To me it is interesting to see whether the NP hard routing and the incomplete data of online flight search tools create a big enough gap for it to be economical to pay someone to do it,
My first competition didn't get any takers ending with no flights, but I contacted support and they re-ran it and I got about 8 different itineraries - all cheaper than expected.
Funnily, there was $1000 to be saved by flying from Melbourne to St Lucia (Carribean) via London (~15,000 miles) rather than via LA (~11,000 miles). That made no sense to me at all!
The most obvious example is using frequent flyer miles. It's one thing to find an award flight on your favorite airline, but much more difficult to search all available partner awards.
Once we get into FF territory, there are also mileage runs and segment runs. In most of these cases you have to spend many hours yourself, which is why we built flightfox.
In short, Flightfox works best for more complex requests. We've seen amazing results with short flights, but it's not the focus and isn't a given.
What impressed me though is that they found a flight that I could not find on the airline's website. I don't know if it was a code share flight with some other airline but I looked all over USair's site for the flight I bought from some random discount site and could not find it.