Have a look at the scrolling search suggestions on the front of http://adioso.com, then try executing the same searches on Kayak, in a single search. All of them.
All of them? Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying, but if you mean that the random travel searches you scroll on the site are a feature, that is bordering on insane.
I don't need to go to some random place for some random duration at some random time.
So, since it would be insane to consider random trips to be a useful feature, I assumed that it was recommending certain trips because they were really good deals. Maybe your system figured out I live near San Jose, and recommended me a flight because it was just such a great deal it was worth my time to try that search and maybe go on a vacation on a whim. That would actually be an awesome feature, and I would probably use it a lot! So, benefit of the doubt.
So, the best fare that Kayak found was a $277 hacker fare. That's almost exactly half as much as what Adioso found. Sure, that's a hacker fare, and for a 10 day trip not 7 days. Fine, the best fare that is exactly comparable is $350 for a 7 day trip leaving next week round-trip on Delta.
I mean they're examples of searches you can do on Adioso, many/most of which take a lot of time and many repetitive searches on other sites.
The Hawaii search you tried came up with the same fares as Kayak when I tried it. It may well have timed out for you, which is part of the performance challenges this post is mostly about.
But it occurs to me your approach to travel doesn't make you the intended customer for this product, so I won't try to persuade you further :)
Who exactly is your intended customer currently? I'm honestly curious. Your site currently doesn't support things like "I'd like to leave from anywhere in CA and go to Europe sometime in August and have a really great experience and a really good deal" and you're also claiming it doesn't work for the style of the person you're responding to... so... who exactly is it that you think is the target user of Adioso?
I'm not just giving you a hard time, either. I'm planning a trip soon and we've got a lot of flexibility in a lot of ways combined with some whacky constraints in others. Is Adioso right for me?
I honestly can't tell. It seems like I should be able to.
Usually! But I know people whose idea of a geographic starting point would be a lot larger than you'd think and would just treat it as an excuse for a roadtrip.
Also you could have a schedule where some days I know I'm going to be near city X and others near city Y, but I wouldn't mind beginning from either.
This is my history on your site. It took me 5 tries before I even saw the page that is the entire point of the site. I would take the negative feedback people are giving you here and accept that some of it comes from an honest attempt to give feedback to a fellow traveler, and use it to improve your shit.
Here is my search history on your site:
"Europe to California":
Error: Too broad.
"France to California":
Error: Too broad.
"France to San Jose":
Error: Too broad.
"Frankfurt to San Jose between June 11 and June 14":
Tried to find flights between Frankfurt and San Jose Argentina, even though there are no such flights.
Forgot about the June 14 completely, limited my search to just June 11.
By now I'm only holding on because, you know, I love arguing with you on the internet and I need more ammunition. So I keep driving on.
"San Jose to Frankfurt":
Hey, I finally see some flights! I'm not sure why I would use this instead of literally any other flight search engine, but at least it didn't just have an error.
"San Jose to France in August":
Oh my! Now it's actually doing something interesting, loading fares to many, many destinations at once. Suddenly I see the point of the site.
