Tag Archives: kayak

Airline fare analysis: comparing cost per mile

NB: A version of this blog post first appeared as a special guest post on Tnooz.

As we continue to improve the Rome2rio multi-modal search technology, we are starting to integrate pricing data into the system to help make sensible routing decisions and better inform our users. After all, price is an important part of the decision process when choosing between routes or modes of transport.

Prices for trains, buses, ferries and taxis tend to be more constant than airfares, which fluctuate with supply and demand. However, airfares do follow certain obvious trends; longer flights cost more, and some airlines are more expensive per mile flown than others.

We decided to model airfares using some simple parameters. To do this, we examined the economy class airfares displayed by Rome2rio to users over the past 4 months, totalling some 1,780,832 price points. We grouped the airfares by distance and selected the 20th percentile fare for each distance (where 20% of fares are less, and 80% are more), to produce the following graph:

Distancegraph

The graph shows a pretty clear linear relationship between distance traveled and airfares. Based on this data, we can create a simple equation to model this relationship:

Fare = $50 + (Distance * $0.11)

Where Fare is the cost in USD of flying Distance miles. On average, a fare costs $50 before any flight distance is taken into account, plus an average of 11 cents per mile travelled.

So what happens if we divide our data by airline? How does the 11 cents per mile flown vary per carrier?

We analyzed the average cost per mile for fares grouped by airline, using the same methodology. We only considered competitive fares – those within 2 times the cheapest fare for that price search – to remove outlier price points. We also excluded airlines where we had insufficient data.

The results are summarized below (original image):

The results are fascinating, and there are some clear trends. Budget carriers such as RyanAir and AirAsia are at the low end of the scale; short haul, turboprop operating carriers such as Regional Express and Darwin Airlines are at the high end.

There are, however, many factors which can influence per mile costs including type of aircraft flown, routes flown, local salary and fuel costs, ancillary revenue, and airport landing fees.

The results should also be taken with a grain of salt, since our sampling set is small, no statistical analysis has been performed, and the results may be biased depending upon the types of searches performed on Rome2rio. Also, Rome2rio may not always have access to the cheapest fares. A major, comprehensive meta-search player such as Kayak or Skyscanner could perform a more thorough analysis based on a far greater sample of search logs or their airfare caches. Nonetheless we wanted to share this data since we thought the results would be of interest to the travel industry, travel buffs, or anyone excited about big data. 

Credit: Special thanks to Fenn Bailey from Adioso and Timothy O’Neil-Dunne for providing valuable feedback on the analysis.

Adding visual appeal: rome2rio’s evolving interface

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about rome2rio’s user interface. The graphic design has had a major revamp over the last few weeks, thanks largely due to the contributions of my talented sister, Lara Cameron. Lara is now busy running her popular and eco-friendly hand-printed textiles business Ink & Spindle but was previously a web graphic designer. Take a look at this comparison of our UI before and after the makeover and it is clear Lara benefited from some creative, artistic genes that I missed out on.

Old-new-screenshots2

 

The other major aspect of rome2rio’s interface is the interaction design, that is, what is shown where on the page and how the user interacts with the site. Getting the interaction design right is certainly one of the big challenges of building a multi-modal travel search engine. There’s a lot of information to present about the various trip alternatives. Conveying these ways to get from one place to another clearly to the user is challenging. Even regular flight search engines such as Kayak, Orbitz, Expedia or Webjet struggle with the challenge of presenting just flight itineraries to the user. There are different carriers, stopovers, layover times, ticketing airlines, departure and arrival times, durations and prices that need to be shown. Hipmunk is a new valley startup that has focused on some new approaches to this challenging flight result layout problem. 

With multi-modal search rome2rio needs to tackle yet another level of UI complexity as the flight schedules are just one part of the itineraries we present. For a single search such as Melbourne to Stanford, rome2rio presents multiple routes of getting there. For example Melbourne -> MEL -> SFO -> Stanford is one route, Melbourne -> MEL -> SJC -> Stanford is another. Each route consists of various segments (drive, then fly, then drive again), each flight segment has various itineraries, and each itinerary has all of the components described above! 

Presenting all this clearly to the user is challenging. We’ve chosen to use different colors to differentiate the various modes of transport, and hide the flight itineraries behind a hover over pop-out. Each route has a short description like “Fly to San Francisco (SFO)” that explains how it differs from other alternatives. We’ve also decided to make rome2rio’s interface largely map driven so that routes can be easily visualized.

Map-screenshot

The map interface is perhaps the most immediately obvious differentiating feature of rome2rio. It certainly takes a lot of screen real estate (although this real estate is re-used for the flight schedules pop-out) however the value it adds varies a lot from query to query. For a search from one major city to another the map will display routes with stopovers, which may be of interest to the user. However the maps value really comes into play for searches such as Seattle to Yellowstone or Dublin to Le Havre where the visualization of the alternative routes really helps the user understand the tradeoffs between them. I suspect travellers with more flexible itineraries will also benefit from the map interface where they may notice one of the routes goes past a town or attraction of interest and decide to make a detour. 

So, what are your thoughts about rome2rio’s current UI? Too confusing and geared towards savvy, high-tech users? Nice and snappy and easy to use? Do you like the map? Would you prefer an interface without the map, or one where the map takes either more or less screen space? 

We’d love to hear your thoughts!