barcelona. (In fact, even if I type Girona directly, it's not found - that seems to be because your database has misspelled it as Gerona!) I admit that some of these types of definitions are stretching the definition of a destination - perhaps you need a core grouping, and another one that also include the wider airports.
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As for the budget airlines, an example is Ryanair who fly to both Girona and Reus, both of which they call Barcelona, yet neither of which appear in your definition of Barcelona. (In fact, even if I type Girona directly, it's not found - that seems to be because your database has misspelled it as Gerona!) I admit that some of these types of definitions are stretching the definition of a destination - perhaps you need a core grouping, and another one that also include the wider airports.
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