Ever gotten bumped from a flight, missed your connection due to a delay or gotten dragged off a plane? We fix that (amongst other things that are hard for airlines and bad for passengers).
We're a B2B2C platform used globally by airlines to help deal with the vagaries of unpredictable demand, weather and the world in general.
> offer compensation equal to the reservation price of the customer
It's a little more complex than this. It's highly feasible to offer compensation higher than than the original purchase price of the ticket while inducing passengers to move to a different flight, meaning they're effectively being "paid to fly".
In many cases, customers are actually not on their preferred flight in the first place, but merely the one that was cost-optimal at time of purchase.
Changes in market demand in the intervening 3-6 months can easily mean that many passengers on an aircraft can be compensated above their original purchase value to move to their preferred flight.
The above case is an idealised version, but the equilibria is complex and difficult to intuit without experimentation (which is primarily what we're working on).
This reminds me of a flight I booked about 3/4 a year ago from SF to DC - I had a suboptimal layover in Houston, which was rerouted to be a layover in Chicago after the hurricane triggered changes to my routing. Unfortunately for the airline, it then had to deal with a situation where they overbooked by 10 people.
I was offered a first class seat on a direct flight + $600 to switch, which I happily accepted. In truth, I would’ve been happy with just any seat on that direct flight.
> I would’ve been happy with just any seat on that direct flight.
And, the goal of the Volantio is to collect data on you so that the airline never over-compensates you. That is, all the benefits from the rebooking transaction accrues to the airline.
Imagine every time you went to buy a coffee, the coffee shop charged you exactly how much you value the next cup of coffee.
> It's a little more complex than this. It's highly feasible to offer compensation higher than than the original purchase price of the ticket while inducing passengers to move to a different flight, meaning they're effectively being "paid to fly".
> In many cases, customers are actually not on their preferred flight in the first place, but merely the one that was cost-optimal at time of purchase.
You misunderstood.
The original purchase is no longer relevant. The airline and the passenger are now in a new game. In this new game, the passenger has a reservation price. Your goal is to estimate that accurately to transfer all surplus from rebooking to the airline and to another passenger.
The passenger is not harmed by this per se. They are indifferent between taking this flight vs taking the compensation and flying on another.
However, in the real world, people don't really like being driven to their reservation prices in your quest to assign all surplus from this new transaction to the airline and a third party.
This is not a new idea. Priceline comes to mind.
You could have chosen to work on a decent auction application for this purpose. Instead, you choose to collect data that is unnecessary to solving the actual "overbooking problem", but has the benefit not leaving any surplus from the rebooking transaction to the passenger.
Part of the issue they are trying to solve is that the optimal pricing problem is overlaid with a currency exchange problem. Airlines can compensate customers with vouchers, upgrades, cash or frequent flier miles; as well as different commitments for rebooking. Each customer is going to have a different value for each of these axes. Learning about passenger preferences will help airlines to make offers that are most appealing to individual passengers.
Ultimately, operating a rebooking system near the Nash equilibrium is great for everyone. People who really need to get from A to B on time have a higher chance of doing so, people who are flexible can trade that flexibility for compensation, and the airlines can operate at higher capacity and sell more high-dollar last-minute seats.
This. (Disclosure: I'm cofounder/CTO of Volantio). Airlines are very much currently burdened with a legacy that was cemented in sometime in the 50's.
It may be worth mentioning that airlines are perhaps less-evil than is apparent from the outside. Most of their baffling behaviour is (IMHO) largely due to lack of capabilities rather than malevolence.
Ultimately, they're given a large multi-dimensional optimisation problem in a marketplace with extreme illiquidity (eg: traditionally, seats can't be resold effectively once purchased).
We are taking the (very small) initial steps in alleviating some of the issues by introducing increased liquidity into the market, but the ultimate goal is helping shift the industry into a more dynamic place (perhaps as described by the parent comment).
"Airlines are very much currently burdened with a legacy that was cemented in sometime in the 50's."
Personally, I find this common observation off base. Most airlines have pushed the legacy TPF layer into a sort of nosql data store. Both Sabre and Amadeus have been able to pull the business logic out of TPF.
Any sort of lagging technical progress seems more related to either thin margins, or the complexity you point out.
There's certainly room for innovation and improvement. I just hate the framing of the problem being tied to "old systems". It is mostly not true. Varies per airline, and res system, of course.
Sorry, I possibly stated that poorly - what I meant was: The current state of duopolistic airlines technology suppliers means that there may not be sufficient motiviation to evolve the capabilities of the old systems.
