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Comment by mspecter | Hacker News Reader

As someone in a long distance relationship, it would be awesome to be able to visit my SO over a weekend spontaneously if the flight price were below a certain threshold. I currently have to manually search Kayak which is a bit suboptimal.

Equally awesome would be the ability to query something like "Show me all round trips in the next three months that take off Friday at 8 and return Sunday at 8, and that are below 100$ for this destination". I haven't been able to find this kind of feature yet, and it looks like a simple MySQL query.

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Adioso does this. Inside the company we actually call it the long-distance relationship query.

http://adioso.com/us/nyc-to-omaha-nebraska-in-march-any-frid...

From your suggested query, we're just missing time-of-day and wider timeframes than just a month, but we're close.

The reason it's not a simple MySQL query is that most flight search sites don't have all the flights from all the airlines on all the dates pre-cached in a local database.

I really really like the fact you are using natural language to try and simplify these kinds of queries. However, your service appears to be quite buggy.

http://adioso.com/fi/helsinki-fi-to-birmingham-uk-between-ma...

- If there is a 1 stop filter, it covers the top of the page - On this search result, I cannot advance more than one calendar month. - Where do I sort by the cheapest flight?

Are you only writing queries on top of expedia? If not why does it say "Loading expedia calendar" at the top.

This is actually more interesting then hipmunk, but kind of not as easy to use as their service. Maybe you could just do a simple page like they did to query your service. And filter god-damn Spirit, they should not be called an airline!

How about this?

http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-domestic-return-5-to-1...

http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-international-return-5...

http://adioso.com/us/san-francisco-to-western-europe-return-...

Also, you can filter out any airline - just hover over the icon and click "Hide [airline name] flights".

Yeah, that's it, thanks for demonstration :)

This is awesome and incredible when I hit "watch price" it says:

Ensure this value has at most 100 characters (it has 103).

My email is not very long... its 8 characters + @gmail.com

EDIT: I like to fly back to see my family in Los Angeles and I was finding across the board better prices at hipmunk.

Thanks for pointing this out.

The value-too-long error was actually relating to the search query; a silly bug we've never noticed before.

Regarding fares - we're at the mercy of the agencies and airlines whose inventory we can access, and sometimes it will be the cheapest and sometimes it won't, but ultimately we're trying to establish connections with enough agencies/suppliers that wherever the cheapest fare happens to be, you can find it via our site. It's a big job, but we're getting there.

You could also try just launched http://www.tripcommon.com to see if there is some romantic destination for you to meet up.

They search prices from both departures and then collate to find the few destinations that are cheap for you both.

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