Dohop Search Engine Compares 667 Airlines

I vote we rename Reykjavik to Techjavik -- I keep hearing about cool Internet stuff going on over in Iceland. Case in point: dohop, a travel search engine that compares 667 airlines and works with unsettling smoothness even in Opera. It's at http://www.dohop.com/

Start at the front page by entering the to and from points of where you want to go. I tried entering airport codes and they didn't seem to work. Just start entering your city and it'll make suggestions on the fly. This is unsettling; I am not used to travel search engines being this intelligent. It's like walking into your office in the morning and discovering that your cat has borrowed your computer to type her thesis.

Click in the depart date box and a calendar will open up for you to click dates, or you can simply enter them. A checkbox toggle allows you to specify 1- or 2-way flights. I tried Richmond (VA) to Reykjavik. Dohop will show you a set of itineraries that includes the airlines involved, airport stops, and start and end of the flights. Sometimes you will get a result delineated with a green bar up at the top. These are sponsored, and it does say sponsored (though in fairly small font on my screen.) A series of sliders and checkboxes on the right of the results page allow you to filter your results by time, airlines, transits, etc.

Click on the Show Details link for each result and the result will expand, showing you the times of the flights and the airport switchovers as well as prices. (Prices are in Euros by default -- use the drop-down menu in the upper right of the page to choose between eight different currencies, including USD and GBP.) If times between flights seem short, dohop includes a warning in their listing (to dohop, "little time" seems to be less than about two hours, and "very little time" seems to be less than 70 minutes or so. I appreciate their conservativeness.)

Flight prices come from several different sources including Travelocity, OneTravel.com, and of course the airlines themselves. It's interesting to see the prices listed like this while viewing several itineraries at a time -- it's easy to see by glancing through a page patterns of higher or lower prices among providers. For each itinerary you have the option of e-mailing it or updating the price.

I am not a big fan of travel search engines, but this was really nice. Fast, quick-updating, smart. Good stuff.

Posted to Business-Transportation-Aviation | TrackBack