Case in point: Regardless of whether Sabre/Amadeus have replaced their legacy layer with some sort of nosql, I can absolutely guarantee you that many of their primary APIs are literally screen-scraping terminal sessions and returning the screen as XML.
"I can absolutely guarantee you that many of their primary APIs are literally screen-scraping terminal sessions and returning the screen as XML"
True, but TPF is scalable enough that it doesn't matter. The API is responsive, flexible, and handles the traffic. The ugliness isn't limiting new functionality, etc.
We spend very little time talking about the cruft at the bottom. The business complexity is more important.
Things like fare classes, discount codes, availability, fare basis codes, reaccommodation, and so forth. If it were all written in rust or Go + microservices it wouldn't be any more straightforward.
Your product seems to confirm that. You aren't reducing that screen scraping any. But you're adding value.
> The current state of duopolistic airlines technology suppliers means that there may not be sufficient motiviation to evolve the capabilities of the old systems.
So then what is the motivation to change this now? This seems like simple economics to me.
Is the legacy only technical? I was speaking of something far broader than just the database they're using at the heart of something.
Our theories of place and travel are slowly changing due to new technical capability. Some of the lag is due to old theories embedded in old technology. But I think a lot of it is embedded in habit, custom, protocol, and business model. And in plain old not knowing. I expect we'll thrash around for decades before a new consensus emerges.
Think of it like nosql. High transaction rates, and high contention. Great when used for it's strengths, terrible otherwise. Close to bare metal, and hard to match for transactions/second with decades newer tech. The record sizes are closely matched to hardware I/O offload cache sizes. It's an I/O beast.
Imagine an OS built specifically to ignore things like private memory space in favor of specific dedicated drivers with intimate knowledge of specific disk and cache controllers to read and write as fast as possible, skipping the CPU whenever possible. And hardware
-aware record locking semantics.
> traditionally, seats can't be resold effectively once purchased
That's not tradition, that's self imposed to make yield management work. If you could just buy a ticket at its cheapest and sell whenever you want then yield management would collapse.
>"It may be worth mentioning that airlines are perhaps less-evil than is apparent from the outside. Most of their baffling behaviour is (IMHO) largely due to lack of capabilities rather than malevolence."
Just to recap the "Dr Dao United Airlines" incident mentioned in the article - United airlines had a passenger forcibly removed from a flight for not agreeing to give up his seat for off-duty United employees.[1]
The reason the doctor wasn't interested in giving up his seat was because he had patients to see. I think that meets most people's criteria of "malevolence."
>"Airlines are very much currently burdened with a legacy that was cemented in sometime in the 50's."
Which legacy exactly are they "burdened" with? The airlines in US were deregulated in 1980s. The airlines look nothing like they did in the 1950s. The regulatory regime is gone, there's "power by the hour", fuel futures etc.
>"Ultimately, they're given a large multi-dimensional optimisation problem ..."
Yes and the airlines have pursued a policy of rapid consolidation which means forcing more people through
regional hubs which are in no way optimal for their itineraries.
>"We are taking the (very small) initial steps in alleviating some of the issues by introducing increased liquidity into the market ..."
That is a bunch of double speak. Fixing the problem of overbooking is done by airlines practicing some basic discipline - "stop selling what you don't have." If you are selling seats on an A320 with 180 seats then don't sell 200 seats. In what other industry is selling something you don't to sell done as a matter of course?
The problem of overbooking is fixed by not actually overbooking. You are simply enabling airlines to continue this unethical practice of overbooking in a manner that's more profitable to them. I fail to see the innovation.
>You are simply enabling airlines to continue this unethical practice
Don't project your morals onto the rest of us. As a frequent flyer who likes to travel I love this practice. It means lower prices overall and it gives me the opportunity to fly for free somewhere else later if I volunteer out. With the switch to real cash compensation on some airlines, I can even make money if I don't feel like using it to fly.
I have flown over 2 million miles in my lifetime and I have never seen someone forced to give up their seat. The airlines always enticed people to volunteer out with (sometimes significant) compensation.
United behaving like assholes with their forced removal is indicative of their behavior, not the practice of overbooking.
I'm fine with increasing required payouts for forced removals to deal with piss poor airlines that don't conduct an auction until volunteers are found, but banning the practice outright is throwing the baby out with the bathwater due to ignorance of the practice.
I'm not projecting "my" morals onto anybody. Intentionally overbooking and knowing full well that you are going to bring inconvenience and stress to people is just plain fucked up. That's not really a grey area. If you bought a ticket to a movie and then were asked to leave the theater before the movie started in order to make room for someone else who bought a ticket you would be livid. The same is true for any other "ticketed" event.
