I usually have quite a bit of flexibility when traveling. Exploring multiple options with current tools (at least the ones I'm familiar with) can be slow and annoying.

So what I think would be better is a constraint based system. Rather than simple departure and return dates, you'd input more abstract info like

- Trip must take place between October and November

- Trip must last between 10 and 15 days

- Trip must contain 2 full Tuesdays at the destination

And so on and so forth. Then come up with all possible flights that meet these criteria, and let me sort by price, or by least time spent on transfers, or any number of parameters.

From the small digging I've done, seems like the real hard part of this is getting the actual flight data. I wouldn't even want to necessarily book the flight through this service, just giving me the info about the flights would be enough. But airlines seem to be really stingy with that data. Which kinda makes sense, but damn, is it annoying.

Maybe scraping could be ok. I'd refrain from doing that in the past, but with the AI craze, I guess I'd barely affect the background noise levels of bot activity hitting their servers. Certainly if I built this for me only, and didn't release it, or just released the source for people to run it themselves.

During a blizzard, their system fell so far behind trying to route planes and crews around it to make sure uncancelled flights could still be honored that they had to do it by hand and they were stranding crews and passengers all over the US by not reacting fast enough to new closures.

After that hit to their reputation the ownership and board shifted to a more extractive model and they have continued to spiral.

> Optimal boarding method for airline passengers (2008)

https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0733

I just heard about this paper via one of the best podcasts in the Local Group: https://coolworldslab.podbean.com/

6 months ago