Looking for a more powerful way to search for inexpensive flights?

Question

I find things like yahoo farechaser and all the equivalent tools on sites like travelocity to be lacking. Anyone who's familiar with the power and flexibility of SQL knows what I'm talking about.

Specifically, I am looking for a way to make the following kinds of searches:

Alert me when the following search returns 1 or more results:
For each of these airports: LGA, NEW, JFK, BDL, look for flights arriving at any of the following airports: DFW, LAX, NRT, BIM, departing on any FRIDAY and returning 3 days after the arriving flight (the next Sunday) for under $600.

What's new to that search is the ability to group geographically unrelated airports together and the ability to look for flights leaving or arriving on a particular weekday, instead of a using a specific date or date range.

Now I'm almost certain no such tool exists to execute the example search that I wrote here. Do you know of one? And if there isn't a way to do that right now, shouldn't there be?

TIA!

I find sites such as yahoo farechaser, travelocity, swabiz, expedia, and even kayak.com to be lacking. Anyone who's familiar with the power and flexibility of SQL knows what I'm talking about.

Specifically, I am looking for a way to make the following kinds of searches:

Alert me when the following search returns 1 or more results:
For each of these airports: LGA, NEW, JFK, BDL, look for flights arriving at any of the following airports: DFW, LAX, NRT, BIM, departing on any FRIDAY and returning 3 days after the arriving flight (the next Sunday) for under $600.

Do you see how I grouped geographically unrelated airports together and had the ability to look for flights leaving or arriving on a particular weekday, instead of a using a specific date or date range? I've checked all the commonly known websites out there and NONE of them can do either of those things.

Do you know of one? And if there isn't a way to do that right now, shouldn't there be?

Answer 1

I agree that this would be a really useful service. I'm looking for a tool that will search one airport for a particular date range (3-6 days max, and not particularly flexible) and a price range and return a list of destinations that fit. Can't find that one, either!

Any experienced DBA can write this kind of query if you have access to the database. I guess what it comes down to is cost and return on investment, and potential market.

The kind of travel you want to do--- and the kind I want to do--- isn't really common in the US. Business travellers are not overly concerned with cost but require set dates and airports; leisure travellers are concerned with dates to some extent but will sometimes shift their trip around to get a better price. The mindset of "I want to go to DFW, don't care when as long as I can leave from JFK and pay less than $600" doesn't match either of these two categories. And since those two sets of people make up most of the US travelling population (not too many people get on a plane just because they want to get out of town for the weekend), there's no tool around for this market.

I don't even know that you would make a lot of money if you were to develop such a site. Operating expenses are high and if you're not actually selling tickets, your only revenue comes from advertising. Not too many companies are going to advertise with you unless you have a lot of visitors! So technically it can be done (and probably not as hard as it might seem once you have the data in the database), but no one has seen it as a good investment yet. If you are a DBA/SA or know a friendly one who can write the query for free/cheap, you could always develop one for your own use but keeping the flight data up to date would be a pretty big task and might end up costing you more time and money in the long run--- without a direct data load from the airlines, you'd have to manually collect all those schedules!

But if you decide to open such a site, let me know. I will probably be first in line to sign up!

Answer 2

I know theres a lot of people that use the computer and net to book flights and think they are getting cheap prices. Well they may I don't know.

I look but do not use the net to buy. The travel agent i use always gets me better prices and better service. All I have to do is call her and tell her where from and where to and what times. She knows me and what I like and does her job very well.

Answer 3

i certainly appreciate your concern over good fares. i became quite disenchanted with the ones you mentioned. someone suggested sidestep.com to me and i use it exclusively. it filters through all of the ones you mentioned but quickly and thoroughly.
we just used it for tickets to lake tahoe and are now looking up tickets for our next trip there in february.

Answer 4

Have you tried expedia or swabiz? They are easy and simple to use. We use those at my work.

Answer 5

http://www.kayak.com/s/flights.jsp?searchid=HiCNQ4yYwl3$3ToxG5Pe&completed=true

try that