I compared the route they screenshotted and apparently the only reason TripDelta come up with a $150 cheaper one-way option ($302 vs $455) is by flying Spirit from OAK to LAX with a 9 hour layover. Kayak probably assumes that layover is excessive and filters it out. Because really, if you're that desperate to save funds, just take Greyhound to LAX.
And if you book round trip, returning a week later, it's $779 on Kayak and over $1086 on TripDelta. Plus Kayak will also give you the probability that prices will drop in the next 7 days.
Would be surprised if it gives you the same price, usually direct flights are more expensive.
I'm borrowing this from Vayant (which I think is a B2B competitor) with seemingly similar challenges:
> As mentioned above, the computational challenge here is to solve a “traveling salesman” style problem, with costs associated with each graph segment and in fact each combination of segments.
Source: http://vayant.com/airline-availability-solving-travelling-sa...
> Is it safe to book your results?
> Yes. We only work with highly respected partners and choose very carefully who we trust.
> Is it safe to book two separate tickets?
> Yes, it is. Just make sure to have enough time between two different tickets on the same day. To make it even easier, we will soon be offering stopover protection.
Could somebody explain why mathematicians(!) have physically travel to 100+ countries to build a web site? Are these airports so secret they could not be reached with modern means of communications?
I suspect it is just a bad marketing pitch...
An in fact, those suggestions are more expensive then the actual flights to Austin.
However, in your case if they're still more expensive than the direct flights then seems like a broken calculation.
Personal anecdote: several years ago when Ryanair used to offer ultra cheap flights within Europe (as long as you paid with appropriate credit card type and accepted weird dates and times of the flights) I wrote a Ryanair-only poor man's version of this tool, looking for connections through two particular hubs of interest. The code sucked incredibly, but managed to get me two very cheap bookings (well, had to spend some nights in the airports, but it's nothing when you're young and short on money). Then Ryanair did some changes (and also raised the prices) which made the project obsolete. Old good times :)
Regarding the code, I had to do some reverse engineering to parse the responses from the airline's site. Funny part was that the responses were non-deterministic for a given request, seemed like they used some kind of dictionary of possible transformations of output values of price to prevent easy scraping. The other thing that made me scratch my head for a while was that the response had some weird unicode whitespace in one place instead of "traditional" space and I couldn't figure why the parsing didn't work until I downloaded a response manually and opened it in a hex viewer (when I was dumping the response to console in the script, this unicode space was not there).
TripDelta found me a $655 flight, except out of Portland (which is like a 3 hour drive away), and a $750 flight that looks like
SEA-EWR / JFK-LHR
which is a hell of a connection. I couldn't deal with the inconvenience, but even so I'm kind of impressed.
What I would be more interested in is this problem: Often I get reimbursed for a flight from A to B.
Often I can fly A->C->B and make a nice (paid) vacation in C. Hence I look for the most interesting routes possible for a decent price.
Especially exotic airlines can be a great deal here. Currently I look up the airport to see what airlines are served by this airport and then see if there is an airline that has it's hub in an interesting tourist destination.
Better solution?
Better off using Google Flights with multiple destinations. Put a little bit of effort into finding which origin/destination airports are viable for you, and search directly for it on another OTA.
In fact the cheapest flight was in general (over my 3 test searches of flying to New Zealand.) 50-100$ more expensive and had one extra stop. About the same flight times.
And about 40USD more expensive when flying to new york and 20 hours longer
I want that job. Maybe I should do a startup that rates the world's vegetarian restaurants. VCs, are you listening?
