This is an excellent resource, especially for bargain-hunters like myself.

One question I have: how are you going about adding new flight information? Do you do them in an automated manner, using a web service, or perhaps by scraping? I'm primarily interested in flights between USA and East Asia, which as of now is still rather difficult to find with your site, but I'd be interested in hearing if that would be available before the end of the year.

BTW, I was a bit confused by the TechCrunch headline. To me, "keeping options open" means something like being allowed to change my mind at the last minute, for cancellations or rescheduling. I hope you don't adopt that as your byline, unless you plan to address that aspect of the flight search problem as well.

I clicked over to the site thinking, this could be cool, I wonder what I'll search for. The default search option was "Detroit to domestic for under USD200". DTW is 20 minutes away, and $200 is little enough I could just book something for the hell of it (and I just may). I just wanted to say, that was a killer default search.

It would be nicer to see dates further in the future. The error message for exceeding the 4 month window is rubbish too: http://adioso.com/au/bne-to-dps-april-2011. By putting scare quotes around "April" in the underlined text it look like the natural language processing engine doesn't know what "April" means. Also, that error message shouldn't be a "Tip", as it's completely failed for that search.

It would be nice to have an optional advanced search form so I could see exactly what a parameters I can search for. Free form search just lets me try permutations of text until I find one that works.

Also, the related searches bar is really confusing. It looks like crumb trails. Turning the arrow into a magnifying glass could be a good way to fix that.

Awesome site and fantastic to see another Aussie startup! Being in Perth, I'll definitely use it and I love that the founders have focussed on the low cost carriers first. Hope that they add a few of the high capacity international majors too though (the 2 UAE carriers come to mind) because reducing flight time and connections is usually at least as important to me than price.

Congratulations to the guys. It may be true that the flight search market is saturated but I'm not so sure if that is the case in Australia, anecdotally when it comes to people booking flights here the first impulse seems to be to go to the carriers websites or webjet which is more big business and less useful.

I've been using http://matrix2.itasoftware.com for flexible flight searching. From the few minutes I have been playing with Adioso, it seems even better.

I think I understand now why every other flight search engine has little "to" and "from" boxes. I got the "couldn't parse this" screen four times in a row trying to get from my house in Northern England to Kalymnos, Greece.

It finally gave me results when I tried "manchester to kos", with the minor problem that all the results started in Boston, 3000 miles from my house.

I like the idea. At the moment though the execution is simply not there.

I think the "natural language search" championed by Adioso is really cool, but the question I want to raise is whether the "natural" in our everyday speech is also "natural" in human-machine communication? i.e. could it be the case that people are so used to searching specific things online that a "natural language search" creates uncertainty about what to expect thus turning people away from the website?

Amazing they made it this far with that terrible name. I googled my best attempt to spell it from memory (5 seconds after reading a whole article that mentioned the name a dozen times), and their site didn't show up anywhere in the results.

  - Memorable
  - Spellable
  - Readable over a phone

Congratulations to Tom, Fenn and Andrew on AV3. Great to see an offering like this coming out of Melbourne's startup ecosystem!

I wish the guys good luck, but personally I find Kayak Explore a more than efficient and accurate tool for this type of search.

I found it returned rather erroneous results, "London to Asia next month" returned flights for mainly Eastern European destinations, I started to try different variables... "southampton to edinburgh next month" and it returned results for London Gatwick to Edinburgh.

Flight search is a very competitive online service, accuracy of results is key. The everyday user who receives poor results just simply wont bother returning.

You should add the feature of search for multiple cities at once. For example depending on the price I have flown out of the Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Indianapolis airports. Believe it or not, it takes me about the same amount of time to get to each.

EDIT: It appears you include nearby airports as well in your search, but I would still like to be able to chose which are included. Dayton is included in Cincinnati searches and Indianapolis is included in Columbus searches, but I can't search for all four.

I tried to find something from Venice to Portland, Oregon. It doesn't seem to do PDX, so I tried with SFO instead. It gives me VCE to Gatwick, England, then to Basel, Switzerland, then Dusseldorf, Germany, and then on to San Francisco. Yeah it's cheap, but that sounds like an awful, awful day of traveling.

It would be nice if it understands continents. For example from Amsterdam to South America late december.

The last time I checked (mid-june) it didn't get very far from the netherlands (we wanted to go to north africa or the middle east), but it only showed up with some trips to the UK and Italy. Bummer.

Still, the idea of Adioso is really attractive.

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Did Tom move from Australia to the US to be accepted by YC?

Crunchbase has him as a cofounder, who is the other one? US based founder?

cheers.

The site definitely feels snappier than earlier versions!

I'm excited to be able to this for more US domestic flights. Keep up the good work!

Well, I guess it's good to know Alexia Tsotsis has no idea what the travelling salesman problem is. Almost like she didn't read her own link.

As the author points out it is great when you have no firm dates in mind, perfect for planning holidays etc.

I used this as my primary travel site in Australia and really liked it.

Congrats Tom and Fenn!