Goibibo, an India-based online travel agency, has launched an intelligent flight sorting feature using what it calls the "Dig Algorithm".
The algorithm takes three parameters into consideration - price, duration of flight and cancellation policy.
Flight Advice, as the service is known, is currently in beta (with ideas already being considered to include additional parameters), but more than 45% of visitors to the site have used this application.
The screenshot below shows flight search results for New Delhi to New York, with Flight Advice turned off. The default display is result sorted by price.
Next, with Flight Advice turned on:
Refundable fares are given priority in display, followed by a combination of price and duration. Flights with non-refundable fare are pushed to the bottom of display.
Example:
Note the second and third flights below. The second flight's duration is longer than the third by just 15 minutes, but the second flight is cheaper by around Rupees 9,000.
When a user hovers their mouse over the rank bar, a popup explains how the flight's position was sorted.
The image on the left shows a flight with a refundable fare, so its ranked high. The right hand image has non-refundable fare, so the rank is lowered for the flight.
Flight Advice is an interesting move by an OTA, especially once the Dig Algorithm matures in terms of the number of parameters it considers to sort flights.
Whether the algorithm gets too complex is another matter, however, as travelers may actually end of spending too much time analyzing and testing.
Useful tool and enhanced user experience versus the reality of simply needing a conversion.