

Show HN: Flight search engine that pieces together two roundtrips to save money - philiphu
http://cleverlayover.com/

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philiphu
Any feedback is welcome, especially around communicating the value proposition
and making it more useable. Thanks so much, everyone!

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tongzhan2013
How does this distinguish itself from existing services like Kayak, Expedia,
etc.?

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philiphu
Thanks for the question!

We run an algorithm to look at all the possible connecting cities and
calculate the price of purchasing roundtrips to that connecting city
separately (i.e. from origin to layover and from layover to destination). We
don't just limit ourselves to layovers specified by airline partners, so we
search the entire graph.

The savings we show are in comparison to the cheapest ticket you'll find on
Kayak, Expedia, etc. On about 66% of the searches performed (by search
popularity), there are no savings, but we show you the cheapest ticket you can
find on other sites. On 33% of the searches, we can find savings, and we show
you how to book those savings. Typical savings are $100-200, but sometimes it
can be up to $500 or more for long-haul flights.

This is hard to communicate visually, so we were hoping to get some advice
from HN on how to do this!

Also, to give context, this is a school project that we (a group of 6 Harvard
students) hacked together in 2 months.

