
The Programmer’s Guide to Booking a Plane - robbiet480
https://hackernoon.com/the-programmers-guide-to-booking-a-plane-11e37d610045#.d04atbt16
======
faebi
I have a long distance relationship and therefore I run into similar issues.
Unlike most traveleres and therefore search machines I was looking for the
dates with the cheapest flights from or to my city from or to my girlfriends
city. I do not care which airline, dates or weekdays. All I care is arround
the weekend and as cheap as possible. So I made a ruby script which searches
all those thousands of possible combinations in a flightsearch machine, took
the 20 cheapest flights per date combination, took my favourite direct flights
per date combination and put it all into a basic rails application. After that
I could group and rate those dates and see when I should book which flight.
Also important for the rating were: total flight time, favourite airlines,
hated airlines and the price difference between cheapest flight and favourite
flight. Like this I could get a nice overview how my girlfriend and me can
meet easily. The time spent developing exceeded the usual flight search time
quite fast. As my flight search machine I used swoodoo/kayak which is in my
opinion by far the best I found. /sorry for any typos in this comment, I
actually just landed.:-)

------
herbst
Cant comment on the article because of some third party cookie bullshit. But
sounds like a fun project. I started something like this 3 days ago with
airasia just to realize their website does not want me to make that amount of
requests :/

------
trendia
Airlines should offer a flight service where you pay a heavily discounted fare
up front but you don't know when it will fly until a day before. For instance,
you would pay $250 for a flight tfrom LAX to JFK, and they would put you
wherever they had the most vacancy. (or whatever is cheapest)

Sure, you might end up on a 5am flight, but for some people it'd be worth it.

------
traviscj
This is really awesome! One of my "life mantras" is "Don't Poll", and this is
exactly the kind of thing I have in mind when I think that.

The eye candy is super cool, too.

------
lsiunsuex
Definitely going to use this if we go to Vegas for vacation this year (SW
fly's direct there from "here") - thanks!

