[todsul]

Here are the winning flight details:

This is a 6-Continent RTW itinerary for $1,730. We personally verified that it's a valid itinerary, and at the time of checking, all flights could be booked.

   JFK 18-Oct-2012 GEO 18-Oct-2012 Delta (New York, US to Georgetown, Guyana)
   GEO 25-Oct-2012 JFK 25-Oct-2012 Delta (Georgetown, Guyana to New York, US)
   JFK 14-Nov-2012 TXL 15-Nov-2012 Air Berlin (New York, US to Berlin, Germany)
   SXF 29-Jan-2013 AGA 29-Jan-2013 EasyJet (Berlin, Germany to Agadir, Morocco)
   AGA 05-Feb-2013 LGW 05-Feb-2013 EasyJet (Agadir, Morocco to London, UK)
   LTN 26-Feb-2013 SAW 26-Feb-2013 EasyJet (London, UK to Istanbul, Turkey)
   SAW 18-Mar-2013 IKA 19-Mar-2013 Pegasus (Istanbul, Turkey to Tehran, Iran)
   IKA 29-Mar-2013 KUL 30-Mar-2013 AirAsia (Tehran, Iran to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
   KUL 02-Apr-2013 PER 02-Apr-2013 AirAsia (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Perth, Australia - YAY!)
   PER 07-Apr-2013 KUL 07-Apr-2013 AirAsia (Perth, Australia to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
   KUL 09-Apr-2013 BKK 09-Apr-2013 AirAsia (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Bangkok, Thailand)
   BKK 18-Apr-2013 KBP 18-Apr-2013 Aerosvit (Bangkok, Thailand to Kiev, Ukraine)
   KBP 18-Apr-2013 JFK 18-Apr-2013 Aerosvit (Kiev, Ukraine to New York, US)

Any questions, please ask.

[drostie]

For those curious, here are the stay times:

    1 week in Guyana 
    3 weeks in the U.S.
    ~11 weeks in Germany
    1 week in Morocco
    3 weeks in the U.K.
    3 weeks in Turkey
    11 days in Iran
    3 days in Kuala Lumpur
    5 days in Australia
    2 days in Kuala Lumpur
    9 days in Thailand
    

I like how most of this winning itinerary shows a clear disregard for the presumptive intent of the challenge, instead fulfilling its goal to the letter. That is, this itinerary is really in some sense two "trips" separated by three weeks in the same home country (the U.S.) containing not just 3 months in Germany (which is presumably longer than expected, though of course you can make very good use of that time) but also no time spent in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Cheers to the person who discovered it.

[michael991]

And cheers to you!

[3JPLW]

Because I was curious, here are the days of the week that the expert used for the travel:

  Sunday:    1
  Monday:    1
  Tuesday:   5
  Wednesday: 1
  Thursday:  3
  Friday:    1
  Saturday:  0

One other dimension of purchasing tickets is when they are bought. Prices fluctuate; do you have any thoughts on incorporating expert advice on waiting for a last minute fare or otherwise optimizing the purchase date?

[leecbaker]

6 to 12 weeks in advance according to this reservation agent.

"IAMA Delta/KLM/Air France reservation agent that knows all the tricks to booking low fares and award tickets AMA" http://www.reddit.com/comments/v82rz/c524yi7/?sort=best

[lusr]

Very cool site. I'd love to send friends a link to your site and have the itinerary information visible right there on the site -- otherwise you're expecting me to send non-technical people a link into HackerNews to see the details. I know already that will absolutely confuse them and turn them off from the site.

Consider opening up flight itineraries to the public for certain contests if you're trying to gain as much as possible from this sort of public exposure? (Even if that means paying the original contest creator back their $500, that's nothing given the future business you'll generate. Right now this link simply can't spread until more information is visible.)

[todsul]

Hi Lusr, we'll definitely do this for the next big contest and we'll make sure we get prior approval from the winning expert. Appreciate your comments re exposure, but it's not the contest holder we're worried about; it's more an issue of publicizing our experts' secrets and shortcuts. There's certainly nothing against airline policy in the winning entry, but this is our experts' livelihood. Our flight hackers are everything to us and we'd rather err on the side of maintaining integrity. We'll better plan for this in future, no doubt about it.

[starpilot]

$1,730 for six continents‽ My roundtrip ticket from Los Angeles to Kathmandu, Nepal was $1,800!

[ctdonath]

Small requirements are costly.

"Somewhere on this continent sometime this year" has a lot more room for cost savings than "this particular airport within a narrow time range". Likewise any product or service: "we can do something cheap, but to include requirement X is gonna cost you."

[ashbrahma]

This looks like a combination of one-way and RT tickets. Do your experts give instructions on how these tickets can be booked relatively quickly?

