Flight Search

Recently, I was was trying to book a flight online. As my friend Brian can attest, this is a painful thing thing to do: You go to all these different websites and try to find the best airport/time/airline combination. This can take several hours, at the end of which you decide that you don't want to save $50 by flying through Anchorage. (Sometimes, you go with the first thing you found.)

This gets even more painful when you have poorly defined requirements. Sometimes, you know you want to go to Rome for a weekend. Any weekend. At other times, you want to visit Portugal for a wedding on July 17th, but would also like to go to Italy either before or after. Same thing with visiting family in three different states: What's the best ordering of visits?

Also, maybe taking a train would be cheaper and faster than flying.

So what do online sites have to offer? You choose "Flight", enter to/from, travel dates. Good websites, such as ITA Flight Search, will find you the cheapest weekend to go. But what about all the other requirements:

• Isn't there a better way to enter the flights you need? Couldn't we design a better interface for defining flight search parameters?
  
• Can't someone integrate all of the travel info that is out there (flights, trains, busses) into a common "travel search"?
  

And a special wish:

• Why do I have to enter my flight parameters by hand at every single travel website? Can't my browser offer some auto-filling? For this, a Firefox plug-in would work: If there is someone devoted enough to doing such a thing (and keeping it updated when input forms change).
  

There is much to improve.