The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents • Hacker News Board

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#111

Post by drostie » Wed, Jul 11, 2012, 12:15 PM UTC

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…

For those curious, here are the stay times:

    1 week in Guyana 
    3 weeks in the U.S.
    ~11 weeks in Germany
    1 week in Morocco
    3 weeks in the U.K.
    3 weeks in Turkey
    11 days in Iran
    3 days in Kuala Lumpur
    5 days in Australia
    2 days in Kuala Lumpur
    9 days in Thailand

I like how most of this winning itinerary shows a clear disregard for the presumptive intent of the challenge, instead fulfilling its goal to the letter. That is, this itinerary is really in some sense two "trips" separated by three weeks in the same home country (the U.S.) containing not just 3 months in Germany (which is presumably longer than expected, though of course you can make very good use of that time) but also no time spent in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Cheers to the person who discovered it.

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#112

Post by michael991 » Wed, Jul 11, 2012, 12:20 PM UTC

drostie wrote: post #111

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…

For those curious, here are the stay times: 1 week in Guyana 3 weeks in the U.S. ~11 weeks in Germany 1 week in Morocco 3 weeks in the U.K. 3 weeks in Turkey 11 days in Iran 3 days in Kuala Lumpur 5 days in Australia 2 days in Kuala Lumpur 9 days in Thailand I like how most of this winning itinerary shows a clear disregard for the presumptive intent of the challenge, instead fulfilling its goal to the letter. That is…

And cheers to you!

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#113

Post by riobard » Wed, Jul 11, 2012, 1:10 PM UTC

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…

Author of airportcode.riobard.com here. Couldn't believe my eyes when I saw someone wrote a script to call that ancient API of mine from a few years back. Thank you for the `sleep 1` =)

I haven't maintained that service for a long time, and I've got a dozen or so emails suggesting ways to improve the API. I'm not sure what I should do with it, given that the data is really scrapped from Wikipedia and pretty hard to keep it up-to-date. Any suggestions?

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#114

Post by jerf » Wed, Jul 11, 2012, 1:23 PM UTC

riobard wrote: post #113

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…

Author of airportcode.riobard.com here. Couldn't believe my eyes when I saw someone wrote a script to call that ancient API of mine from a few years back. Thank you for the `sleep 1` =) I haven't maintained that service for a long time, and I've got a dozen or so emails suggesting ways to improve the API. I'm not sure what I should do with it, given that the data is really scrapped from Wikipedia and pretty hard to k…

Ha! Sorry, didn't mean to resurrect a dead project. I just searched for an API to the airport codes and ran with it.

I was actually hoping to find just a data dump of them somewhere, but if you can't I suppose no such thing publicly exists.

My personal recommendation is to do what you want to do. If you don't want to maintain it, perhaps add a note about that, but whatever. You've got no obligation.

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#115

Post by ctdonath » Wed, Jul 11, 2012, 1:37 PM UTC

starpilot wrote: post #75

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…

$1,730 for six continents‽ My roundtrip ticket from Los Angeles to Kathmandu, Nepal was $1,800!

Small requirements are costly.

"Somewhere on this continent sometime this year" has a lot more room for cost savings than "this particular airport within a narrow time range". Likewise any product or service: "we can do something cheap, but to include requirement X is gonna cost you."

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#116

Post by riobard » Wed, Jul 11, 2012, 2:19 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #114

riobard wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of airportcode.riobard.com here. Couldn't believe my eyes when I saw someone wrote a script to call that ancient API of mine from a few years back. Thank you for the `sleep 1` =) I haven't maintained that service for a long time, and I've got a dozen or so emails suggesting ways to improve the API. I'm not sure what I should do with it, given that the data is really scrapped from Wikipedia and pretty hard to k…

Ha! Sorry, didn't mean to resurrect a dead project. I just searched for an API to the airport codes and ran with it. I was actually hoping to find just a data dump of them somewhere, but if you can't I suppose no such thing publicly exists. My personal recommendation is to do what you want to do. If you don't want to maintain it, perhaps add a note about that, but whatever. You've got no obligation.

Please don't feel sorry about it. I'm actually quite happy to see it's still useful for someone today. I'm just not sure what to do with it next. Right now it doesn't cost me anything to run it anyway. Thanks very much for your idea :)

I was in searching of such a data dump before I wrote AirportCode, but like you said, it's not really available. Some websites sell these data for big fees, which I couldn't pay for, so I ended up scraping Wikipedia for the data. And these things change over the time, which makes it rather complicated to maintain.

I'm thinking maybe something like open source data would be helpful to make these kinds of data available to the public, and let the public to update and maintain it so everyone could benefit from it.

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#117

Post by ajays » Wed, Jul 11, 2012, 2:35 PM UTC

todsul wrote: post #87

ajays wrote: post #72

I 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 Flight…

Thanks for the response. It is a neat idea, and I'll try it out soon. I wish you folks all the success!

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#118

Post by exhilaration » Wed, Jul 11, 2012, 3:21 PM UTC

michael991 wrote: post #99

kornholi wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in your magic as well. If you don't mind, you can reach me at kornholijo at gmail.com. Thanks!

Any flight in particular? I can't give it all away as that would be unfair to Flightfox, as well as other experts. Flightfox really is a very good site where experts work hard finding you the best price for your particular needs.

I'm New Jersey - would love to know how you found the JFK-BKK flight as well, please e-mail me usmanc---at----gmail. No need to give it all away - I plan to use Flightfox in the future for complicated travel. I just did a crazy complicated Middle East and Asia trip, it would have been worth $50 to me just to see other options than what my travel agent booked.

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#119

Post by path411 » Wed, Jul 11, 2012, 5:32 PM UTC

todsul wrote: post #84

geoka9 wrote: post #82

I'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.

I would also be curious with a maximum of say 1 or 2 month timeframe. If I was actually curious in an "around the world" trip, I don't think I'd want to stay 11 weeks in Germany, ha.

Re: The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

#120

Post by sampo » Wed, Jul 11, 2012, 6:20 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #49

laumac wrote: post #10

For the cheapest route ($1,730), here are the cities visited: Depart New York - Georgetown (South Am) - New York (North Am) - Berlin (Europe) - Agadir (Africa) - London (Europe) - Turkey (Europe) - Tehran (Asia) - Kuala Lumpur (Asia) - Perth (Oceania) - Bangkok (Asia) - End New York

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

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

Nitpick of nitpick: The larger airport in İstanbul (Atatürk International Airport) is on the European side, the smaller (Sabiha Gökçen International Airport, serving mainly low cost airlines and domestic flights) is on the Asian side.