[londons_explore]

On the counter-side, if there are 300 seats on a plane, worth $100 each, and everyone does 10 flight searches before booking a flight, that means that your database needs to hold a few hundred bytes about prices, the plane, and departure time, and handle 3000 queries, and for that you get a chance to make a commission on $30k in revenue.

There aren't many computing platforms that could offer a higher profit margin per byte stored or queried!

[AlotOfReading]

Every single one of your numbers can be orders of magnitude off. Many people search without buying, there can be hundreds or thousands of fares for a single flight, and industry margins are razor thin. If you're lucky enough to actually get a commission (unlikely), your percentage will still be junk. Skyscanner (much bigger than you) is earning in the single digit percents and I have no doubt there's a cap in many of their agreements.

Pretty much any other computing service has a better ROI.

[sokoloff]

When I do 10 searches, each of those searches hits a substantial subset of every flight that could satisfy my travel need. Suppose I want to fly BOS to LAS for re:invent. For the outbound leg, I’m probably searching for Sat through Tues, every carrier, every leg, every cabin. That means a leg BOS-SLC, BOS-ORD, BOS-ATL, BOS-LAX, etc are all considered.

You can’t easily prune the tree on cost or time because you don’t know my preferences. You might notice that most pruning is done only on segment count, with (almost?)no one by default showing itineraries with 2 additional segments over shortest. I might prefer a carrier (I do), but even if I do, I still want to see the other choices, because my preference isn’t thousands of dollars strong.

Rather than 10 queries per seat sold, I’d not be surprised if the actual query count was 10K or more.