>"I have flown over 2 million miles in my lifetime and I have never seen someone forced to give up their seat."
Airlines would be willing to do this if all tickets were 100% non-refundable, non-exchangeable, no excuses. But, that would be a terrible experience for customers. Imagine if you missed your flight, and were informed that you had no choice but to pay for another ticket.
Movie theatres can do this because the $12 loss of missing a movie is annoying, but not life-changing, and the social contract is that event tickets are not changeable.
I would wager that the fallout of tens of thousands of people per day being told they have to re-buy a ticket if they miss their flight would have much greater negative fall-out than the much smaller number who get involuntarily bumped.
>"Airlines would be willing to do this if all tickets were 100% non-refundable, non-exchangeable, no excuses. But, that would be a terrible experience for customers. Imagine if you missed your flight, and were informed that you had no choice but to pay for another ticket"
In the US all three big carriers - American, United and Delta all charge $200 to change non-refundable tickets.[1]. Any you pay the fare difference if any on top of that. So there's already a hedge in place.
Yes, but they don’t usually charge you this fee if, e.g. you miss a flight.
Additionally, that $200 fee comes nowhere near covering the lost revenue if you change flights a day in advance of departure and that seat isn’t re-sold.
I hope you can see that a last-minute change (even with a nominal fee) means the plane takes off without a paying butt in that seat.
If you miss your flight due to a delay by the airline such as missed connection then you will not pay this penalty. If you miss the flight because you overslept or got stuck in traffic then yes absolutely will pay this penalty. You will have to pay this fee at the counter in order to be rebook. I also wouldn't call $200 plus any change in fare for the rebooked flight "nominal."
No, those are your morals. And you're projecting them on to everybody. "Just plain fucked up" is another way of expressing your personal values, not a rational argument.
I get that you value the "but we had a deal" criterion for fairness above the other things people value in this situation. Which is fine! You do you. And I agree that forcible removal is a bad idea that we should ban.
But booking so that the airplane will probably be full and paying people to wait a bit when statistics make it overfull is something that the great majority of the public is fine with. Flexible people like it quite a bit.
No its common decency and etiquette. These aren't "mine" they are social norms.
>"I get that you value the "but we had a deal" criterion for fairness above the other things people value in this situation"
Sure everybody is "fine" with this as long as its just chatter on HN. It's all optimization problems and capturing true market value etc. But I'm willing to bet that when you yourself are on the receiving end of an involuntary bump by an Airline your first thought is most certainly not "I'm fine with this."
If a significant fraction of people won’t show up AND a significant fraction of those who do show up will have flexible plans and be happy to take a later flight, “overbooking” seems a lot more reasonable.
The fraction is obviously significant to the people trying to make sure airplanes are fully utilized, so this seems like a word game to me. People miss flights all the time.
A brief look for stats doesn't turn up hard data, but TechCrunch has it at ~5%:
> Intentionally overbooking and knowing full well that you are going to bring inconvenience and stress to people is just plain fucked up. That's not really a grey area.
First, passengers who buy refundable seats frequently cancel last minute to take a later flight. The airline can somewhat estimate how many cancellations any given flight will have and overbook by some amount less than that. This happens all of the time (nearly every close to full flight you are on will have had this happen) and you don't even know about it. You just benefit from it in the reduced fare due to the increased margin this provides.
Second, even if more people show up than projected, this doesn't bring "inconvenience or stress" to anyone in the vast majority of cases because they begin an auction to give up seats. The people who volunteer out come out ahead winning an auction they willfully participated in by selecting their own price. Delta will bid up to $10,000[1] to get people to release their seats. That's more than a month's salary for most people in the US just to take a later flight. Nobody feels like they got screwed in the volunteer situation, because they volunteered in exchange for the money/flight voucher.
>Here you can read all about it:
Cool, you sent an article echoing what I already said about bad actors like United's regional carrier who don't define the norm. That case is not what happens in the vast majority of overbooking situations.
You ignored what I said to make what point? You are intentionally confusing forced removal with the standard case for overbooking where people volunteer out and come ahead.
>I'm not projecting "my" morals onto anybody.
These are your moral issues which seem to be driven by ignorance of how overbooking works in 99%+ of the cases. I suspect you have flown very little or have never paid attention at the gate. Please don't armchair referee an industry practice you don't understand that benefits both consumers and the airlines in all but pathological cases.
There's a price for which I'd be delighted to be kicked out of a movie or off a flight.