[todsul]

Just to follow up on laumac's comment, the booking instructions tend to be a large part of the secret sauce. In this case, we fully verified them and all the flights were bookable at the time of verification. We disallowed a few itineraries that didn't properly visit all continents. As an aside, it was interesting to define what countries fit in which continents. For example, Guam, Curacao, Turkey.

[prawn]

I think Istanbul is considered to straddle Europe and Asia.

Fly in to Ataturk (Istanbul), stay for a couple of nights, bus across the river and fly out of SGI (Istanbul). Europe and Asia, done?

[laumac]

Yes, the experts give step-by-step instructions on how and where to book.

[kapkapkap]

Could you update that post with city names in addition to the airport codes? I think most of us could recognize ~2 of those at most.

[jerf]

todsul beat me to it (good show!), but in the spirit of teaching a person to fish:

   for airport in JFK GEO TXL SXF AGA LGW LTN SAW IKA KUL PER BKK KBP; do
      curl "http://airportcode.riobard.com/airport/$airport?fmt=JSON";
      echo;
      sleep 1;
   done

Semicolons are present because I did this in one line, left so you can too. Linebreaks are for HN convenience only. echo is because curl doesn't add linefeeds, sleep 1 is to be polite.

[riobard]

Author of airportcode.riobard.com here. Couldn't believe my eyes when I saw someone wrote a script to call that ancient API of mine from a few years back. Thank you for the `sleep 1` =)

I haven't maintained that service for a long time, and I've got a dozen or so emails suggesting ways to improve the API. I'm not sure what I should do with it, given that the data is really scrapped from Wikipedia and pretty hard to keep it up-to-date. Any suggestions?

[jerf]

Ha! Sorry, didn't mean to resurrect a dead project. I just searched for an API to the airport codes and ran with it.

I was actually hoping to find just a data dump of them somewhere, but if you can't I suppose no such thing publicly exists.

My personal recommendation is to do what you want to do. If you don't want to maintain it, perhaps add a note about that, but whatever. You've got no obligation.

[riobard]

Please don't feel sorry about it. I'm actually quite happy to see it's still useful for someone today. I'm just not sure what to do with it next. Right now it doesn't cost me anything to run it anyway. Thanks very much for your idea :)

I was in searching of such a data dump before I wrote AirportCode, but like you said, it's not really available. Some websites sell these data for big fees, which I couldn't pay for, so I ended up scraping Wikipedia for the data. And these things change over the time, which makes it rather complicated to maintain.

I'm thinking maybe something like open source data would be helpful to make these kinds of data available to the public, and let the public to update and maintain it so everyone could benefit from it.

[whiskers]

http://openflights.org/data.html has a pretty decent airports data set!

[ramchip]

Doesn't work on Windows ;)

[jerf]

Sure it does. Install cygwin. (Or something else like that.) No serious computer user should be without a good shell. Powershell may be fine, too. There's probably some way to convince it to understand the JSON as a native object.

[lolcraft]

    $wc = New-Object "System.Net.WebClient"
    $airports = @("JFK", "GEO", "TXL", "SXF", "AGA", "LGW", "LTN", "SAW", "IKA", "KUL", "PER", "BKK", "KBP")
    foreach($airport in $airports) {
        $wc.DownloadString("http://airportcode.riobard.com/airport/" + $airport + "?fmt=json")
    }

[todsul]

Done, please see above.

[blyuher]

Just wow, unbelievable! Though I have a question: How have you confirmed the last two steps (BKK to KBP to JFK)? I tried Aerosvit site, Hipmunk and Skyscanner and haven't been able to replicate this result.

[205guy]

RTW (round the world, I assume) may have some special meaning in this context, but to the lay person, that itenerary does not cross all degrees of longitude and, notably, not the dateline.

[damian2000]

Its fascinating that some of these destinations seem initially to be way off the beaten track, e.g. Kiev, Perth, Agadir. Never thought they would feature on any cheapest RTW itinerary.

[lukeholder]

Perth is not off the beaten track. It's the San Fran of Australia!

[damian2000]

Amen, I live in Perth and its an awesome place. I meant its off the beaten track of tourists coming to Australia - something like <5% of tourist visitors to Aus take the time to visit Perth.

[megablast]

Perth is one of the remotest cities in the world (along with Honolulu), it is around 3,000 km to the nearest city, with a huge desert in the way.

It might be the San Fran of Australia if you are a miner.

[flog]

What? Perth is, colloquially, the arsehole of nowhere.

[taligent]

Perth is the cheapest way to visit Australia if you are already in the Asia region.

[robbiep]

that depends. Cheapest to get there? Because a cup of coffee there will set you back more than in sydney these days

[yitchelle]

After you have done Perth, then what?

[damian2000]

Fremantle & Rottnest island are good for tourists and cheap to travel to.

[Monotoko]

Can you break down the price by flight? Or would that be too much information? I'd be interested to see how much each flight costs.