As others noticed, the connections usually suck and are not guaranteed (looked up a european flight, found a 3h30m layover in London between Heathrow and Stansted - well good luck making that!). That is something I could accepted if I was still a student, but no more (since I did not make a connection one day due to bad weather :)<p>Personal anecdote: several years ago when Ryanair used to offer ultra cheap flights within Europe (as long as you paid with appropriate credit card type and accepted weird dates and times of the flights) I wrote a Ryanair-only poor man's version of this tool, looking for connections through two particular hubs of interest. The code sucked incredibly, but managed to get me two very cheap bookings (well, had to spend some nights in the airports, but it's nothing when you're young and short on money). Then Ryanair did some changes (and also raised the prices) which made the project obsolete. Old good times :)<p>Regarding the code, I had to do some reverse engineering to parse the responses from the airline's site. Funny part was that the responses were non-deterministic for a given request, seemed like they used some kind of dictionary of possible transformations of output values of price to prevent easy scraping. The other thing that made me scratch my head for a while was that the response had some weird unicode whitespace in one place instead of "traditional" space and I couldn't figure why the parsing didn't work until I downloaded a response manually and opened it in a hex viewer (when I was dumping the response to console in the script, this unicode space was not there).
This is a weak pitch... Kayak, Hipmunk, any almost any other site have an option to include nearby airports when searching.<p>I compared the route they screenshotted and apparently the only reason TripDelta come up with a $150 cheaper one-way option ($302 vs $455) is by flying Spirit from OAK to LAX with a 9 hour layover. Kayak probably assumes that layover is excessive and filters it out. Because really, if you're that desperate to save funds, just take Greyhound to LAX.<p>And if you book round trip, returning a week later, it's $779 on Kayak and over $1086 on TripDelta. Plus Kayak will also give you the probability that prices will drop in the next 7 days.
Assuming this sets up flights where the legs are separate bookings and maybe even multiple airlines, there's a risk that you're on your own and have to buy new tickets if you miss your connecting flight due to delays/cancellations, no?
ITA Matrix allows for the same functionality and a lot more: <a href="https://matrix.itasoftware.com/" rel="nofollow">https://matrix.itasoftware.com/</a>
Huh, I tried a SEA-LON ticket, best price $1363 on Kayak.<p>TripDelta found me a $655 flight, except out of Portland (which is like a 3 hour drive away), and a $750 flight that looks like<p>SEA-EWR / JFK-LHR<p>which is a hell of a connection. I couldn't deal with the inconvenience, but even so I'm kind of impressed.
Such linkbait nonsense. Lesser known but brilliant Icelandic search engine dohop.com in particular has being finding all these options for over ten years. e.g <a href="http://www.dohop.com/flights/?d1=190116&d2=&a1=SFO%2CSJC%2COAK&a2=LHR%2CLGW%2CSTN%2CLCY%2CLTN%2CSEN&return=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.dohop.com/flights/?d1=190116&d2=&a1=SFO%2CSJC%2CO...</a>
> "The site was built by a team of mathematicians who traveled to more than 100 countries"<p>Could somebody explain why mathematicians(!) have physically travel to 100+ countries to build a web site? Are these airports so secret they could not be reached with modern means of communications?<p>I suspect it is just a bad marketing pitch...
Ticket hacking and "Mixing" airlines becomes a problem if you miss a flight. This can be highly risky.<p>What I would be more interested in is this problem:
Often I get reimbursed for a flight from A to B.<p>Often I can fly A->C->B and make a nice (paid) vacation in C. Hence I look for the most interesting routes possible for a decent price.<p>Especially exotic airlines can be a great deal here. Currently I look up the airport to see what airlines are served by this airport and then see if there is an airline that has it's hub in an interesting tourist destination.<p>Better solution?
Searched YYZ-SFO on Dec 22. Google Flights gave me US$206, Tripdelta gave me US$248 with SMF (Sacramento) as the destination, with approximately the same airtime. Tripdelta doesn't even show the $206 flight as an option.<p>Better off using Google Flights with multiple destinations. Put a little bit of effort into finding which origin/destination airports are viable for you, and search directly for it on another OTA.
It did not get me any flights that was cheaper than the site i usually use.<p>In fact the cheapest flight was in general (over my 3 test searches of flying to New Zealand.) 50-100$ more expensive and had one extra stop. About the same flight times.<p>And about 40USD more expensive when flying to new york and 20 hours longer
Nice, except I'm reasonably sure that I do, in fact, want to go to Austin, and not San Antonio: <a href="http://imgur.com/aQupfq0" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/aQupfq0</a><p>An in fact, those suggestions are more expensive then the actual flights to Austin.
Having just watched the most recent South Park episodes <i>Sponsored Content</i> and <i>Truth and Advertising</i>, I'm honestly not sure if this a real story or very well placed native advertising... Oh, Lifehacker.
> The site was built by a team of mathematicians who traveled to more than 100 countries ...<p>I want that job. Maybe I should do a startup that rates the world's vegetarian restaurants. VCs, are you listening?
Is this some sort of paid-for journalism, posted on HN? What is this more than some ad disguised as legitimate article? It annoys me a lot to see that on the front page.