Show HN: what Google Flight Search instigated me to code up...
A little background: I'm from Brazil. In Brazil we speak Portuguese (PT-BR!). "viajando" could be translated to "traveling" or "travel to".
I was blown away by the new interface google provided for flight search. I mean, Hipmunk in itself proposed a new, unique, and novel way that (at least in my opinion) completely changed the landscape of how flight search should be done. But when google stepped in, it proposed an almost instant manner for me to see flights, repeat searches, put in adjustments and what-not. The simplicity of it was also something that got me itching...
My wife is always looking out for cheap tickets to visit back home, and I thought it would be great if she could use that interface... but alas, flights are still limited to US only. So when I saw a $2 .us domain go up on namecheap, I snatched viajando.us and coded this really simple way to see flights to/from US/Brazil with no typing whatsoever.
Obviously, there are limitations:
1) US/Brazil flights only 2) Limited number of airports 3) Round-trips only
All of these limitations are for now. Although (1) probably won't change so soon, (2) and (3) has more to do with the huge amount of background search and parsing I need to do to get all the updated search results. Each airport has all flights to the other country's hubs, all dates with a 15 day range, and all round-trip flights with a 30/15 trip length.
While the interface only shows the cheapest flights, I have them all. In fact, this will probably be really fun to play with from the statistical and data mining point of view... to see which airports, air line companies, and flights have the greatest variability, etc..
Would love any feedback from everyone here. Thanks.