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Comment by laumac | Hacker News Reader

For the cheapest route ($1,730), here are the cities visited:

Depart New York - Georgetown (South Am) - New York (North Am) - Berlin (Europe) - Agadir (Africa) - London (Europe) - Turkey (Europe) - Tehran (Asia) - Kuala Lumpur (Asia) - Perth (Oceania) - Bangkok (Asia) - End New York

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Geography nitpick: The airport in Istanbul is actually east of the Bosporus, making it Asia.

Hey mseebach,

We had a few issues in the beginning defining these border countries and decided to allow Istanbul as Europe, but will definitely group it for Asia in future.

We had a handful of difficult decisions, but luckily the winning entry visited all continents without contention.

Guam was the tough one for us. Would you say Oceania?

Guam is technically part of Oceania.

Although it isn't really part of the "region" as such.

For the winning intinerary, it's a moot point as both Europe and Asia are represented at different stops.

Istanbul Atatürk (TAV) airport is Europe, Sabiha Gökçen (SAW) is in Asia. The border is the straight of Bosporus.

Continents are a rather vague concept[1]. Any definition is going to be arbitrary. For the purposes of your contest, I think the spirit would be to have gone to the continents "proper", i.e. I wouldn't count Guam at all, but say the continents are the mainlands of: NA, SA, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, Antarctica. I'd be inclined to allow New Zealand as part of Australia as the only exception.

1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uBcq1x7P34

> I'd be inclined to allow New Zealand as part of Australia as the only exception.

Sure - why not, there's only a sea between us that you can fit an area the size of California to Nebraska into ... pretty close really.

Are you saying NZ is its own continent? Or that the continent should be referred to as Oceania?

Allow it as part of the australian continent, despite the water. The alternative is to not recognize it as part of any continent. Just like how California and Nebraska are part of the same continent despite, what, three deserts and two mountain ranges between them.

Did I mention that any definition of continents is arbitrary?

As a bonus, that would make the Brits very happy :-)

Other notable exceptions I can think of are Indonesia, Vancouver island and Manhattan.

I think you should extend each land mass to wherever the sea floor reaches a given depth (100 meters or so?), and then do a transitive closure on those to get continent boundaries.

> Geography nitpick: The airport in Istanbul is actually east of the Bosporus, making it Asia.

Nitpick of nitpick: The larger airport in İstanbul (Atatürk International Airport) is on the European side, the smaller (Sabiha Gökçen International Airport, serving mainly low cost airlines and domestic flights) is on the Asian side.

Feature request: be able to see the fare some days after it's "expired", or pay the same bounty and see the fare, too.

Thanks Matt, it's definitely something we're discussing at the moment. Fares can disappear at anytime though.

Absolutely, but it's cool to see how folks constructed it :)

Since fares can expire/disappear at anytime - do the experts still get to keep their commission if its gone by the time the contest creator decides to book it? Do experts have time caveats around their entries? Edit: Grammar

As you can imagine, this is a fairly big challenge for us. As we grow it will become less important because experts in your timezone will tend to reply, but now, we simply implore customers to book quickly. We haven't had too many issues because a lot of the value comes from not-so-temporal factors.

Aside from that, we offer a full refund to anyone that asks for any reason.

Could you tell us over what time period?

The $1730 itinerary is for 6 months (Oct - Apr), but the other options are different - one as short as a month (but at least 48 hours in each continent).

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