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Comment by beatthatflight | Hacker News Reader

Flight search. I hunt deals for Aussie travellers (https://www.beatthatflight.com.au), but an inordinate amount of my searching for deals is manual.

- initially, all manual

- secondly, timers - I know when some airlines do deals, so I go look

- thirdly, I found other sites indexing unusually cheap flights, but they're not always the same price on my site

- fourth, built a script to search my own site for a route, but the number of combinations rockets with the increase in date ranges. If you're taking different stopovers etc, it becomes ludicrous.

- it's growing at least, but finding ways to make it less hands on and less mind-numbing is a never ending quest. Although I still enjoy it :)

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That really is a hard problem. Here is a very good slide deck [0] detailing the complexity of flight search. It's written by an employee of ITA Software, who built QPX, the system that was bought by Google and now powers Google Flights. [1]

[0] http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software

Haha, I very nearly quoted that deck in my summary, I've read it a few times. When people ask "why can't you just show the cheapest flights" I usually pull out their Chicago example. The computational complexity is just enormous.

I've found, however that for one way routes I can do fairly well, and for return journeys I have to just sample the space and hope that I'm hitting some good dates in there, currently.

I've always wondered how flight search sites develop a system for such a difficult problem with minimal API options and Google limiting access to QPX. There seems to be a lot of data fragmentation in the travel industry too. How do you automate under those constraints? Are there good alternatives to QPX?

Not easily. Sometimes just doing manual-esque queries using selenium(!).

There are rate limits on a lot of tools/APIs as well, so if I can narrow my search boundaries quickly with some hand tweaking, it helps a lot.

Thought your username looked familiar, I've seen your site on OzBargain many times.

I always wondered how/if finding cheap flight deals could be automated, and it's interesting to hear that it's as hard as it seems.

Just FYI, your logo and part of the menu disappear off the sides of the site background on my 4K screen.

interesting - thanks! Would you let me know what browser/OS as well, just so I can have a look?

For sure. Win 10 Pro x64, 4K screen at 150%. Just tested on Firefox Developer 73.0b6 (64-bit), Chrome 79.0.3945.130 (64-bit), Edge 44.18362.449.0, IE 11.592.18362, all with the same issue [0][1]

I think it's just that with the background image being 1880×1253, it isn't wide enough with background-size: auto. I just changed it in FF devtools to background-size: contain, and it looks fine.

[0] https://www.dropbox.com/s/f0ewee5b1rc1bnw/beatthatflightLHS....

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/pxdvr2o8o96f6x7/beatthatflightRHS....

I see this too - see https://imgur.com/a/029OQCn if the parent's screenshots are not enough.

cheers to you too!

champion, thanks!

As some of the other responses mention, this is an insanely complex problem...as evidenced by the large number of businesses in this space. In your eyes, what are the best flight search engines at the moment? Aside from https://www.beatthatflight.com.au of course ;)

azair.eu for Europe and Asia

Kayak?

I'm a big kayak fan for their flexible search, and am sad hipmunk is shutting down this month :/ Grabaseat.co.nz is brilliant for NZ specific deals.

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