The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

http://flightfox.com/contest/18969

by laumac • 14 years ago

266 124 14 years ago

flightfox.com

gmig• 14 years ago

"Sorry, only the contest owner can view flight details."

MIT_Hacker• 14 years ago

ybombinator'd?

joshmlewis• 14 years ago

Yep. For me as well.

confluence• 14 years ago

Cached Version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...

hahla• 14 years ago

Wow that's a bummer I would have loved to at least see how far that money stretched (ie. places visited).

todsul17• 14 years ago

Hi hahla, please see my post above. We've listed the individual flights and airlines. All the best.

todsul17• 14 years ago

Sorry all, we've put up a cached version on the live site, so it's loading now. We'll also post details of the flights here so you can see how the trip was created.

laumac10• 14 years ago

We'll be up again in a minute - just upgrading the box :)

chrisrickard• 14 years ago

working for me..

thechut2• 14 years ago

I see the page and the prices but their website literally does nothing...

laumac10• 14 years ago

People who need a flight can create a contest and then flight hackers compete against each other to find them the best deals/flights. This RTW contest was an experiment to see how far our hackers could go, and considering a RTW itinerary usually costs $4k+, their results are pretty impressive.

thechut2• 14 years ago

Sorry, I should have clarified. I wasn't able to click to actually see the itineraries created even though there are "View Details" links. The other links I tried to click on the page also just hung. I guess all the hn traffic took them down.

Edit: I see your other post above now with the cities! Thanks!!

laumac10• 14 years ago

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

MattRogish2• 14 years ago

Feature request: be able to see the fare some days after it's "expired", or pay the same bounty and see the fare, too.

laumac10• 14 years ago

Thanks Matt, it's definitely something we're discussing at the moment. Fares can disappear at anytime though.

ashbrahma3• 14 years ago

Could you tell us over what time period?

laumac10• 14 years ago

The $1730 itinerary is for 6 months (Oct - Apr), but the other options are different - one as short as a month (but at least 48 hours in each continent).

mseebach3• 14 years ago

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

todsul17• 14 years ago

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?

sampo• 14 years ago

> 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.

jser• 14 years ago

How is this different than buying an around the world ticket through an airline alliance (e.g. OneWorld, Star)? Those tickets tend to start at around $2000, sometimes less: http://www.oneworld.com/flights/round-the-world-fares/onewor...

_delirium• 14 years ago

OTW fares were legitimate entries in this contest, but they don't start very near $2000 for hitting all six continents. I briefly checked, and would've entered one in this contest if it were that cheap. :)

Even at low season, if you price out an itinerary starting/ending in North America and hitting all six, using OneWorld's online calculator, it always comes out $3500+. You can get lower if you don't have the six-continent requirement, though.

laumac10• 14 years ago

A $2000 RTW ticket wouldn't include taxes and it wouldn't go to all 6 continents. All the prices in this contest include taxes and stop on every continent (except Antarctica).

blhack• 14 years ago

Why do you require my email address and a place where I was referred to search a flight?

laumac10• 14 years ago

When you launch a flight contest, there are real people on the other end who are searching just for you, so we need to let you know when they've found a great flight. As for asking how you found out about us, we're just gathering information on what works best for customer acquisition.

actuary• 14 years ago

My first thought upon clicking through was "Wow, a big crowd-sourced database of very cheap flights to random destinations. I think I know how I'm going to plan my next vacation!"

But then: "Sorry, only the contest owner can view flight details." And there's nothing more for me to see here and I go back to what I was doing. Very cool concept otherwise, though.

todsul17• 14 years ago

Hi actuary,

Apologies for the confusion. Typically, a customer puts up a contest so our flight hackers can find them the best or cheapest flight.Often this contains a lot of personal information, as well as the secrets of our flight experts. Flightfox hinges on competitive advantage, so we keep the flight details private.

I've posted some of the flight details above, so you can at least see where the flight stops.

But be assured that if you put your own contest up, you can see everything. Also, we're constantly adding more and more flight information to help you make an informed decision.

mliubinskas• 14 years ago

Love it.

It would be great to add premium economy in there too. :-)

science_robot2• 14 years ago

Why would you use a human flight expert instead of an algorithm?

timaelliott• 14 years ago

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

science_robot2• 14 years ago

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

damian20004• 14 years ago

Because an algorithm probably hasn't been written that is smart enough to do the complex tasks required in these cases. It would probably also need the ability to scrape websites for latest prices.

todsul17• 14 years ago

Hi science_robot,

The entire premise of Flightfox is that humans beat machines. Of course, in some cases if you only consider price this is debatable, but in many more cases, humans really do win.

