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.:-)
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 :/
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)<p>Sure, you might end up on a 5am flight, but for some people it'd be worth it.
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.<p>The eye candy is super cool, too.