A flight search engine that combines flights from different airlines? (2014)
travel.stackexchange.com
travel.stackexchange.com
The startup I co-founded (Adioso - YC W09 [1]) tried to do it, including having discussions with a travel insurance provider about offering "layover protection" - so that if one leg was delayed causing you to miss your onward leg(s), your costs are covered. Kiwi.com does this now.
We worked on it from about 2008 till 2013 then basically gave up, as it was too hard to offer a service that customers could really love and trust. (It wasn't for nought; the technology we developed was valuable, and the company was able to rebrand and pivot and now does important work for airlines to optimise loads and fares [2], though I left when the rebrand/pivot happened).
The thing that makes it hard to do is it's basically impossible to get all the flight inventory, including fares and seat availability, that's complete and up-to-date enough to deliver a service that customers can trust.
The engineering challenge is one thing - solving a multi-dimensional travelling salesman problem (price and distance/duration) highly repetitively - but you can solve that with enough smart engineers and "compute", which ITA did in the early 2000s, and on a smaller scale, our team did a decade later.
But you could build the most beautiful routing engine the universe has ever seen, and still have a user experience that's kind-of garbage because the industry just keeps the flight inventory data so locked down.
These days there are APIs and feeds available from the major distribution platforms - Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport, but it's still not comprehensive. You often still need to negotiate individual agreements with major airlines in order to be able to publish and sell their fares. And even then, many of the low-cost airlines (which are often most of interest to travellers who want to find the cheapest route and deal with self-transfer) are not available through these distributors, and some, like Southwest, have blanket refused to be on 3rd party search sites, only starting to relax that position very recently and only with the dominant platform [3]. Kiwi.com has only recently come to a partnership agreement with Ryanair [4] after being in legal battle with them for years [5]. (I hate the thought of having to be at war with your most important partners).
Others have mentioned Skyscanner, which was always the closest to us in what we were each trying to offer (we talked briefly with them about being acquired by them).
Right from the beginning when we got funded for Adioso, my mind became fixated on the thought "if only you get every single flight in the world loaded into one big graph database, what could you do with it?", but it turned out to be a very big "if".
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/adioso/
[2] https://amadeus.com/en/blog/articles/creating-a-private-resa...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffwhitmore/2024/05/25/southw...
[4] https://media.kiwi.com/company-news/kiwi-com-and-ryanair-ann...
[5] https://www.travolution.com/news/kiwi.com-celebrates-three-w...
At the very least it would make more sense to let their own frequent flyers snag such deals.
Giving frequent flyers very good deals make them expect them, thus not be so willing to pay "regular" price.
The loyalty reward in this case would be treating virtual interlining tickets as if they were an actual interlined ticket.
And with different alliances they already have fully functional interlining model. So trying to extend outside this is not beneficial for them.
We don’t even compare prices for domestic flights and we fly a lot on our own dime (15x-20x+ a year since mid 2021). We instinctively just book Delta where we have status and lounge access.
Usually this happens when flying long haul business class from smaller airports to another small airport on a different continent.
tl;dr - airlines are happy to sell you a seat that's taken, betting some % of other people cancel.
Is that still done?
Our pitch to airlines when we were trying to establish partnerships with them was that we could find flexible travelers to fill seats that would otherwise be empty, and we had unique ways of doing that (which is why the company was able to pivot to enterprise), but we weren’t strong enough for them to feel the need to partner with us (and they don’t want to help a small player grow into a big player).
Flight revenue optimization is an art and science at least as old as industry deregulation, and funnily enough is now something my old company is providing a lot of help with. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em as they say.
Besides the people who have high status with an airline are usually price insensitive business travelers.
The people who aren’t penny pinching customers who do fly often on their own dime are either going to pay for business class or first class seats or are going to get auto upgrades for free once they book. At least that’s how it works on Delta.
They surely aren’t going to sully themselves by sitting in the “cattle class”.
For instance, Delta releases cheap economy seats to their partners like Virgin and KLM. I routinely book short flights between MCO (Orlando - current home) and ATL (former home) all of the time for 5500 points via KLM/AirFrance to fly Delta (cash price $230 one way) and to see my parents in small town south GA (MCO - ATL - ABY) for 8500 points (cash price one way $358).
The tickets that Delta releases to partners are the least desirable times and they take away even tho use three weeks before the flight because they can jack up prices.
