Offpeak.io helps you avoid peak season to book the cheapest vacation
thenextweb.comHorribly broken url management.... selecting a city replaces the home page in history so you can't use the browser back button.
Plus the search recommends locations nowhere close to the search term... and has like 15 total destinations.
I noticed this as well. If you poke around, you can see that only 53 cities are currently available. I tried "Portland" and received "Orlando" as a suggestion. Looks like it uses some sort of half-baked search algorithm that looks for a close match, but does not work so well.
Sorry about that. You're right, we need to work on our autocomplete algo and set a fallback for unavailable cities.
I will add Portland to our next batch of cities we add and message you when it's up.
Thanks for the feedback.
We fixed the back-button issue. We currently have only 53 cities during this beta, and are aiming to add a ton more soon.
And you are right, the autocomplete algo needs a bit more work and a fallback for missing cities. We're on it.
Came here to say the exact same thing. I tried typing in Montreal and it took me to Seoul. Really frustrating actually.
Sorry about that. We need to work on a fallback for the autocomplete.
Also, I will add Montreal to our next batch of cities we add and message you when it's up.
It would make more sense to be able to select from a list of available cities instead of a broken auto complete.
Sometimes off-season exists for a reason (ie: Rainy/Hurricane season)
This is true, but my October honeymoon in Puerto Rico - right in the middle of hurricane season - was amazing. Perfect weather combined with miles and miles of empty beaches on the island of Vieques all to ourselves. Airfare, car rental, hotel, meals for a week - it cost us right around $1k.
I mention this because even during the several months of hurricane season the weather is usually fine.
But not always. People travel more during weekends, holidays, spring and summer school breaks.
Depending on the city. In a lot of major cities weekdays are more popular due to business travel.
In addition to being costly it also gets very crowded. Went to Amsterdam and couldn't see the Anne frank museum due to a huge line of tourist. Then went to italy's main square, couldn't get inside the Basilica. Then we went to Louvre, same thing. I just don't have patience to stand in line for hours, so it is kind of my fault. Still, I think it's best to avoid the main tourist attractions because they are generally all booked by tour operators and each groups now contains hundreds of tourists.
If it makes you feel any better, the Anne Frank house has absurd lines year-round
Hehe, yep, they even made a documentary retelling the Anne Frank stories from experiences of all kinds of different people who're standing in line to get a ticket. (many of them having stories of their own).
They're working on it btw, expanding opening hours, allowing you to buy tickets online and skip the queue and expanding the museum itself.
Italy is a state, it has not a "main square" or a "Basilica", a number of cities in Italy may have those, maybe you meant Rome?
Yes, sorry. That was a slip of tongue. I don't remember the exact city but iirc there was a bridge of sigh and many glass factories around this Basilica. Googling it, it looks like Venice.
Yes, bridge of sigh and glass manufacturing, definitely it is Venice.
And more or less the same bad news as the ones about Amsterdam, Venice has a continuous flow of tourists, all year round, the "offpeak" in Venice is more or less perfectly overlapping with the cold, rainy winter period where there is less people visiting (but not that much less).
I have a similar idea (currently on the backburner) but instead of focusing on "peak" season I thought you would define your own criteria. Some examples:
1. When is a good time to visit (ski resort) based on your chances of catching a powder day? What about a sunny day? What about no lines? What about all 3?
2. When is the best time to visit northern Thailand when it's not too hot.. but air quality is still decent (ie not peak "burning season")?
3. When is a good time to visit San Francisco if I'm into music (perhaps during a festival) but I can't stand rain? And how does that correlate to hotel pricing?
Etc..
I like this approach a little bit better.
Only having "peak" and "off-peak" could have a waze-like effect, directing more people to "off-peak" might help distribute the demand surges a little, but probably not enough.
Being more specific and tailoring time frames to interest/objectives seems like a better approach.
Hey guys, co-founder and developer of Offpeak.io here. Let me know if I can answer any questions, and we greatly appreciate feedback.
When viewing the column chart for a particular city on mobile, you should add some animation when scrolling horizontally to switch months. At the moment it feels quite jagged and laggy. Perhaps make the action more obvious, too.
Apart from that, great work! I know my mother who pays attention to all things travel and tries to find the best deals will like using this site!
Interesting concept, but as mentioned in the article, the severely limited list of destinations really limits the utility.
http://offpeak.io/all-cities url broken to Istanbul
Also, this site should definitely add Tbilisi, Georgia
Fixed the URL issue, thanks for alerting me of that.
Will add Tbilisi to top of the list for the next cities we add as well.
Might want to think about a couple of cities in multiple regions around the world, rather than trying to complete a country as tourist typically season varies per region. For example, Africa (Cape Town [SA]) and Oceania (Sydney [AU], Brisbane [AU], Bali [Indonesia], Auckland [NZ], Suva [Fiji], Noumea [New Caledonia], Port Vila [Vanuatu]).