FlyerTalk Forums - MileageBrain beta 3

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- - MileageBrain beta 3 (https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-tools/1201344-mileagebrain-beta-3-a.html)

Quote:

Originally Posted by bengl3rt (Post 16149742)

Hello again everybody! Thanks so much for all the interest and support in our ongoing development efforts of MileageBrain.com. Things have been quiet for a while, and the old thread was getting quite long, so it's time for a fresh start!

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, please try out the mileage run finder over at www.mileagebrain.com. The goal is to offer a useful, competitive mileage run finding tool by the time mileage run season picks up at the end of 2011.

Some bad news: we’ve had to temporarily disable all other airports except the top 25 most searched (SFO, JFK, EWR, LAX, IAD, LGA, ORD, DCA, BOS, SEA, BWI, YYZ, ATL, PHL, SJC, LHR, FRA, IAH, DEN, OAK, MIA, YVR, MUC, YOW, YUL). We’re really sorry to not be able to offer everything like we used to, but we’ve had to take this path to both save money and better concentrate on developing user experience and more. We want to be able to sustainably roll features out for all the other airports and we’re hoping to slowly trickle out more airports as we get more efficient with our resources.

That said, we're planning to let users “Adopt an Airport” soon by donating a certain amount to have an airport of their choice fully crawled by our Brain and featured on the site. If you've already donated, don't worry, we'll be in touch - you get first pick :)

And now for a few pieces of good news. These are our official "Beta 3" features:

- Mileage calculation is now extremely accurate for most itineraries. You can even see the exact routing that the calculation was based on by clicking "Details"

- The fares you see should be fresh and hot - no more than 24 hours old and definitely still bookable.

- American Airlines is back in the system! They got away from us for a little while because they are pulling out of the online travel ecosystem in general, but we caught up with them and now you should see their fares along with all the other oneworld results.

- In addition to this FT thread, our twitter, the "contact" form on the website, and email to info AT mileagebrain.com, we now have a MileageBrain area in the ConcourseZ section of milepoint.com. Just another way to get in touch with the team and share your experiences and feedback.

Looking forward into the future, our top priority is to get fresh, accurate data into the system for a larger number of airports, but we are also thinking more seriously about the best way to access MileageBrain from mobile devices and about how we can improve our search to make it more useful for everyone.

Development is guided entirely by your feedback (well, and the constraints of physical reality ;)) so please keep it coming! Thanks again everyone who has tried it out so far.

Really neat too, would love a date range option.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lrluis (Post 16150394)

This is a great idea! I know Ill be using this once Q4 comes around. I just tested this from SFO flying UA/CO and it seemed to be pretty accurate. I love how clicking on details gave me an option to book and brought me straight to the Expedia page with the exact itinerary and price mentioned.

Any chance you'd be developing an iPhone app to go with the website?

I don't see an option on my screen to book, was that taken away?

Quote:

Originally Posted by rkaradi (Post 16168464)

Really neat too, would love a date range option.

I don't see an option on my screen to book, was that taken away?

Click on the details button and the pop-up will offer you a booking option.

Hello everyone, quick announcement...

This past weekend we tripled the efficiency of our infrastructure - this has allowed us to re-enable 75 additional airports, so we are now serving the top 100 most-searched airports. If yours wasn't available before, please try it again!

Your continued interest and feedback is greatly, greatly appreciated. :)

Awesome news, thanks for adding us lesser-ranking airports back. :)

I believe that you are including AI as part of the *A.

Quote:

Originally Posted by cheltzel (Post 16283642)

I believe that you are including AI as part of the *A.

Correct. They will officially join in June, but we wanted the Brain to start learning about their routes now. We are hoping MileageBrain use will pick up considerably when MRs are in season during Q4 :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by bengl3rt (Post 16285182)

I have been trying to figure what the official AI date would be.

Thanks

I'd love to see BUR get added. PM me on what the cost of 'developmental' efforts would be. :D

Quote:

Originally Posted by bengl3rt (Post 16149742)

You removed DFW?

Quote:

Originally Posted by BUR Regular (Post 16299175)

You removed DFW?

Nope, DFW is up and running.

Quote:

Originally Posted by siricepick (Post 16292288)

I'd love to see BUR get added. PM me on what the cost of 'developmental' efforts would be. :D

siricepick,

It looks like BUR is enabled, but it's not finding any good mileage runs from it - the only ones I'm getting are on Oneworld (specifically AA), and they're clocking in at 10cpm. Yikes!

I think finding compelling routings from long-tail airports such as this is a problem we have barely scratched the surface of so far. Lots of work left to do be done!

Should I see the same fare and CPM in mileagebrain that I see from the farecompre/flyertalk search? I'm seeing differences and wondering if it's due to being in development or one isn't actually bookable. ie: out of SEA, there are different AA and CO fares with farecompare showing better CPMs.
Looks like a cool tool though as long as the results are accurate.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nemloc (Post 16300517)

Well, MileageBrain's results are accurate with respect to the data it has access to. I'm not sure how the farecompare tool works - I'm not able to get it to show me the specific dates or routings for the fares that it's finding so I don't know how I would move forward with booking them.

Anyway, digging down deep into the universe of multi-city itineraries to extract the best possible routings is something we haven't done yet... MileageBrain just looks for simple round trips at the moment. The super-low cpm stuff is pretty elusive but we're working on it! Stay tuned.

Pardon me if this is intuitively obvious to the casual observer, but not to me...

Tried looking for *A MRs out of IAD and lowest cpm choice was IAD-LAS on UA. Thought to see what the lowest cpm choice was ex-LAS and it was LAS-IAD, but at a lower cpm that the one IAD-LAS. How does a discrepancy like that come about? Aren't domestic fares generally symmetric, that is A-B-A the same price as B-A-B? And if an airline flies A-B, don't they usually fly B-A so that one could do the same route in reverse?

I believe that FareCompare only uses the actual intercity mileage for a non-stop flight, so will always show the upper bound for cpm with what they have identified as the lowest fare for that city pairing. Thus, one can use FareCompare as a starting point when looking for possible MRs, figuring that their lowest stated cpm intercity pairs are most likely to be among the lowest cpm intercity pairs after one has played with different routings. Since MileageBrain begins with the lowest cpm intercity pairs after different routings are considered, can one expect get to the objective, that of the lowest possible city pairs and routings, faster and more reliably that using FareCompare? Has anyone tried putting them side by side? Is it any more likely that with MileageBrain one will see MR possibilities for which there is availability out there, which often seems not to be the case with FareCompare?

Quote:

Originally Posted by itsme (Post 16306626)

I believe that FareCompare only uses the actual intercity mileage for a non-stop flight, so will always show the upper bound for cpm with what they have identified as the lowest fare for that city pairing.

Is that the case? Interesting. That would certainly explain the discrepancy between the two tools.

Very early alpha versions of MileageBrain (which FTers will no doubt remember) used the actual intercity mileage (great circle distance) for all the itineraries it found. To me that was a stopgap to just getting SOMETHING out there, not a tenable long-term strategy :) Routing is everything when it comes to mileage runs!