As an example, there are at least 15 flights a day between MCO and ATL on Delta. Three of those flights may be available on KLM or Virgin
I've done paid travel for several companyies and they've all still been price sensitive. They usually have some policy where they'll detect some "reasonable" itinerary but then let me choose my own as long as it's within a certain dollar amount of their "reasonable" itinerary.
Who are these "price insensitive" companies?
What's always been especially annoying to me is that I've never had an option to pay out of pocket to upgrade my seat. Company travel portal only lets me book an economy ticket, and if I ask the airline about upgrading, they say to contact the company travel portal, who of course tells me to contact the airline. $eyeroll_emoji
Of course, the companies always have a strict "ALL TRAVEL MUST BE BOOKED THROUGH THE PORTAL" policy, so I couldn't even just pay the ticket out of pocket and get a portion reimbursed.
> I routinely book short flights between MCO (Orlando - current home) and ATL (former home)
That's only ~450 miles. I'd just drive that.
Especially since it is essentially free?
Besides I work remotely and we have been down to one car since mid 2020. If either one of us are going by our self, we wouldn’t want to leave the other without a car.
As far as price insensitivity , what are the chances that the cheap routes are going to be available when and where the business traveler needs to go?
I assure you that the travel policies that your company uses for you aren’t the same ones they use for their executives.
I doubt very seriously that Andy Jassy or Bezos had their expense report rejected for a $3 stick of deodorant they charged to the room like what happened to me when I was at AWS (cloud consulting department - ProServe).
But even Amazon didn’t make you choose the cheapest route and I could always choose thier “most preferred carrier” - Delta - even if it did cost more.
I could also choose non stop vs layover if it costs more.
For me, flying is a bigger ordeal than that.
It's a 30 minute drive to the airport, to which I want to arrive 2 hours before departure to ensure I have enough time to go through security. It's never been more than 30 minutes at my airport, but I don't want to chance it. There's also the time it takes to check my bag and walk to the gate. I'll typically get to my gate an hour early.
I don't fly nearly enough to get access to lounges.
Then when I get there, there's the waiting for my bag, then waiting for transportation...
From the time I leave my house to the time I arrive at the hotel, that 450 mile flight would take me a total of probably around 4 hours. I'd rather just add on another 2 hours and drive myself, especially since that means I'll have my own car when I get there. But I enjoy driving, so that likely influences my choice as much as your access to TSA Precheck (I should get that) and the Delta Lounge, not to mention it being free.
I still hope to rebuild it one day but only when I can do it as a passion project. You can’t make a living from a site like that.
This is why there are close to zero flight search engines that are successful standalone companies and almost all the big brands have been acquired by bigger dominant players - Kayak is now a sub-brand of Booking (prev. Priceline) and Skyscanner was acquired by Trip.com in China.
Yes they can be valuable properties but more as a traffic generator for selling other products (accommodation, car rental, insurance), and you need a big team to do all that.
Sorta, the real pain point is if anything needs changing on any of your tickets, it's a total PITA. I value 'less hassle' more than I do saving 5-20% of the airfare. For me Kiwi (and other middlemen like it) are a hard 'No'.
No reasonable amount of savings is enough to convince us to ever use a third party portal.
My wife and I travel a lot as a hobby - mostly domestically with one or two international trips a year - and something is statistically going to change between the time we book and the time we fly on at least one of our trips.
It’s a lot easier to make changes directly with the airline/hotel especially when you have status than going through a portal
Just last month we had a flight to Vegas + hotel over Labor Day that we changed at the last minute to go see my mother in law who had been taken to the hospital by our older (adult) son. We were able to change our flights to another city (ATL instead of LAS) as an even swap.
This was Delta airlines.
Then two hours later we found out she had Covid and decided against it and were able to call and change our flight back all without any change in fees and get our hotel reservation back.
Good luck doing that when booking through a portal.
Unfortunately, Amex’s hotel partners - Hilton and Marriott are usually horrible redemptions.
Chase -> Hyatt is the gold standard. But Hyatt has a small footprint
May not be everyone’s experience, and if you live in a big hub city for one of the others they might be better. But for me, I only book something else if it will save me a plane change.
We knew about the non assigned seats. But flying Southwest without assigned seats is like a reenactment of Peloponnesian War (“We are Sparta!!”). We said we would do a layover before flying SW again.
My wife chose to fly Spirit back to LAS when she went to a conference over flying SW and that’s saying a lot.
I don’t have an issue with SW. The seat thing never bugged me too badly.
