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The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

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Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#61

Post by taligent »

damian2000 wrote: post #60
todsul wrote: post #40

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…

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.

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

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#62

Post by joezydeco »

science_robot wrote: post #30
timaelliott wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

Yes, exactly. Travelling Salesman with distance being measured in dollars.

Need to add one more dimension. Distance is dollars, given a particular day of the year.

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#63

Post by ramchip »

jerf wrote: post #47
kapkapkap wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 poli…

Doesn't work on Windows ;)

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#64

Post by taligent »

todsul wrote: post #53
mseebach wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geography nitpick: The airport in Istanbul is actually east of the Bosporus, making it Asia.

Hey mseebach, We had a few issues in the beginning defining these border countries and decided to allow Istanbul as Europe, but will definitely group it for Asia in future. We had a handful of difficult decisions, but luckily the winning entry visited all continents without contention. Guam was the tough one for us. Would you say Oceania?

Guam is technically part of Oceania.

Although it isn't really part of the "region" as such.

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#65

Post by prawn »

todsul wrote: post #51
ashbrahma wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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?

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#66

Post by anacrolix »

taligent wrote: post #61
damian2000 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

that's because it's shit (and closer). disclaimer: i live in perth.

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#68

Post by prawn »

laumac wrote: post #33
GodsMoon wrote: post #28

Can I pay a small fee and see all the results? I would even pay a monthly fee for that. I would be very interested in that.

You can create your own flight contest and note exactly which cities you want to visit and we'll find you the best/cheapest itinerary. We're discussing now about opening up the results of this RTW contest for a smaller fee, would anyone else be interested in that?

Don't miss an opportunity to provide encouragement for people to create tempting routes. e.g., requester posts bounty for interesting trip. Pays the winning expert. Then the public can pay a smaller fee (to the requester) to piggyback on their info.

e.g., requester might've paid a $250 bounty, but they can make it back from 50 people buying the info for $5 each, less FlightFox's fee.

Love the idea, BTW.

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#69

Post by 6ren »

jhuni wrote: post #67

Is this using an eight content model, including Antarctica, Oceania, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and Africa?

I was hoping for the 6 Continent model, which would include Antarctica! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Number_of_continents But no, search for "6 Continents:" (including the ":") on the submitted site:

  - North America includes Central America
  - South America is mostly the mainland
  - Europe is borded by Istanbul (Turkey), Azerbaijan and the Caucasus in Russia
  - Africa is mostly the mainland bordered by Egypt
  - Asia is the Middle East, East of the Caucasus, and Indonesia (West Papua)
  - Oceania is Australia, NZ and the islands

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#70

Post by jerf »

ramchip wrote: post #63
jerf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poli…

Doesn't work on Windows ;)

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.
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