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.
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.
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!
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.
- 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.
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.
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.