But no first class. And if I can’t afford business/first, I can’t afford the trip these days. I would rather stay home.
If things go wrong with Kiwi, they're likely to go very wrong, yes...but on the other hand, if I can keep saving $700 per trip, I can afford for them to go very wrong sometimes and still come out ahead.
I'm finding Google Flights more reliable these days.
Out of curiosity, what's stopping you from just scraping/crawling this on a daily basis? I'm at a scale-up that offers a BI solution for the hospitality sector, and we scrape well into the tens of millions of data points per day using web crawlers.
They obviously don't want you to, so it's an ongoing cat and mouse game of integrations breaking, but once we we're established and had a customer base, the ability to negotiate data API agreements actually opened up. Especially if you have data to offer in return.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs, but it seems some airlines would rather throw lawyers at a problem than let their users have a better experience.
[1]: https://onemileatatime.com/news/airlines-shut-down-websites-...
It’s just a very big undertaking - building all the scrapers, maintaining them (every time any detail of an airline website changed), getting around anti-scraping measures, running servers, and even then your data is out of date as soon as a flight’s price or availability changes. And it’s an exponentially growing undertaking the more comprehensive you want your index to be - I.e, to include round trip and multi-stop tickets.
Question for you: can Google Flights (or any other flight search engine) give you the same kind of search capabilities/answers/experience you got from Adioso?
I've looked for other booking sites that helped me determine where I want to go, but haven't found anything else similar sadly.
I still have fond memories of their legendary (pre-leetcode) coding challenges [0] posted on the T (they also hosted the Boston Lisp users group in the early 2000s which was filled with mind-blowingly incredibly brilliant people, everyone there seemed to be an expert in software and had a PhD in some other, non-related field)
Having worked a bit in the travel industry, I highly recommend that you never book through a third party (by all means use their search). Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline and typically have abysmal customer service, and I can assure you any "add-ons" offered by a third party are ultimately a scam.
How come I regularly see third-party OTAs offer the same itineraries cheaper than the airline then?
Sometimes there's a mystery fee added just before payment, but not nearly always – and I've flown such itineraries once or twice myself (if the difference was significant and I was absolutely certain I wouldn't need any change or extra service).
I was under the impression that these effectively share part of their agent fee with the traveler as a form of kickback (to appear as the cheapest option in search, which in the end might end up a win-win for both).
1. Reservation
2. Booking
3. Ticketing
Each step has its own expiration dates set by the airline, which can range from "instant" to several days/weeks. They may also set different cancelation fees for each step. A smart travel agent could in theory use this to cancel an old booking and book again if the price is reduced, but I think some airlines have changed their practice to avoid this.
Keep in mind that I mostly worked for the European market. I know US airlines operate a bit differently from the rest of the world. They usually have more flexible rules around flights and exchanging of tickets.
This is called churn and airlines are pretty on top of it. If you do this often then it will completely ruin your relationship with the airline. Maybe individual travel agencies can get away with it if they're trying to book a handful of tickets each week but OTAs can't.
> I think some airlines have changed their practice to avoid this.
AFAIK even direct connections still use the pattern of creating a PNR, confirming the booking, and then issuing a ticket. Even so in the US, airlines have to guarantee a full refund if a domestic flight is cancelled within 24 hours of booking.
Two reasons for that, one can be because the airline is less known in that market and whats to price more aggressively, and the other is that the ticket conditions are slightly different. For example your right to get compensation in case of a delay (and how much) may be different between those tickets.
Depends on exact case but if traveling on a budget going with low costers and connections a good third party can be better than an unknown shitty airline's system.
I used Expedia a few years back, got a lower price and could cancel for full refund within a day but they probably don't do that anymore. Kiwi seemed okay. Ctrip now owned by China.
I thought it was because of the DoT rule, but apparently they wouldn't be subject to that.
While airlines can apparently not legally completely prevent such "uncooperative" third-party resellers, and I do have some sympathy for the business model, it's not great to be stuck between travel agent and airline when things go wrong.
Other OTAs like Experian actually take the role of a good old travel agent (the entity historically doing much of the ticketing work the airlines are now doing directly) and will usually only sell you itineraries of interlining (i.e. cooperating) airlines, and also only of airlines that accept travel agents as business partners in the first place.
Technically true in that they can't undercut the airline on the same fare class.
But there are many different fare classes and some of them are only offered via 3rd parties, so you can often get much better deals via e.g., Expedia than you can by going direct to the airline.
