Kia ora,
I’m Henry, the founder of Waywide, a pre-launch NZ flight-discovery project.
I’m trying to understand how people here actually go about finding cheap flights when they have some flexibility. For example, instead of knowing “I want Auckland to Tokyo on these dates”, you might know something more like: I can leave from Auckland, I’ve got a few weeks I could travel, I want to go somewhere in Asia for around a week, and I don’t want to spend more than $650 return.
From talking to travellers so far, the frustrating part seems to be repeatedly checking different destinations, dates and tools to see whether anything actually fits all of those constraints. One idea we’re testing is a Watch where you define that full trip rule once and it keeps checking automatically, only alerting you when something matches the whole thing. I’d be interested in how people here currently solve this. Do you mostly use Skyscanner Everywhere, Google Flights, airline sale pages, spreadsheets, alerts, or something else? And what part of finding cheap flights from NZ still feels unnecessarily manual?
Waywide is still pre-launch, so I’m mainly looking for criticism and examples of how people actually search. If anyone wants to follow the project, the free waitlist is here: https://waywide.co.nz/
Disclosure: I’m the founder of Waywide. This isn’t a deal post, there’s no affiliate/referral link here, and nothing is being sold in this post.
I can't see how to join the waitlist?
Personally i'll use Google flights when I know where I want to go to find the cheapest time and carrier and it works perfectly for that need, I don't need anything else.
But what it fails for is i've got $1k and I want to go to somewhere new, in that case I go to kiwi.com because it's what I found last time I googled and read some reddit posts. I never ended up booking anything though since none of the deals seemed that good. This seems like it'd fit that niche well. It would be cool to have a feature that even if I find a route I like, that you may be able to get a better deal since you know a competing carrier goes on sale 3x a year or something and you could notify me then, that would be very cool.
One thing that would make me nervous about setting up rules and letting you handle them is how rigid rules aren't as rigid as we think. I may say I want to leave on the 6th of may, but actually if I was manually browsing and saw the deal I wanted for 1 day sooner maybe I would have taken it. A setting to allow some constraints to be broken would be good.