Hi,
I'm the creator of this itinerary. This is a site with great potential. If you appreciate the effort it took to come up with the trip and are interested in trying out the site, please follow my referral link and you'll get a 25% discount on your first flight!
http://flightfox.com/referral/16686
Thanks :)
Michael
The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents
81–90 of 128 posts
Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents
#82I'd be interested in a similar contest but with business class seats instead.
It would be interesting to see how much it takes to fly around the world in comfort :)
Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents
#83Here 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…
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 muc…
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.
Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents
#84I'd be interested in a similar contest but with business class seats instead. It would be interesting to see how much it takes to fly around the world in comfort :)
We can definitely see that contest coming up soon. With this contest we thought sub-$2k would be a huge stretch, but the flight hackers seemed to manage it with ease. For business, we can't imagine it being less than $5-6k, but we'll see. Sub-$5k would be amazing.
Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents
#85Hi, I'm the creator of this itinerary. This is a site with great potential. If you appreciate the effort it took to come up with the trip and are interested in trying out the site, please follow my referral link and you'll get a 25% discount on your first flight! http://flightfox.com/referral/16686 Thanks :) Michael
cool! How long did it take you to build this routing?
Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents
#86Hi, I'm the creator of this itinerary. This is a site with great potential. If you appreciate the effort it took to come up with the trip and are interested in trying out the site, please follow my referral link and you'll get a 25% discount on your first flight! http://flightfox.com/referral/16686 Thanks :) Michael
cool! How long did it take you to build this routing?
Quite a long time. I didn't think I could get a price this low intially, but if you have a lot of good sources, anything is possible eventually :)
Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents
#87I am curious about the scalability of such an endeavor. If you have to verify the fares by hand, you need a certain minimum amount of return before it becomes worth it. For example: I live in SFO. I might want to fly down to Vegas for the weekend, any weekend from now till (say) September, for $150rt. How much overhead would you charge to make it worth your while? Also: how do you settle disputes? Say I get an itiner…
Hi ajays, sorry for the confusion; we only verified flights by hand for this contest because it was somewhat contentious. With other contests, we let the contest holder rate/vet entries. If a flight hacker repeatedly enters bogus flights, we would deal with them. But that hasn't happened yet. It's in everyone's interests to spend time posting legitimate flights.
Right now, SFO to LAS isn't an optimal route for Flightfox. This will change very soon, but right now price is key and if you already know short domestic routes well, there's less chance we can help. In the near future, we'll capitalize on non-financial value of flights. This is really where we'll innovate.
If you aren't satisfied, for whatever reason, we offer a full refund. You generally need to ask for a refund within three days because we auto-award contests if they're abandoned. Our theory is that if you're not happy, you deserve your money back.
As for your last question about docs, we tend to leave that in the hands of the traveler. That should change soon as we build out the site (it's still very early days). We want Flightfox to be your one-stop-shop for flights, including all non-price info and all the tips and tricks that will make flying a much better experience.
Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents
#88There doesn't appear to be a way to register without creating a contest. As someone who'd doesn't have any trip plans right now (and doesn't want to clutter your database with fake data), I'd like to know if there's a simple registration page? I tried just /register to no avail.
Hi martin,
The only registration options are 1) becoming a customer, or 2) becoming an expert. There's no advantage to registering because only customers can see flight details for their contests and only experts can post flight options. Otherwise, what you see as a guest is all there is.
This will of course change as we build out the site, but right now it's just a one-trick-pony.
Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents
#89Here 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…
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?
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
Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents
#90Very cool! I wish we didn't need humans to find flight tickets, though. Hipmunk is getting pretty good, but I always end up tweaking the itinerary manually. Seems such a simple problem (except this particular one, which is NP-complete)