Just this year my family flew Melbourne-Madrid then Milan-Melbourne, both legs on Cathay, but this route was only available on Expedia (and maybe other OTAs too, I don't remember) - all I know was that it was impossible to even search for this route on Cathay's own website. We didn't have any issues, but if we did I don't know if I'd worry about Expedia's customer service being much worse than an airline's own service.
The problem (speaking as someone who has to deal with Travel Agents many, many times) is that Expedia will say it's Cathay's problem, and Cathay will refuse to speak to you and tell you it's Expedia's problem.
It just happened to me 2 weeks ago. I booked a resort in Cancun through Chase Travel at a heavily-discounted rate and made an error in booking, for one person versus needing two. Chase said they couldn't change it and to call the resort, their middle agency said they couldn't change it, and the resort said they couldn't change it and to call the agent! It eventually got fixed after hours of calling and essentially pleading.
That’s not always true. I’ve often used services like Skyscanner to find a flight, then checked directly on the airline's website, and the prices didn’t match. Sometimes, it depends on which country you're in too. For example, I once looked at the same flight on Lufthansa’s German site and on a localized version for another country, and the price was different due to taxes. By a third part, I never had a different price depending on which country you are buying it.
However, nowadays, I still prefer to book directly through the airlines, though, because when they cancel your flight—and they’ve been doing that quite a lot since COVID—you have a better chance of holding them accountable.
> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline
This is not necessarily true. OTAs are not allowed to list a price that undercuts the airline but there are definitely ways for them to undercut the price that the booker ends up paying e.g. offering credits that they can redeem on future flight bookings. In this scenario the airline still gets paid the full amount for the ticket and the OTA makes up the difference.
Airlines are fully within their right to withhold inventory from OTAs that do this, but that entirely depends on the relationship that the OTA has with the airline. In some cases airlines actually run discount campaigns through OTAs in order to capture a bit more market share or fill inventory that they're not seeing being booked through their first party website.
>I can assure you any "add-ons" offered by a third party are ultimately a scam
This is definitely not true. Any kind of insurance product offered by third parties are essentially just that. Hopper's "cancel for any reason" insurance is essentially paying a premium to make your ticket fully refundable. Typically airline inventory managers price refundable tickets at a fixed premium and there's an opportunity there for OTAs to essentially undercut that premium because it's a naive model.
Those ITA puzzle ads on the T (Boston MBTA subway) got my interest. They were so much better for introvert thinkers, than getting ambushed in a Google interview context, and there was also no interference from a bad-loop interviewer.
> they also hosted the Boston Lisp users group in the early 2000s
IIRC, those meetings were organized by Faré Rideau. Volunteering meeting space was maybe ITA (then Google) and Northeastern University?
(I made the small contribution of building the the Boston Lisp announcements email list, by promising a lot of people, wary of social media, that it would be announcements-only. This included famous people, who I'd read about as a kid, such as in the Steven Levy book, or knew only from their names on books and standards documents.)
Incidentally, speaking of brilliant big names in programming... in a few weeks, Gregor Kiczales, Hal Abelson, and Gerald Sussman are speaking at RacketCon 2024. https://con.racket-lang.org/
I've paid much less (on international round-trip flights originating USA) on justfly.com than I could find on the airline's own site.
> Amazingly, the graph diameter is often as high as 20: there are airports that can take 20 flights minimum to get between
I wonder if that's still true. It's hard to imagine. And just the thought of having to optimize that search function made my cortisol levels spike a bit.
> typically this will be a small airport in Alaska or Canada to another small airport in Africa or Indonesia
It's still mind blowing to me. Surely any Alaskan airport would be within 5 hops of Anchorage (or not have scheduled flights at all, fine, but that can't be the case here), likewise surely any Indonesian airport is within 5 hops of Jakarta, and Anchorage-Jakarta can certainly be done in 3 hops in a multitude of ways. But one of those assumptions is wrong by 7 hops!
There aren't even that many airports to consider, the same presentation gives 4000 as the number included in the analysis.
Maybe the graph topology is something like a series of tiny airports that each only connect to the next airport in the series, probably by the same flight that makes multiple stops (not unknown in island hopping, and maybe then in Alaska/Canada too). So you don't really board 20 planes but you do require 20 takeoffs and landings.
But it's definitely plausible the author half remembered the routes with 20 hops from some optimized search like this, and wrote the wrong thing in the presentation.
