Flights With Friends @flightswithfriends-blog - Tumblr Blog

It's official, Flights With Friends is now Suiteness

Check out our new site or download our app in the App Store.

For our customers currently planning trips or who want to access their old trips you can still sign in to your account.

Thank you so much to all of our amazing customers who have taught us so much, we hope you love Suiteness as much as we love helping make your trips more amazing.

Grab it on Github. You're welcome America.

We shared some tips on group travel with ExpertFlyer

Julian Green of Jetpac models a Flights With Friends shirt before their Vegas Hackaway.

How to disable Turbolinks in Rails 4

tl;dr We are long time Rails fans so we started looking into upgrading to Rails 4 today. While the concept of Turbolinks is good we think PJAX is a more flexible solution. Here is how to remove or disable Turbolinks.

Why not use Turbolinks? Turbolinks takes over any local link, sends an AJAX request for the content, and replaces the body on your current page with that content. PJAX does the same thing but you opt into it per link and it only replaces the part of your page that you specify. The advantage to PJAX is that you don't have to reload your layout every time. Also there are far less problems loading Javascript and Javascript libraries, more details on this here.

How to disable Turbolinks:

Use this option if you might want to use Turbolinks in the future, or on certain parts of your site.

Add "data-no-turbolink" to the <body> tag of the layouts you don't want to use it.

How to uninstall Turbolinks:

Use this option if you know you will not want to use Turbolinks.

Remove "gem "turbolinks"" from your Gemfile and run bundle.

Remove "//= require turbolinks" from application.js.

Remove any "data-turbolinks-track" attributes in your layouts.

#ruby on rails #rails 4 #turbolinks

ungroundedthinking

Announcing: Team Transatlantic!

The final team is in. Announcing Team Transatlantic, which includes Claudia Fan Munce, Managing Director of IBM Venture Capital.

This group will focus on how to meet the growing US demand for STEM talent, from the global pool.

See who else got a spot on Team Transatlantic, below the fold.

flightswithfriends-blog

Our co-founder Kyle is on his way to London tomorrow with this amazing team...

Check out our new introduction video.

Now you can use us as a gallery for your great vacation photos. When you tag a photo with #FlightsWithFriends on Instagram it will appear on our homepage. Boost your likes with the thousands of people who use Flights With Friends.

Flights With Friends wants to make it easy for families and friends to find and book flights and hotels together, allowing everyone in your travel posse to see the same results, pin their favorites and chat about different options in realtime. The startup wants to solve the problem that many small groups find when planning trips, preventing the process from devolving into the inevitable lengthy back-and-forth, the group email chains and spreadsheets.

For you aviation fans like us here is a great video of an Lufthansa A380 landing at SFO.

There are now five options for Redis hosting on Heroku, not including Amazon EC2. So we fired up Excel and tried out the ones with public beta and production add-ons. We thought it would be helpful to share what we found.

All of the providers are in the US-East-1 region so you shouldn't have any latency issues (Amazon's uptime is a different problem). Everyone is also running Redis 2.6 so version compatibility shouldn't be an issue.

Besides using a provider who integrates with Heroku, the other way to go is to manage your own EC2 instances running Redis. It's the most economical option if you don't factor in your time. It's a relatively painless process to setup. But when there is a problem you are on the hook for fixing it.

Redis To Go

Plans: 7 options ranging from 20 MB for $9 (45¢ per MB) to $4,000 for 50 GB (8¢ per MB). They also have a free 5 MB plan

They are the ones that started it all, and then started the influx of new Redis hosts after raising their prices in July.

Pros

They have a long standing solid reputation

Responsive support

Cons

The most expensive option

Daily backups only

Upgrading to a larger instance is a manual process

Heroku Add-on Status: Production

openredis

Plans: 7 options ranging from $8 for 50 MB (16¢ per MB) to $700 for 13 GB (5¢ per MB)

Pros

Redundancy and hourly backups are included

Notifications at 80% capacity

Temporary bump in memory if needed

Responsive support

Cons

Short downtime when upgrading to a larger plan depending on the amount of data you have

Heroku Add-on Status: Production

RedisGreen

Plans: Only one option 750 MB for $169 (23¢ per MB)

Pros

Hourly backups

Nice dashboard with links to download backups

Resque dashboard

The most cleverly named option

Cons

Only 750 MB plans available right now, more coming soon

Heroku Add-on Status: Production

MyRedis

Plans: 10 options ranging from 60 MB for $8 (13¢ per MB) to 34 GB for $1,150 (3¢ per MB). They also have a free 5 MB plan.

Pros

The most economical option excluding hosting on EC2

Cons

In private beta

Short downtime when upgrading plans

Heroku Add-on Status: Private Beta

Redis Cloud

Plans: 1-20 GB, pricing is not announced

Pros

Memory size scales automatically to the max you set

Data redundancy, your data is sharded over multiple servers

Cons

In beta

Heroku Add-on Status: Public Beta

EC2

Plans: 11 options ranging from 613 MB for $14 (2¢ per MB) to 70 GB for $1,296 (2¢ per MB)

Pros

The least expensive way to go

Cons

You are responsible for the setup, administration, and security

Conclusion

We found that Redis To Go was the only provider who wasn't competitive on price or features, which is too bad because they have been solid. Openredis is our favorite option right now, their pricing is good, their service is full featured, and their support is great. We'll see how MyRedis progresses. Their pricing is excellent but we didn't test their service because the add-on is currently private beta. We are excited about the flexibility of Redis Cloud, but we are waiting for pricing before we move anything over.

#Heroku #Redis

Slate has a striking history of airline baggage tags. It makes me wistful for the older creative tags over our current utilitarian ones.

Our Concierge app for planning the best places to eat while traveling, won last night! We won for teams of less than 3 people, a team from Amadeus won for teams of 3 and up. Lots of great apps were entered and we are very proud to have been chosen.

We are going to polish Concierge and make it a part of Flights With Friends.

Some years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted. Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags. So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.

Alex Stone, NY Times.

If you ever wondered why you are at the furthest gate in an empty airport now you know.

While 99% of bags make it to their destination, Conde Nast Traveler has a great article about the other 1%.

http://www.quora.com/Air-Travel/Why-is-airplane-boarding-always-a-mob-scene

Daeken demonstrated an exploit for the lock installed in approximately a third of all hotels. Make sure you are using the door chain when you are in your room!

More details are available on Cody Brocious's Blog.

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