Adioso, Flight Search For People Keeping Their Options Open

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

YCombinator-funded Adioso today launches its third iteration as an online destination for adventurous travelers who want to take vacations but are not constrained by specific days or even places. Yes, the online travel space is saturated, but the more mainstay search services like Kayak and Sky Scanner only let you find specific dates and destinations, failing if your desire is more vague.

In contrast, Adioso allows you to search flights with complete flexibility, like if you want to go somewhere in Europe in November but are not committed to specific area or time. Examples of the natural language-enabled broad or open-ended searches specific to Adioso:

Chicago to Boston next week

San Francisco to Europe late September under $800

San Francisco to anywhere

Says founder Tom Howard:

“There are really no other services that let you know where you should go, and what days are the cheap days. You go to a website and you’d spend two hours trying to find the cheap deals, there was nothing that said these are the good days at this location.”

Before Adioso, the only solution to the “What are the good days at this location?” kind of query was to manually do separate searches on different sites until you stumbled across what you were looking for. Adioso’s model necessitates some programming chops however, as open-ended search is harder to enable than constrained.

Future plans include expanding the service’s airline and destination inventory as soon as the Adioso platform has stabilized, currently Adioso only covers a selection of airlines in Australia (the home country of founders Howard and Fenn Bailey), Asia, Europe and the USA.

Howard and Baily hope that service will create opportunities both for casual travelers (the most rapidly growing segment of the travel industry) as well for airlines who are looking for ways to best monetize left over seats on undersold flights.

Company: Adioso
Website: adioso.com
Funding: $355k

Adioso is a travel search engine that supports broad, open-ended, natural-language queries, built to satisfy the needs of budget-conscious travellers with flexible date & destination options. Its natural language search interface allows date-flexible and destination-flexible searches, like “San Francisco to NYC late October”, or “Austin to anywhere under $200 next week”. It also provides a routing engine that interconnects flights from low-cost airlines to allow budget-conscious travellers to identify the lowest-cost route between any two places domestically or internationally. Adioso seeks to...

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Person: Tom Howard
Website: tomhoward.co
Companies: Adioso

Tom Howard is a co-founder at travel search startup Adioso. His roles include UI design, visual production, and strategy. Prior to Adioso, he developed management software for a taxi e-payments provider, managed the website and built the ticketing system for prominent Australian music event The Falls Festival, and worked in support and pre-sales engineering for Australian ISPs OzEmail and Pacific Internet.

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