I would imagine we're seeing two to four groupings of sequential routes which are subsidized access. A floatplane which hits every island in the archipelago, like a bus route, before reaching the international airport with jets. Likewise with bush planes in Arctic villages, and regional turboprops that hit a sequence of rural airports because they only attract a few passengers a day on their entire route.
In the early stages of vacation planning, it’s be fun to see a list of all possible direct flights to evaluate my options, but the use case of doing flight searches with an unknown destination isn’t too common. Basically, i want to be able to browse flights like a bus schedule and just see what the possibilities are from a particular start point
Skyscanner does this pretty well.
Helps you really know what you're paying for.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/flyontime/mjhocoppe...
I’m fairly flexible on dates, but getting the best price for it is a super iterative process. Having some similar functionality like excel’s solve function would be awesome to find optimal dates within a range for each destination.
I spent many a happy hour <2020 on ITA Matrix. It was well worth learning as a tool back then despite its terse interface and tricky syntax.
But these days? The sorts of clever tricks you could do before are no longer viable for the reasons I outlined at the top, i.e. connections no longer exist and/or the price is no longer attractive.
And before anyone tries to tell me otherwise, my experience is bang up to date. What I said above is based on 2024 experience.
But today fares are the lowest they've been in the history of aviation, except for during COVID which should never be factored into trends.
Inflation-adjusted averages for fares, both overall and on specific routes, for the last 30 years are here: https://www.bts.gov/air-fares
Even with fees and taxes airfare is the lowest it's ever been.
Internationally the difference is even greater than the halving of US domestic ticket prices over the last 30 years.
The tricks no longer work because the bottom has been reached and there are no more pennies to pinch.
If one buys a ticket today, right now, for next month one can fly from DC to LA for $98-- round trip. Then they will complain about paying $30 for a bag....
I can fly first class from New York to Frankfurt for less than what an economy class ticket cost when I was visiting my Oma in the 80s and 90s and that's NOT adjusted for inflation.
LA<->DC is my most commonly booked flight and I haven't paid less than $300 (net baggage fees) in almost 20 years. On top of that, I end up with less legroom than I did 20 years ago.
Google flights: BWI to LAX sun-sun $98 on Spirit.
I'd pay the extra $110 for United because my bags and an Economy Plus seat are free with my status.
Even if you've been paying a consistent $300 for 20 years, the cost fallen by a third.
Not from the US to Asia they're not.
Not even close to the 3-5 years preceding Covid, when competition from Chinese airlines drove prices way down
What planet are you living on ? Clearly a different one to me.
As I said, I speak from direct experience.
Before COVID, I could regularly pick up J-class (business) fares on top-quality airlines for 2–3k a pop.
Post-COVID for J-class you'll be lucky to get much change out of 7–8k unless a specific airline has a sale on.
Prices have gone up. That's a fact. I travel enough for business and pleasure to know that. And its the same with my friends and acquaintances.
Sure, if you're looking at the bottom of the barrel end of the sector where the LCC's operate then prices are still cheap. But tools like ITA Matrix were never useful for bottom of the barrel flights, you always just went directly to the website of whichever horrid cheap and nasty operator.
I've probably been on around 250 flights in the past 7 years in Europe and I can't remember one time that it was cheaper to book directly than through some third party. Sometimes it's the same price to book direct, but it doesn't matter either way: the support you're going to get is the same, and the insurance or whatever depends on... exactly whatever you've paid for already.
I think this is not true. In my limited experience, if you book a flight through a third party or even a code share agreement, you don’t get full access to the flying airline’s UI and things like changing your flight or dealing with cancellations are a real hassle.
Just last week I had an issue where I had booked an Iberia code share flight through American Airlines, but then Iberia bumped me from the flight onto an AA flight. Of course, both Iberia and AA support initially claimed it wasn’t their problem and that I needed to contact the other airline.
Maybe in Europe it’s not as much a problem because (1) modifiable flight tickets aren’t as common and (2) passenger rights in the case of delay and cancellations are stronger.
Some time again (as discussed in this thread), Ryanair had some spat with resellers. So I had to upload a picture of my ID to the Ryanair website in order access my booking that way.
I did some extreme budget flying as a youth and you might just get stranded at a random airport so you better be very flexible with your plans. If it’s inside the US maybe you’re fine to rent a car or take a bus or something but if you happened to layover in UAE or something then it gets trickier
It's no-nonsense, easy to filter by number of stops, and 'date grid' is great for scoping out savings by departing a day or two earlier/later without having open multiple tabs as other sites necessitate.
