Airlines are weird. You would expect that a direct flight should generally be cheaper than one with a layover, especially if you want to go to the city of the layover. This is not the case. I had been thinkign about a trip to China for the last year. Usually flying to the city you want to go to is not the cheapest option. For example a direct flight from Budapest to Shenzhen is more expensive than a flight from Budapest to Xi’an with a Shenzhen layover. Even if you are boarding the same plane. You can just buy the layover ticket and act like you missed your transfer. This is called skiplagging and airlines don’t like it. There is a website called skiplagged that searches for those flights with the layover in the city you want. They get sued quite often apparently.

But you have other ways to save money. There are some cities with very low flight prices. If you can find a city, where manually having a layover is cheaper than flying to your destination directly (or with airline layover) you can save quite a bit of money. If you are travelling anyway you can take up to say 3 days for such a layover and explore the city, while saving on the airline tickets.

I asked claude the name for this and apparently it is called “fare-hacking”. Not very creative if you ask me.

Currently I am doing this manually, and it looks a bit like this:

  1. Go to google flights
  2. Search one way flights from city A to city B
  3. Note down the prices around the time frame I want to go
  4. Go to explore view and open the map. This shows prices of all the cities from city A on the map
  5. Look for cities that are kind of between city A and city B, and have relatively cheap flights
  6. Once I have a candidate (C), look up flights A -> C and C -> B manually, keeping in mind the time between flights

For example I want to go to Ho Chi Minh city from Berlin. The cheapest price until the end of the year is 500 euros. Whereas the cheapes flight to Dubai is 100 euros, and one (or two for more exploration) days after arriving there is a flight to Ho Chi Minh city for 179 euros. That means I can save 220 euros by exploring Dubai.

This feels like it would be really easy to make a tool out of. Currently this takes a lot of time and a bit of luck to spot the right cities. But an automated tool can search all the opportunities. It can even add more cities to the mix and maybe save more. It can help me compare these prices for multiple cities that I want.

There are already APIs like skyscanner indicative prices api that should get me most of the way there. Once I get flights prices to and from a bunch of cities, it is just picking the lowest one. I should probably start with airports that have high traffic or generally have lower prices, like Dubai or Singapore.

The problem is you have to request access to the skyscanner api. Amadeus is another option. Otherwise I can try to scrape google flights or something, but feels like a hassle.

Anyways my plan is to

  1. Find a way to get the data
    1. Skyscanner api
    2. Amadeus
    3. Scraping
    4. ???
  2. Write some PoC script with python or whatever to test it out.
    1. How many queries does it take
    2. Does it find better connections than I could with the map
    3. How many cities can I search and not go bankrupt from api fees?
  3. Build a nice UI for it to share with people
  4. Profit?

I will add another post once I get going.

Unrelated things I found while researching