The entire premise of Flightfox is that humans beat machines. Of course, in some cases if you only consider price this is debatable, but in many more cases, humans really do win.
Why? Because there is a lot of flight data and there is a material cost to performing a search. If you want a 6-Continent RTW trip, a flight search engine can't run 1,000,000 queries just to find you the cheapest route. The data providers impose pretty tight limits. When you hit those limits in aggregate, you risk very high costs.
Apart from that, and most importantly, humans have a wealth of knowledge that simply isn't catalogued. That's because it's too broad, too often changing, too obscure, or the airlines don't want OTAs to use that info; e.g. award flight availability across all airlines.
Our challenge now is to expand into many of these non-price factors and offer value even for short trips where we can't beat airline advertised prices. But as you can imagine, in its current state, Flightfox really comes into its own for complicated flights, even if just slightly complex.
The posted contest really beats anything on the web by a large amount. 6 continents for $1730 is pretty remarkable, or at least we think. It's not us who found it, it's our experts, who are the fabric of Flightfox.
Out of interest, how hard is it to get data feeds? Do you have to pay or is cost based on referrals? Do you have to enter an agreement? Understand if you can't answer.
List price (for minimum monthly spend) is in the 10s of thousands, but of course everyone does deals to reduce fees at this level. The problem is that those data feeds don't hold the key to the best flights. We're trying to leverage the stuff that won't be in data feeds for at least a decade (likely forever).
Because an algorithm probably hasn't been written that is smart enough to do the complex tasks required in these cases. It would probably also need the ability to scrape websites for latest prices.
The entire premise of Flightfox is that humans beat machines. Of course, in some cases if you only consider price this is debatable, but in many more cases, humans really do win.
Why? Because there is a lot of flight data and there is a material cost to performing a search. If you want a 6-Continent RTW trip, a flight search engine can't run 1,000,000 queries just to find you the cheapest route. The data providers impose pretty tight limits. When you hit those limits in aggregate, you risk very high costs.
Apart from that, and most importantly, humans have a wealth of knowledge that simply isn't catalogued. That's because it's too broad, too often changing, too obscure, or the airlines don't want OTAs to use that info; e.g. award flight availability across all airlines.
Our challenge now is to expand into many of these non-price factors and offer value even for short trips where we can't beat airline advertised prices. But as you can imagine, in its current state, Flightfox really comes into its own for complicated flights, even if just slightly complex.
The posted contest really beats anything on the web by a large amount. 6 continents for $1730 is pretty remarkable, or at least we think. It's not us who found it, it's our experts, who are the fabric of Flightfox.
Hope that helps.