The missing step after finding your destination

When I started building Midway, I had a very clear goal regarding the user experience: make it as easy as possible to find a destination.

I’ve written about this before: when you visit the more traditional travel websites, the assumption is that you already know when and where you want to go, and they help you find the cheapest ticket. But Midway approaches this from a different point of view: you want to travel with someone, but you don’t know exactly where and when.

Here’s an example, there are 18 common destinations between Stockholm and Tokyo (Haneda). New York is one of them, but only with direct flights between April and October.

If you are looking for a destination during Christmas time, you can filter by month. That narrows it down to 15 destinations. With Midway, it took you a few seconds to get the answer. Vienna is one of them.

Now comes the hard part: viewing the available flights and prices for each departure airport.

Even for one month, the schedule of a route can be all over the place. Here is an example between Stockholm and Vienna. You can see that there’s not an easy or straightforward answer.

Ideally, Midway will show a calendar highlighting the dates where all departure airports have a direct flight. Then you can pick one of them and see the actual flights. I built a prototype for that using a commercial API, but it costs several thousand dollars a month.

Flight search APIs are also a challenge — most online travel agencies require solid traction before granting access to their booking APIs.

So I need to make a compromise, accepting a less-than-ideal user experience but still offering a way to search and book a flight. In the coming weeks, I will display an average price for each city and a link to a booking site where you can search for flights directly.