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I'm looking for airline ticket prices for travel around Asia. I want to visit India, Indonesia, Thailand and few countries more (about ten). And doesn't matter order of traveling for me. I mean, I can fly to India, after that to Thailand and Indonesia, or, i can start in Indonesia... And we all know total price is depends on order. And I want to find cheapest way.

Technically it is Travelling salesman problem, but to solve it in my case i need information about prices for every airport, for every flight. For example from India I can fly to any other country from my list. It is about 10 flights (if I assume flight to capital is cheapest). 10 flights for every country is about 100 flights...

Is there some way to find prices for 100 flights without 100 search queries?

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    Sadly, by hand. matrix.itasoftware.com is probably the most impressive search tool, but it's still limited by the computational complexity. You're not just searching flights (well you are), but the engine searches multiple classes, times, airlines and stops, and so that suddenly multiplies by many, many factors...
    – Mark Mayo
    Sep 3, 2015 at 11:56
  • This won't be a complete answer, but I'll try to save you some time. Look at prices on Vietnam Airlines, Tiger, Air Asia, and whatever are the popular discount carriers in India. Some of the discount carriers like Tiger don't show up in typical fare search tools at all, but they offer the lowest prices by far on some routes.
    – John Zwinck
    Sep 13, 2015 at 8:40
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    This is substantially more difficult than a travelling salesman problem. Finding the lowest price with a fixed route is already more computationally difficult than a travelling salesman problem. Whatever tool you use, it will never be comprehensive over all possible routes and prices.
    – Calchas
    Sep 19, 2015 at 17:14

4 Answers 4

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Try Skyscanner. It is free. I seem to get more options here than with other online tools.

You can select "everywhere" or some regional options as a destination to see which ones might be cheaper.

You can also display fares for the month to see when it is the cheapest to go to any particular destination, but this doesn't seem to always work from my experience.

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+50

There is indeed no way but to query the possible citypairs yourself. However you can save some time by narrowing it down with the help of several tools.

  1. Do a wide/flexible search on website that allow multiple cities and multiple dates like matrix.itasoftware or Skyscanner (flexibility only on dates). You might also consider to give skypicker.com a try, as they find combinations of airlines, that does not have interline agreements with each other. Write down the results.
  2. Once you found cheap city pairs, you have to query the OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) in order to get real, bookable prices. Good starting points are search engines like Kayak, Momondo, and Skyscanner. But also try other OTAs like Expedia, Ebookers and Budgetair. You might also want to try different languages (e.g. expedia.fr, expedia.ca, etc.), as airlines publish different fares for different point of sales. If you want to save even more on these flights you can make yourself familiar with flight-hacking tricks like fueldumping, hidden-city-ticketing and back-to-back-ticketing. For example by simply adding skiplagged to the list of websites.
  3. Combine the results to one journey. You probably wont find the (mathematicaly) optimal solution, but you can save a lot of money by flying a certain route on a certrain date.

As Him already suggested, if you dont want to do the work on your own, you can get help from experts, who will do the searching for you on platform like flightfox or chimpando.

Btw: You're assumption that flight to capitals are less expensive is not true. Often flights to smaller airports are cheaper, as they have smaller fees for starting and landing. However there are no heuristics, which airports are cheaper. You will have to query prices on your own.

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Flightfox is one of the solution.

The website allows the users to customise their trip, without any limitation of departure/arrival cities. Of course you can set some special limitation on it. The travel expert (not computer) will set the best trip within your criteria.

However, the downside is that it charge $49 for each trip (service), but it may be worth it.

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Rehlat.You can select everywhere or some regional options as a destination to see which ones might be cheaper.

You can also display fares for the month to see when it is the cheapest to go to any particular destination.

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    your site? we require you disclose if so.
    – Mark Mayo
    Nov 4, 2015 at 10:26

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