VisuFare

Visualizing Air Fare

A tool for better vacation planning

 

VisuFare is a way for vacation-seekers to visualize their options and decide on their vacation destination.

It is designed for users interested in prices, timing, and destination selection. VisuFare can help you gain insight into flight prices and the patterns of prices, easily identify locations within your budget, identify locations of interest (popular location, locations with many attractions, etc).

You would be interested in VisuFare if you are planning a vacation, and are unsure as to the timing or destination. VisuFare can help you decide When, Where, and How Much to Pay.

Visufare can help you answer the following questions -

*         "What is cheap?"
Which cities are within a price-range? Which states are within a price-range?
When is it economical to fly to city X?
How do prices change over time?

*         "What's popular?"
Which cities are popular attractions?

*         "What's fun?"
Which cities have specific attractions?
Which cities have ample accommodation?

VisuFare was implemented by Yaniv Pessach and Punit (Pete) Shah as part of The Harvard CS171 Visualization class (read more about the class on http://cs171.net/)

 

To use visufare, you can interact with the applet below. The best way to Learn VisuFare is to click around – don't worry, click the ‘clear map' button to reset your state.

Here is a typical VisuFare image:

 

The easiest way to use VisuFare is

*         Hover your mouse over selected cities (the initially-grey circles) and read the city information.

*         Click on your departure city (most likely, where you are now). It will be outlined in blue.

*         The other available destinations will be colored by the flight prices to them from the departure city. The city circle size indicates popularity - notice the legend on the right!

*         Hover over a possible destination to see city information, city picture, cheapest flight information, and a graph showing flight prices over the entire month (so you can choose a cheaper flight date).

*         To select a different date, use the next and prev buttons. Notice the slider left of the buttons indicating the selected flight date.

*         To see Heatmap information, coloring each state by the price of arrival, click the 'turn on heatmap' button

*         Click the animate button to see how prices (in city mode or heatmap mode) change through the month, and observe pricing patterns.

*         The legend is fully linked. You can click (toggle on and off) any legend button, or any group of legend buttons. For example, To highlight prices between $140 and $220 or destination with many hotels or beaches, click the buttons 'Price <$180' 'price < $220', 'many hotels' and 'beaches'. Notice the attraction indicators are only shown on the map for selected attraction type to reduce clutter.

*         To un-highlight a legend element, click the legend button again

*         Click on a destination city to make the destination information 'permanent'. This feature works great if you then click 'animate', or when you choose a price highlighting.

Is right here. (Please be patient while VisuFare loads)

Our primary data is flight prices for each source and destination pair on each day. This data is quantitative by nature. This information was obtained by scrapping www.JetBlue.com for all flights for the month of August 2009. We scrapped this data using python and the Beautiful Soup library.

We added additional location data from sources such as www.fodors.com, www.wikipedia.com, http://www.partow.net/miscellaneous/airportdatabase/, www.hotels.com, and www.google.com (which we use to determine up-to-date popularity data).

VisuFare was built using Processing, and relies on scraped data by python.

The software tries to follow those design principles taught by Edward Tufte. Keeping things simple and only providing more data when needed or requested. The graph doesn't use size inappropriately, or use any perspective. It is our belief that there is very little lie factor is any at all. The encoding of the data was chosen carefully to ensure the best interpretation of the data. The Quantitate data (flight prices) is encoded by length and position in a Bar graph (the price graph visible when hovering over a city or selecting it) and is also encoded by color (the color of the city bubble or the state shade) and luminance - the lighter the circle, the cheaper the price, and the redder the color, the more expensive it is. The choice of color hues for high prices and yellow for lower prices was reached after experimentation, white to red color brewer scale made it harder to discern, and the concept of a color scale shifting from one color to another was introduced in chapter 3 of 'visualizing data'. As implemented by us, we use both color and luminance channel, so the visualization makes sense even in black&white (or for color-blind people).

The animation of the visualization is just one additional way we show a very large amount of data in a small space - the number of price data- points over a month from all cities to all cities is hard to display otherwise, so we allow the user to choose a departure city and see an animation of the city bubbles or state heat-map prices over the entire time period.

 

 

 

VisuFare provides some insight on actual real-life value on flight pricing. Click the applet to see for yourself.

*         Flights from Seattle to Boston range in price from $159 to $239, and choosing the date helps reduce cost
- we garnered this data mostly from the price bar graph visible on selecting Seattle as departure and Boston as destination

*         Flights from Seattle to NYC are considerably cheaper, on almost all days, than flights from Seattle to other east-coast destinations
- this insight was clear once we ran the animation of prices with city bubbles, and makes sense since NYC is a JetBlue hub city.

*         Prices from Seattle to LongBeach CA are cyclical (apparent from the price bar graph) as are prices to Las Vegas, but not prices to San Diego, CA. This can be helpful information, since a user you may want to time their arrival to Las Vegas to save money, but need not bother with timing when flying to San Diego.

 

Future

o   We intend to continuously improve VisuFare even after the class is over.

o   Some ideas include additional airline sources, more city information, and support for roundtrip fare information (taking length of stay into account). Have improvement ideas? Email us!

o   The latest version of the application will always be available at www.VisuFare.com

o   The latest version of the tutorial (this page) will be available at www.VisuFare.com/welcome.html

o   To contact us about VisuFare, email questions@VisuFare.com