True, they care about local competition. But they also care about growing stockholders' equity, of which one method is improving profitability.
Since RyanAir has shown some prowess in this regard (admittedly through solicitation of subsidies, but also with an aggressive model), Southwest would certainly have some interest. We're talking almost 50% greater net profit on a third of the revenue. Sure that exact comparison is debatable, but the contrast is nonetheless interesting, even if done with a novel approach.
You're right, it doesn't make sense. We're adjusting our numbers to what the central bank has actually reported here: http://www.bcra.gov.ar
Reserves at 31 Dec were US$43.29b and at 18 Oct were US$34.25 = total loss of US$9.04b. Since there has been 291 actual days in the year up to 18 Oct, the daily loss is $31.08m.
8 hours a day minus an hour for lunch is 7 hours .. perhaps exchange operations close an before the daily close of business? Wouldn't surprise me, and that's ~5.9375 (6 to be precise). Then of course there's bank holidays and weekends...
The goverment has declared an unprecedented number of holidays last year (i.e. moving holidays from weekends to mondays, declaring "bridge" holidays when a holiday happens on tuesday or thursday, 2012 had 5 more than 2011). 2013 will have 17 bank holidays.
Also anything that's not your normal trip. I.e. travelling with pets or surfboards, help using frequent flyer miles, help getting frequent flyer status, or just going to a new country that you've never been before.
"Help me fly with my pet in cabin" would be a great service -- only some airlines do it, and they have weird rules. International even harder due to quarantine rules. (i.e. if I want to go to Hawaii with a cat in cabin, I'd have to charter, since I think the last airline doing cabin pets to Hawaii, Alaska, stopped on that route in 2009).
Thanks for the feedback, we're looking into booking options now so that you don't have spend time trying to book yourself.
For others it has been an easy process to book as we have some verified travel agents on board. Other times when your trip is super complex, you may have to book on different websites. We're definitely aware that it's a friction point though so we're trying to fix it asap.
I wasn't aware of/able to find the travel agents, so I paid the finder's fee but never actually booked tickets. It was too intimidating for me and I was too worried about ending up with half of the tickets and the other half becoming unavailable and ending up holding expensive partials.
Anyway, I'd be happy to pay for someone to handle it -- I'd even pay going rates -- but the whole process of me having to take the itinerary to someone else (that I have to find via Yelp or some other vehicle) or spend time on the phone with a couple of airlines is just too much for me. I'm super busy, and my expertise lies in tech -- not travel. :(
we're looking into booking options now so that you don't have spend time trying to book yourself
This is the pain point which has prevented me from recommending flightfox to anyone else yet: When I tried it, I was pointed towards orbitz for flights which it turned out that they were advertising but (after I provided my credit card details) they didn't actually have. I'm still glad that I used flightfox, because the expert advice I got saved me $300 by pointing out that returning to Canada from Germany was much cheaper than returning from Austria -- but the booking instructions were completely useless.
If you can add a "book via flightfox" mechanism which guarantees that the flights actually exist, I'll tell everybody I know to use flightfox every time they travel.
We're focusing on anything international and/or complex. Online travel sites like Kayak and Hipmunk have already done a good job for simple and domestic travel.
I spoke to the guys here and your contest was indeed a special case. It's true we're not flexible enough to put two people traveling from different locations on a single ticket/contest. But as you rightly pointed out, your comments should have sufficed.
The second mistake on our end was misreading the issue and the third was our new refund process, which unfortunately had issues during your refund. This isn't an excuse, but your case really was a series of unfortunate events that ended up affecting the same person, you.
In addition to the refund, I believe we also offered a free contest to win you back.
All of that aside, we're trying our best to deliver the highest quality results. It's not easy on a 2-sided platform, but our efforts are paying off. Every day we save people $1000s; that's not a soundbite, we really do. We hold these 'showcase' contests as a bit of fun for our experts and also to prove out business hypotheses. Every now and then, a couple of contests like yours slip through the cracks, but we do everything we can to re-gain your trust.
The last thing I want to clear up is your suggestion that we don't do complex flights. That's simply not true. Your case was unfortunate, but it wasn't really a complex flight. We do much much more complex itineraries involving frequent flyer miles, pets, unusual luggage, etc.
Again, apologies for the poor experience and we'd be more than happy to pay for future contests to regain your trust.
At the moment you can put in whatever you want - we have with this contest - you can write a custom destination like "Anywhere in Europe" or "Round the World". There's a text box where you can put any requirements you like, you can even ask for help to use your 100k United miles etc. We've left it completely open to see how people use it and then build on that.
You can create your own flight contest and note exactly which cities you want to visit and we'll find you the best/cheapest itinerary. We're discussing now about opening up the results of this RTW contest for a smaller fee, would anyone else be interested in that?
Don't miss an opportunity to provide encouragement for people to create tempting routes. e.g., requester posts bounty for interesting trip. Pays the winning expert. Then the public can pay a smaller fee (to the requester) to piggyback on their info.
e.g., requester might've paid a $250 bounty, but they can make it back from 50 people buying the info for $5 each, less FlightFox's fee.
I think people most of us are curious to see the detailed results but I don't think more than a few people would be willing to shell out any $. Perhaps consider opening up the detailed results for this contest as a one-time-thing? I think that the interest+publicity you will receive (in addition to already being #1 on HN) would greatly out-weigh the few hundred bucks that you might get from a handful of people who'd seriously be willing to pay to see these results.
When a post is on top of HN, I don't think we're used to seeing the meat of the content stuck behind a quasi-paywall.
EDIT: It looks like you've posted the results publicly now, nice.
Love the idea; we'll definitely give it some thought, especially how the experts can profit from these fees well after they post the flight option.
Aside: we really didn't expect this post to get to the top of HN. Our intern was running around the apartment saying, "I told you we should have planned better."
Since RyanAir has shown some prowess in this regard (admittedly through solicitation of subsidies, but also with an aggressive model), Southwest would certainly have some interest. We're talking almost 50% greater net profit on a third of the revenue. Sure that exact comparison is debatable, but the contrast is nonetheless interesting, even if done with a novel approach.