Why? Because there is a lot of flight data and there is a material cost to performing a search. If you want a 6-Continent RTW trip, a flight search engine can't run 1,000,000 queries just to find you the cheapest route. The data providers impose pretty tight limits. When you hit those limits in aggregate, you risk very high costs.

Apart from that, and most importantly, humans have a wealth of knowledge that simply isn't catalogued. That's because it's too broad, too often changing, too obscure, or the airlines don't want OTAs to use that info; e.g. award flight availability across all airlines.

Our challenge now is to expand into many of these non-price factors and offer value even for short trips where we can't beat airline advertised prices. But as you can imagine, in its current state, Flightfox really comes into its own for complicated flights, even if just slightly complex.

The posted contest really beats anything on the web by a large amount. 6 continents for $1730 is pretty remarkable, or at least we think. It's not us who found it, it's our experts, who are the fabric of Flightfox.

Hope that helps.

skeletonjelly2• 14 years ago

Out of interest, how hard is it to get data feeds? Do you have to pay or is cost based on referrals? Do you have to enter an agreement? Understand if you can't answer.

mayukh• 14 years ago

they use still use a similar principle in India for a lot of travel -- its called a travel agency. I suppose flightfox is just making it very clear who the best travel agents are.

Gluck, I'll give this a shot during my next international travel.

dmix• 14 years ago

It's not what their achieving that matters, its how...

todsul17• 14 years ago

Hi there, in one respect you're right; we absolutely value human-power in flight search, which is why we're crowdsourced. But compared to traditional agents, we're much more aligned to your interests. Our experts don't take commissions, so they only suggest flights on their merits. If someone posts a better/cheaper flight, they simply win.

Also, with crowdsourcing, you get access to expert skill and local knowledge all over the world. You're not limited to the skill and experience of one person. Frequent flyer programs are important in this respect because few agents have an in-depth knowledge of these programs. Airlines generally don't pay commissions on those flights, so it doesn't make sense for agents to become specialists in this area.

Our experts come from all walks: agents, travelers, frequent flyers, etc. So you get access to a wide array of experience.

GodsMoon• 14 years ago

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.

laumac10• 14 years ago

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?

kapkapkap2• 14 years ago

I think people most of us are curious to see the detailed results but I don't think more than a few people would be willing to shell out any $. Perhaps consider opening up the detailed results for this contest as a one-time-thing? I think that the interest+publicity you will receive (in addition to already being #1 on HN) would greatly out-weigh the few hundred bucks that you might get from a handful of people who'd seriously be willing to pay to see these results.

When a post is on top of HN, I don't think we're used to seeing the meat of the content stuck behind a quasi-paywall.

EDIT: It looks like you've posted the results publicly now, nice.

Alex3917• 14 years ago

I'd throw in 5 or 10 bucks to see that.

prawn2• 14 years ago

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.

caseyf• 14 years ago

Is there going to be a way to create more flexible contests like this as a Flightfox user? Right now it looks like I can only do the same sorts of things that I can do on other travel sites (one way, round trip, multi city)

I'd love to be able to put in something like me -> (any of these 10 destinations) or me + friend who lives elsewhere + friend who lives elsewhere -> (any of these 10 destinations)

laumac10• 14 years ago

At the moment you can put in whatever you want - we have with this contest - you can write a custom destination like "Anywhere in Europe" or "Round the World". There's a text box where you can put any requirements you like, you can even ask for help to use your 100k United miles etc. We've left it completely open to see how people use it and then build on that.

zwass2• 14 years ago

Love the idea. You'd really have me if I could at least see something about the itinerary. Dates, cities, at least. Why do you have a "view details" link that does nothing? I doubt that gives away enough to render your service unnecessary.

todsul17• 14 years ago

Hi Zwass, working on it right now. Just trying to keep the server up. But we'll get to it as soon as we can. For most contests it's important that only the contest holder can see the details, because they're often quite personal. But in this case we'll post the itinerary because it's quite interesting to see how the winner managed to construct a 6-continent itinerary for $1730. Will post back soon.

zwass2• 14 years ago

Awesome. I see your point, and am excited to see the results for this one.

anonymoushn• 14 years ago

Is "View Details" supposed to redirect to the same page?

