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Comment by whazor | Hacker News Reader

We (me and friend) are working on the same problem, however we are stuck at the next step. Namely the user interface: how do you let the user search through all the possibilities.

We created some data structures that allow almost instant searching of such routes and we have scrapers running regularly on Ryanair, easyJet, wizzair, and Transavia. You can query the algorithm here: https://algo.tripchemy.com/routes/TSF?year=2019&month=02&day...

Where you want to have a trip of 20 days (4 lovatons, 5 flights) from 10 Feb. Starting and returning to TSF. We also added some scoring for niceness of airports.

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What I've been missing is not so much finding the best routes between two airports, but finding the best (ie. least expensive) route from a bunch of departure airports to a number of destination airports.

If I'm in Antwerp, I really don't care much if I have to depart from/return to Brussels Zaventem, Charleroi or Eindhoven, it just doesn't matter. And if the fare is sufficiently cheaper, then Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Beauvais or Paris is fine too. And I don't have to return to the airport I left from. Typically it's the same for my destination in the case of holidays.

But I still haven't found websites which allowed to do that easily, apart from Google Flights maybe.

It's not perfect but skyscanner.net does the first part of your description. I just did some test searches from Eindhoven + nearby airports, and it found routes starting in EIN, BRU, CRL, and ANR. By default it shows different take-off/landing airports.

Edit: kayak performs the same.

You can try flightics.com

azair.eu does it.

This looks perfect!

Nice. Maybe check out Azuon (they provide a .net app (eugh; sorta runs under wine, though)) - an annual paid service I gladly pay for. It has two interface modes:

- the basic mode allows you to provide sets of origin and destination locations / countries / airports, and a range of dates; gives you results with direct and transfer flights (including all those ryanair+wizzair/easyjet/another-ryanair combos, etc.) and so on - check out how the interface looks like;

- advanced mode allows you to specify multiple hops, with time intervals / date ranges for how long you want to stay at those hops.

If someone were to provide a (paid, etc.) service and some decent platform-agnostic interface (for me personally, an API would do, too:), that'd be super amazing.

To provide some more details:

- Instead of graph algorithms, we use more algorithms that originate from databases

- Currently the bottleneck is improving server parallelism and filtering/limiting the amount of results (cause the algorithm can send up millions and millions of rows back). Which in a sense is also a frontend problem: which locations do you want to visit?

How do you determine the score? Is it just niceness of airports? How do you get that information?

ELO rating with A/B per airport where some friends got some information per location.

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