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Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

blog.jonlu.ca

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Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#31

Post by namdnay »

toast0 wrote: post #17
jd20 wrote: post #14

Looks cool! The problem of enumerating the best routes between two given airports is indeed an interesting problem. My favorite discussion of the problem is from Carl de Marcken: http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.034f/psets/ps1/airtravel.pdf I've been involved in solving a similar problem, on the award flight search side. There are about 12,000 direct commercial routes offering award redemption, and the airline website…

Many moons ago, I worked in the travel industry. Most airlines aren't running their own technology stack -- they are paying someone else $/search to drive their webpage. In a market of razor thin margins, paying per search for you to crawl their flight catalog is a big problem -- thus the arms race. The only way to win at this is to own the catalog, this is why Google bought ITA. Ryanair is the kind of airline that I…

The only airlines I know of running their own PSS are Emirates and Turkish. Ryanair are using Navitaire (Amadeus' low-cost subsidiary). To be honest, the cost structure is the same whether you're running it yourself or outsourcing - you don't want an absurdly high look to book ratio, or else you're just wasting server costs

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#32

Post by seszett »

whazor wrote: post #19

We (me and friend) are working on the same problem, however we are stuck at the next step. Namely the user interface: how do you let the user search through all the possibilities. We created some data structures that allow almost instant searching of such routes and we have scrapers running regularly on Ryanair, easyJet, wizzair, and Transavia. You can query the algorithm here: https://algo.tripchemy.com/routes/TSF?y…

What I've been missing is not so much finding the best routes between two airports, but finding the best (ie. least expensive) route from a bunch of departure airports to a number of destination airports.

If I'm in Antwerp, I really don't care much if I have to depart from/return to Brussels Zaventem, Charleroi or Eindhoven, it just doesn't matter. And if the fare is sufficiently cheaper, then Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Beauvais or Paris is fine too. And I don't have to return to the airport I left from. Typically it's the same for my destination in the case of holidays.

But I still haven't found websites which allowed to do that easily, apart from Google Flights maybe.

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#33

Post by m00dy »

namdnay wrote: post #31
toast0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many moons ago, I worked in the travel industry. Most airlines aren't running their own technology stack -- they are paying someone else $/search to drive their webpage. In a market of razor thin margins, paying per search for you to crawl their flight catalog is a big problem -- thus the arms race. The only way to win at this is to own the catalog, this is why Google bought ITA. Ryanair is the kind of airline that I…

The only airlines I know of running their own PSS are Emirates and Turkish. Ryanair are using Navitaire (Amadeus' low-cost subsidiary). To be honest, the cost structure is the same whether you're running it yourself or outsourcing - you don't want an absurdly high look to book ratio, or else you're just wasting server costs

I tried once Turkish Airlines. It was amazing.

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#34

Post by namdnay »

m00dy wrote: post #33
namdnay wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only airlines I know of running their own PSS are Emirates and Turkish. Ryanair are using Navitaire (Amadeus' low-cost subsidiary). To be honest, the cost structure is the same whether you're running it yourself or outsourcing - you don't want an absurdly high look to book ratio, or else you're just wasting server costs

I tried once Turkish Airlines. It was amazing.

I've flown with them a couple of times for leisure and once for work. Honestly find their economy food is better than most airlines' business food. The business seats weren't very good though, they're a few years behind the others

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#36

Post by aembleton »

whazor wrote: post #19

We (me and friend) are working on the same problem, however we are stuck at the next step. Namely the user interface: how do you let the user search through all the possibilities. We created some data structures that allow almost instant searching of such routes and we have scrapers running regularly on Ryanair, easyJet, wizzair, and Transavia. You can query the algorithm here: https://algo.tripchemy.com/routes/TSF?y…

How do you determine the score? Is it just niceness of airports? How do you get that information?

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#37

Post by jonluca »

shoyer wrote: post #8

This article misses the most obvious way to visualize this graph: put it on a map!

I actually wanted to do that but thought the cost/benefit wasn't high enough - I'd pretty much need to manually place all the airports information on the map if I wanted to use the library I was using (Cytoscape).

Visualizing the DFS at the last step was good enough :) Maybe in the future!

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#38

Post by donjoe »

mtrovo wrote: post #24

I use https://airwander.com/ when flying overseas, I don't know how well it works for low cost airlines though. It's a flight search engine that let you filter what connections there are between the cities you want to travel and help you book a single flight that is going to stay there as a stopover. Sometimes it finds some weird flights that doesn't make any sense if you're just trying to reach your destination but…

As an alternative, https://momondo.com works quite nicely for me most of the times.

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#39

Post by thesimon »

scrollaway wrote: post #23
pintxo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I am not mistakne, one cannot book via Google Flights, they will send you to Ryanair for the booking. Would make it a different case than the Expedia one.

Wonder why Ryanair would insist on having the user go through their website. Seeing as they monetize absolutely fucking everything, I suspect there's a bunch of crap they're doing with user data…

Because they really want to push their other stuff. Transfers, rental cars and hotels is where the money is made.

Re: Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights

#40

Post by radicality »

mtrovo wrote: post #24

I use https://airwander.com/ when flying overseas, I don't know how well it works for low cost airlines though. It's a flight search engine that let you filter what connections there are between the cities you want to travel and help you book a single flight that is going to stay there as a stopover. Sometimes it finds some weird flights that doesn't make any sense if you're just trying to reach your destination but…

Is this better than itasoftware Matrix? I used it twice this year to build more complicated itineraries, including layovers/stopovers or having just one leg (Germany-nyc) be business class on an a380 for only $500 more. Try playing with it. The advanced controls are very powerful, for example to find layovers, so less than 24 hours (so you don’t incur a likely stopover fare add-on), you can do something like “maxconnect: 1440; minconnect: 1000”. I’m in fact typing this from a 20 hour layover in Vancouver!
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