For a movie, it might be only $50. For a flight, it could range from $1000 on up, but it's a pretty rare flight that I wouldn't give up my seat for $15,000 and rebooking. I suspect it's even more rare that no one on a flight would take $15K plus rebook.
These days, it's not the legacy. It is mostly regulation pushed by Chuck Schumer[1].
Predictably, the policy has made it much more profitable to outright cancel flights at the first sign of trouble. Add to that the consolidation that occurred since then, we are left with:
> Four carriers with over 80% of domestic capacity:
> - Three large, hub-oriented, global legacy carriers (American, United, Delta)
> - One large, point-to-point oriented ‘low cost’ carrier (Southwest)
> Six much smaller carriers, each with less than 5% of the market
> - Three smaller, primarily hub-oriented carriers (Alaska, jetBlue, Hawaiian)
> - Three much smaller point-to-point travel merchandisers, heavily reliant on ancillary fees, so-called ‘ultra low cost carriers’ or ‘ULCCs’ (Spirit, Frontier, Allegiant)
The main legacy are the huge health care and retirement obligations. Baumol (1982) discussed the airline industry as an example of a contestable market[3]. Free entry & exit no longer applies.
>"These days, it's not the legacy. It is mostly regulation pushed by Chuck Schume"
The OPs comment was that the airlines were burdened by legacy from the 1950s. Mr Schumer's legislation is quite recent. Additionally the legislation "Passenger Bill of Rights" is quite reasonable - let your customers off the plane after 3 hours of delay. It's pretty easy to avoid that penalty. It's also worth pointing out that legislation was in response to unreasonable practices by the airlines in the first place. I'm not sure why it is even relevant here.
>"The main legacy are the huge health care and retirement obligations"
How is this relevant to discussion about the practice of intentionally overbooking?
So-called "Passenger Bill of Rights" takes away options from passengers[1].
"We found that for every minute of tarmac time being
saved there is, on average, a three-minute increase in
the total passenger delay," said Vikrant Vaze, an
assistant professor at Dartmouth's Thayer School of
Engineering who co-authored the study.
Adopted in 2010, the Transportation Department rule
requires that passengers be allowed to deplane within
three hours of boarding or landing for domestic
flights. Airlines are subject to fines of up to $27,500
per passenger for violations.
Hoping to avoid fines, airlines have been quicker to
pull the plug on flights, Vaze said. That forces
passengers to scramble to find another flight to reach
their destination, something that has become
increasingly difficult as industry consolidation
reduces the number of available seats on planes.
Flights that are not canceled have to start lining up
anew after letting passengers deplane and then reboard,
adding to the ultimate delay.
"Most of these extra delays are being felt by those
exact same passengers," Vaze said. "It's just that
they're not on the tarmac."
Again there is no reason the airlines can't let people off the plane after a couple of hours in order to avoid penalties. And it's unclear why you are holding this up as "burdensome" legislation.
I'm not sure that "cancel[ling] flights at the first sign of trouble" is the issue either.
I had my flight on Air New Zealand cancelled after four hours in the air, forcing us to turn back due to a mechanical problem. After three hours on the ground, they gave up. I ended up with a night's stay in Auckland, a free breakfast, a new flight to LA first thing in the morning and double points. I'll probably be an Air NZ customer for life as a result.
Even United can sometimes rise to the occasion. They cancelled our flight to San Francisco because of SFO's typical shenanigans with fog and not allowing small commuter jets in. We got rebooked the next day, though all they had were economy class seats. We said fine, at least we're on our way. We got upgraded at the gate and we didn't even ask for it.
If a company wants to make customer service a top priority, they can do it.
This. (Disclosure: I'm co-founder of Adioso/Volantio btw)
Just confirming the above: The no-show rate is actually relatively stable in _most_ cases, which is why airlines try and optimize for this by selling past physical aircraft capacity.
In some markets it's illegal, in which case the average airfares are often notably higher.
This can have a more extreme effect than is immediately obvious: Because "last minute" fares (the ones that often fill up the aircraft) are usually the highest price and are critical in how airlines are able to make flights profitable.
Additionally, the most common no-shows are those who have booked early (the cheap tickets), meaning oversell allows the airlines to make space for urgent last minute travellers when the earlier ones don't turn up.
Without catering for no-show, it's feasible that air fares could end up a LOT more expensive (potentially 20%+) to remain profitable, depending on the distribution of prices in the demand curve leading up to departure.
You can certainly not do it, but on average, customers end up worse off (and the market is relatively good at optimizing this).
