by Shuo Wang and Martin Dale Lyness | at Minnebar spring 2020 (canceled)
Can you predict whether flight prices go higher or lower?
For many people, the most stressful part of any vacation is the planning phase. When it comes to flights, we're never quite sure if we're getting a good deal or not. Is this flight too expensive? Should I keep on waiting? What if the price goes up?
Most people don't like the booking process because it takes time and effort, not to mention stress. If you're traveling with your family of 4, when that price jumps $100, your vacation budget's just decrease by $400, which means cooking at home instead of having a nice meal out.
Or maybe you're more tech savvy, so you've signed up a flight alert service. They'll tell you the right time to book. That's what we did too. But what if they're wrong? We were now on the hook for the higher costs. What about those times we were in meetings and missed the notifications? We'd come back, check, and see that the prices went up again. We'd missed the window to book because of other obligations -- and those price drops don't always last that long.
And what we really found was that those predictions didn't ever tell us whether a ticket price was good or not. This single little fact bothered the hell out of Shuo, who never thought the predicted prices were actually any good anyway.
We decided to solve this problem. With 500,000 personal miles flown in the past 10 years and a background in the Data and Analytics space, Shuo knew the flight pricing and the predictive modeling space. Martin, being a Software Engineer and Architect, knew the cloud space and scalable compute space.
We've automated the price evaluation and booking components, and created our startup aiforflights.com, a SaaS who's goal is to remove the stress from your travels by saving you time and money.
How does it work? You'll have to come to our talk to find out!
We will talk about:
Co-Founder (Data) of aiforflights.com. Over 500,000 miles flown in the past 10 years. My obsession is optimizing for value, knowing that value differs from person to person.
Lead Data Science Consultant in the 9-5 world.
I build things for people with people. I have always loved building stuff. Whether it was assembling computer hardware for friends and neighbors as I was growing up, creating custom a bed for my daughter, or developing highly scalable cloud software solutions.
