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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 che

• kapkapkap 14y 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.
  • todsul 14y ago
    Done, please see above.
  • jerf 14y 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.
    • ramchip 14y ago
      Doesn't work on Windows ;)
      • jerf 14y ago
        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.
      • lolcraft 14y ago
        $wc = New-Object "System.Net.WebClient" $airports = @("JFK", "GEO", "TXL", "SXF", "AGA", "LGW", "LTN", "SAW", "IKA", "KUL", "PER", "BKK", "KBP") foreach($airport in $airports) { $wc.DownloadString("http://airportcode.riobard.com/airport/" + $airport + "?fmt=json") }
    • riobard 14y ago
      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?
      • jerf 14y ago
        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.
        • riobard 14y ago
• ashbrahma 14y 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?
  • laumac 14y ago
    Yes, the experts give step-by-step instructions on how and where to book.
  • todsul 14y 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.
    • prawn 14y ago
      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?
• damian2000 14y 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.
  • taligent 14y ago
    Perth is the cheapest way to visit Australia if you are already in the Asia region.
    • anacrolix 14y ago
      that's because it's shit (and closer). disclaimer: i live in perth.
    • robbiep 14y ago
      that depends. Cheapest to get there? Because a cup of coffee there will set you back more than in sydney these days
    • yitchelle 14y ago
      After you have done Perth, then what?
      • damian2000 14y ago
        Fremantle & Rottnest island are good for tourists and cheap to travel to.
  • lukeholder 14y ago
    Perth is not off the beaten track. It's the San Fran of Australia!
    • flog 14y ago
      What? Perth is, colloquially, the arsehole of nowhere.
    • 14y ago
• 3JPLW 14y 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 14y 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 http://www.reddit.com/comments/v82rz/c524yi7/?sort=best
• starpilot 14y ago
  $1,730 for six continents‽ My roundtrip ticket from Los Angeles to Kathmandu, Nepal was $1,800!
  • ctdonath 14y 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 14y 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.)
  • todsul 14y 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.
• blyuher 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
  • michael991 14y ago
    And cheers to you!
• 205guy 14y 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.