The biggest problem (in our mind) is that airlines don't have a good "safety valve" in cases where things go wrong. That's what we (attempt to) fix.
The airlines do have a good safety valve: offering people increasing amounts of money (not vouchers, but actual currency) until they get enough passengers who prefer the money to traveling on that flight. They just don't want to use it.
It's a little more nuanced than this. Gate auctions are a good solution, but can only happen in the last ~15-20 minutes prior to departure, which leads to "too late" scenarios as everyone is already present/committed to travelling.
Oversell is sometimes known with high confidence at checkin-close (1 hour prior to departure) or even before, due to the fact that oversell thresholds can change throughout the booking curve.
Airlines don't have a current solution to rebalance/correct loads prior to the gate auction.
I can certainly see why they'd want to get people on a different flight as early as possible. This article just has a weird tone as if overbooking is a huge problem and the airlines are stuck with involuntary bumping unless they can figure out some novel technique.
They could stop selling the really cheap seats so far in advance which puts them in the situation of trying to scramble for last minute bookings to make it profitable.
Slava is one of the smartest people I've met (and I'm sure the rest of the team follows suite) - it's indeed sad that the RethinkDB company is no more.
I feel we're at a stage where some of the key technologies/platforms are coming out of relatively small companies (docker, storm, rethinkdb, to name a few), however, it appears it can be tough to make a business out of this alone.
I'm consequently very happy to see that the RethinkDB team have found a home at Stripe and hope that works as a setup to allow the talent to flourish and keep producing great work/innovations.
Volantio (YCW09) | Full Stack Engineer | Atlanta | Full-time | ONSITE
Volantio is hiring an experienced full-stack developer to help us fix travel tech for airlines.
We make some of the world’s biggest travel sites suck less, by providing technology products to airlines and other travel companies (and drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century).
Everything we do works on improving the end-to-end airfare marketing/search/purchase process for some of the worlds biggest airlines, from being honest about prices in ads, to delivering emails that only contain real fares that you actually care about. If you’ve ever gotten an anger-inducing email from an airline with prices that are a blatant lie: we fix that.
We’re a close-knit team and have a variety of challenging work on our plates. A typical day can consist of everything from optimizing the Fare Prediction System in the morning to putting the finishing touches on a CSS animation in the afternoon. Our work spans multiple technologies, cultures, and languages (both programming and spoken!), so we value high quality communication and a continuous process of learning from each other.
We're looking for someone with at least a few years of professional software development experience that wants to work with us. Our product is built on Django/Python/Postgres/Redis/TypeScript and various other technologies used as needed. You'll be a core member of our team - able to develop the role and technology in a direction that you find exciting as we grow the company.
If this sounds interesting, we would love to hear from you. Please include whatever info you believe is relevant: resume, GitHub profile, code samples, links to personal projects, etc.
You can apply by emailing directly (jobs@volantio.com)
I'd be really interested to see the pricing/commercials around this too. There was a startup that did exactly this a few years back that got Branson's attention and turned into Virgin Charter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Charter - I believe it got hit by the 2009 financial downturn.
The problem with the expires argument is that you have to set it to a specific date, but I don't think you can be sure what timezone / clock setting the user's browser has - which means that it's pretty much impossible to reliably set a cookie that expires in a couple of seconds time.
Hopefully I'm wrong - I'd love to know if there's a workaround for that issue.
I would think the limiting factor is availability. You can pre-compute valid fares between cities super-fast with sufficient computing power, but you're still (somewhat) limited by the rate at which you can update availability, which _still_ has to be polled from airline systems (to some degree) and can't give you answers in <400ms :)
I would think they can do the fare search/assembly in realtime with their infrastructure, but they're relying on cached availability, hence the limit to "popular US cities" at the moment, to keep caches fresh enough within the practical throughput limits.
Expanding on this, one of the things ITA/QPX comes with is a dirty big availability cache that's constantly being primed (and paid for) by their customers (ie: Kayak, Orbitz, et al), who are now ironically not getting any traffic from Google :)
Ever gotten bumped from a flight, missed your connection due to a delay or gotten dragged off a plane? We fix that (amongst other things that are hard for airlines and bad for passengers).
We're a B2B2C platform used globally by airlines to help deal with the vagaries of unpredictable demand, weather and the world in general.
Read more about us here: https://www.volantio.com/press/
We use: React, TypeScript | Python, Django, Celery | Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ | Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform | Scikit Learn, Keras, Pytorch
Read more about position/apply here: https://angel.co/volantio/jobs/334502-senior-full-stack-deve...
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