todsul17• 14 years ago

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)
   SXF 29-Jan-2013 AGA 29-Jan-2013 EasyJet (Berlin, Germany to Agadir, Morocco)
   AGA 05-Feb-2013 LGW 05-Feb-2013 EasyJet (Agadir, Morocco to London, UK)
   LTN 26-Feb-2013 SAW 26-Feb-2013 EasyJet (London, UK to Istanbul, Turkey)
   SAW 18-Mar-2013 IKA 19-Mar-2013 Pegasus (Istanbul, Turkey to Tehran, Iran)
   IKA 29-Mar-2013 KUL 30-Mar-2013 AirAsia (Tehran, Iran to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
   KUL 02-Apr-2013 PER 02-Apr-2013 AirAsia (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Perth, Australia - YAY!)
   PER 07-Apr-2013 KUL 07-Apr-2013 AirAsia (Perth, Australia to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
   KUL 09-Apr-2013 BKK 09-Apr-2013 AirAsia (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Bangkok, Thailand)
   BKK 18-Apr-2013 KBP 18-Apr-2013 Aerosvit (Bangkok, Thailand to Kiev, Ukraine)
   KBP 18-Apr-2013 JFK 18-Apr-2013 Aerosvit (Kiev, Ukraine to New York, US)

Any questions, please ask.

kapkapkap2• 14 years ago

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.

todsul17• 14 years ago

Done, please see above.

jerf3• 14 years ago

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 polite.

ashbrahma3• 14 years ago

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?

laumac10• 14 years ago

Yes, the experts give step-by-step instructions on how and where to book.

todsul17• 14 years ago

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.

damian20004• 14 years ago

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.

taligent2• 14 years ago

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

lukeholder• 14 years ago

Perth is not off the beaten track. It's the San Fran of Australia!

3JPLW• 14 years ago

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?

leecbaker• 14 years ago

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

starpilot• 14 years ago

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

ctdonath• 14 years ago

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."

lusr• 14 years ago

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 much as possible from this sort of public exposure? (Even if that means paying the original contest creator back their $500, that's nothing given the future business you'll generate. Right now this link simply can't spread until more information is visible.)

todsul17• 14 years ago

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.

blyuher3• 14 years ago

Just wow, unbelievable! Though I have a question: How have you confirmed the last two steps (BKK to KBP to JFK)? I tried Aerosvit site, Hipmunk and Skyscanner and haven't been able to replicate this result.

Monotoko• 14 years ago

Can you break down the price by flight? Or would that be too much information? I'd be interested to see how much each flight costs.

drostie• 14 years ago

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.

michael9917• 14 years ago

And cheers to you!

205guy• 14 years ago

RTW (round the world, I assume) may have some special meaning in this context, but to the lay person, that itenerary does not cross all degrees of longitude and, notably, not the dateline.

jhuni• 14 years ago

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

6ren• 14 years ago

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

ajays2• 14 years ago

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 itinerary from the contest (supposedly verified by you), and it doesn't work for me. Now what do I do?

And finally (apologize for too many questions): what about travel documents? Apparently, even if you're transitioning through LHR, you need a British visa if you're not from a certain blessed list of countries. What if I don't have a visa, but you end up sending me through London?

Please don't get me wrong: I like the idea. I'm just trying to wrap my head around how it can be scaled.....

todsul17• 14 years ago

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.

ajays2• 14 years ago

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

martindale• 14 years ago

There 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.

todsul17• 14 years ago

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.

michael9917• 14 years ago

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

cvg• 14 years ago

cool! How long did it take you to build this routing?

michael9917• 14 years ago

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 :)

blyuher3• 14 years ago

How did you find BKK to KBP to JFK flight? Skyscanner and Hipmunk don't return this within the results. But so doesn't Aerosvit site.

michael9917• 14 years ago

I'm new to this site. Are PMs possible? If so, PM me.

aleem• 14 years ago

Kayak brings it up for $331 if you search BKK to JFK:

http://www.kayak.com/#/flights/bkk-JFK/2013-04-18

What's interesting is that BKK>JFK is a cheaper itinerary than BKK>KBP so if you wanted to travel BKK>KBP you are better of booking BKK>JFK and throwing away the last leg.

geoka9• 14 years ago

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 :)

todsul17• 14 years ago

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.

path411• 14 years ago

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.

bajsejohannes• 14 years ago

Very 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)

nachteilig• 14 years ago

They've learned an interesting lesson from other travel sites too, in that they emailed me when I didn't complete my contest and asked why. Very nice.

The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

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