Adioso: a new beginning
by admin on August 31, 2010
When Adioso was first launched in January 2008, our ambitions were fairly humble. We simply thought there should be an easier way for Australian travellers to find the cheapest flights on low-cost airlines. As a bit of a novelty, we thought it might be cool to allow open-ended searches via a natural-language interface.
At that stage it was just a side-project from other pursuits; a way to try our hand at building consumer-focused web-applications and see what we could learn that we might put to use in a more serious venture.
It’s fast approaching three years later and, well, we didn’t get a chance to look for a more serious venture. It turns out that many people the world over agreed that a much better option was needed in travel search, and liked the look of what we had to offer.
With their support and encouragement, we immersed ourselves in the travel world and worked hard to create a search product that supports spontaneous, adventurous and nomadic styles of travel; a tool that enables passionate travellers to explore options and discover great new destinations, and that combines the best fares from different low-cost airlines to help budget-conscious travellers get to places in the most convenient or affordable way possible.
And so today we’re pleased to announce the launch of Adioso version 3.
Here’s what we hope you’ll like about it:
As always, it provides a natural-language search interface that supports broad or open-ended queries on both dates and destinations, eg:
And it still allows searches to be constrained by date or price:
A new feature of the search engine is that you can now do searches to continents or regions:
And we’ve enhanced support for place-name abbreviations:
The biggest new feature is our multi-airline route generator, that allows you to save hundreds or thousands of dollars on cross-country or transcontinental trips by joining together flights from different low-cost airlines. Eg:
- Perth to Phuket offers a route consisting of two AirAsia flights for just AUD$180 one-way, $200 less than the cheapest direct flight on another airline.
- Ho Chi Minh City to Copenhagen will link flights from Jetstar, AirAsia and easyJet for USD$672 round trip, little over half the best fare from a traditional carrier.
- Edinburgh to Prague will get you there via Stanstead on easyJet for £42 – less than half what you’d pay a traditional airline.
Though if you don’t like transfers and want to limit your search to direct flights only, you can do that by specifying “direct” in your search:
Finally, we’ve completely rebuilt the site from the ground up, including a new platform that allows faster performance, better scaling and more rapid implementation of new features, and a newly designed user-interface that combines the simplicity you’ve always loved with some powerful new features to make finding and booking that perfect trip easier than ever before.
We’re pretty excited about all these changes and we hope you will be too.
That said, we’re still very much in beta as a globally-focused product, and there are still some limitations:
- We only cover a selection of low-cost airlines in Australia, Asia, Europe and the USA. We’ll be increasing our airline and destination coverage as quickly as we can once we’re confident the new platform is performing well.
- For now we’ve removed the ability to limit searches to airline, time of day (‘morning”, “afternoon”, etc) and “weekend”. Though these search options weren’t particularly widely-used, the people who used them really liked them, so we’ll be looking to reintroduce them once other higher priority features have been finished.
It’s very early days for Adioso’s new version but we’ll be working hard to add features and coverage as we continue on our quest to build the world’s coolest travel search engine.
We hope you enjoy using it as much as we’ve enjoyed making it, and we welcome you to contact us to let us know how you’re finding it or just tell us of your Adioso-powered travel experiences.
Tom, Fenn & Andrew
Adioso Founders
That’s awesome guys, the new interface is a nice update and the search is impressive as always.
by Odaeus on September 1, 2010 at 12:45 am. #
I just stumbled upon this site a few days ago and thought it was brilliant. Love the concept. I’m a student and this is about to change everything. SUCH a brilliant idea.
by Hayward on September 4, 2010 at 4:49 pm. #
Love it, love it, love it. You know what I’d love even more? I’d love an Adioso toolbar in my browser. I guess you’ve probably already thought of this or it’s under development… but hey, I use my Google toolbar all the time and it feels natural for me to search that way… maybe others feel the same way… Anyway, congrats on a great product.
by Anna Johnson on September 14, 2010 at 10:38 am. #
A couple of months ago I spent a fortune on flights for a trip next year – I would have saved so much if I had used Adioso. I will from now on! Great work!
by James Sadler on September 15, 2010 at 4:20 am. #
LOVE LOVE LOVE IT!Discovered it thanks to my tutor Steve Sammartino and a peer in Advertising class. Made my American dream come true coz I had been scrounging around for a ticket to NYC.I love Anna’s suggestion of a toolbar. Definitely works. Also a notification system. Not spamming in nature like STA but something customized. If people have the chance to select certain options in a drop down menu to get notifications about you get a chance of selective and relevant communication with the target market. Eg – I want to visit my friend in London but will only do so if there is a ridiculously cheap ticket like the $400 one with AirAsia but din’t know it happened until a few weeks back. I would really love to know more about AirAsia and Jetstar deals and since you have the technology to track flights and costs, if you can build a customized info system that sends automated emails to those who selected AirAsia deals to Europe or where ever I am certain it would be even better. If that were possible coz this is the next best thing after Google for me
Thanks guys and all the best!Cheers,Prateeksha
by Prateekshae on October 14, 2010 at 4:47 am. #
Just love it ! Some enhancements needed but you are already working on that I am sure. 1) clicking on “show more days” wont expand the timeline. 2) it would help to have, maybe optional, a possibility to see the summary of return-flight as well. Keep up the good work ! /HEnrik
by henrikstadler on October 30, 2010 at 9:03 am. #
This is a great site. I am using Adioso to plan my trip around the world at the moment. Well done guys!
by wtnomad on December 14, 2010 at 5:18 am. #