Only criticisms are extremely mild ones: it defaults to 'return', doesn't remember your currency, and bizarrely defaults to a month ahead for the departure date (actually, they must have very recently fixed this because it doesn't do that anymore!)
I've used Google flights ~50 times and hadn't seen too many recommendations for flights booked through OTAs, but hard agree with avoiding them (and booking directly with the airline).
There are considerable caveats when doing that – it's generally not advisable for connecting flights (you're essentially on the hook for missed connections etc.), and even just for separate outbound and return tickets it can mean trouble (e.g. if the outbound flight is cancelled, there is no obligation for the separate ticket to be refunded to you).
The point is there might be issues because the second flight has no obligation to refund you if you're late (but they might still do out of generosity).
It's not like it's gonna happen all the time. So having data points saying that didn't happen is kinda pointless.
That makes an enormous difference, since you usually can do your check-in online a day or more before departure.
I just had a flight where I had purchased my connections on separate tickets. When I arrived at the baggage drop-off, it was closed and no staff from the airline was anywhere. So I had to bring my big suitcase along through security and then the airline staff at the gate was friendly enough to check it in for me for free.
But if you're bringing anything in your checked luggage that security doesn't like, you will have to just leave that item at the airport. You might also have to pay a high fee to bring it to the gate instead of checking it, depending on airline. I had purchased my ticket directly from the airline, so maybe they treated me better because of it?
In the former case, there's always exactly one airline responsible for getting you to your destination in case of a missed connection or itinerary changes; in the latter case, you're often on your own.
My first flight was delayed, and it seemed likely I would miss the second leg flight, so they sent me an email with a list of options to reschedule. I'd purchased the 'Premium Protection', so I think I could choose a new option up to €250 (+ hotel if overnight) without paying any extra.
I decided to risk taking the first flight, as the second airport was much bigger so figured there would be better flights from there. Fortunately the flight on the second leg was delayed too, so I didn't need to change anything.
I've had a very bad experience with Kiwi.com myself: I booked a Ryanair flight on them without realizing that Ryanair is actively trying to prevent Kiwi from reselling their flights. Kiwi.com apparently works around this by booking tickets on pools of Ryanair retail accounts, to which they don't share the credentials with travelers – making mobile check-in impossible. (And Ryanair at least at the time was charging over 100€ of a "service fee" for a boarding pass print at the airport...)
This is only marginally related to booking separate tickets, but I suppose the larger point is that it's never a great situation to be stuck between the lines of two companies actively hostile towards each other, when you really depend on their cooperation to get to your destination.
"Official" interline agreements are an explicit statement that two or more airlines will make at least some reasonable effort to get you and your luggage to your destination, and will be on the hook for it (under ICAO regulations) if things don't work out.
If so why would you want this? Isn't the Expedia way of issuing a single ticket better?
I can't recall exactly which GDS Expedia used (Worldspan or Galileo I think), but I do remember that you could comparison shop between them and us and find lower fares depending on which GDS you were using because they listed some airlines that we didn't and vice versa and even some fares on specific airlines - Sabre was originally an AA subsidiary so tended to have better access to AA fares and was _always_ the cheapest way to fly in or out of Dallas.
So what OP is looking for is what the GDS's would call an uber-GDS - which is, of course, what all of them are angling to become, but are being thwarted by competitive business practices. It's entirely possible that he found a route that was partly available on Sabre and partly available on Expedia that was cheaper than what was available on either, but he had to go poking around for it.
So, why not make a GDS of GDS'es that searched all of them and found combinations like the one OP found? A lot of companies tried - sites like Travelocity and Expedia and Orbitz were online and scrapeable, after all. The problem was, there was no money to be made in them. Travelocity made a lot of its money through travel agency fees - Travelocity acted as a travel agent and got the same commission on tickets that a brick and mortar travel agent would get. I assume Expedia and Orbitz and Priceline did the same. The aggregators, on the other hand, had to charge a fee on top of that to make their site profitable. There are a few people like OP who have a specialized need to be in a certain place at a certain time that an aggregator of aggregators could come up with, but not enough that were willing to pay a fee on top of the combined flight. In addition, savvy travlers could search the aggregator... and then go book the individual flights directly on the travel sites (you couldn't do this with GDS flights, at least not back then).
So yes, Expedia's way is better, and the best option in 99% of cases. It'd be great if the airlines would play ball to give consumers what they wanted, but... well, good luck with that.