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I am looking for a flight search engine which is almost as advanced as Azuon, but includes more airlines. Azuon does what I want, but it does not include many airlines, specifically: Qatar Airways, Iberia, Czech Airlines, Lufthansa, Etihad Airways, Turkish Airlines, Cebu Pacific, KLM - which happen to be the airlines having cheapest flights to create my trip, making Azuon completely useless for my purpose.

Is there anything else besides ITA Software Matrix which comes close to what Azuon does, in terms of:

  1. Searching across a broad range of dates for departure and return. At least a 1-week range, where the engine really searches for flights (not like Kayak and Skyscanner which only display results for a broad range of dates if other users search for these destinations on these dates before - making it pretty useless).

  2. Searching for flights from a large group of origin and destination airports, either by being able to put at least 10 different origin and destination city codes, or by searching from/to all airports in a few-hundred km radius. Again - not just cached results, but actually search for all the combinations!

As such searches take a lot of time, its completely unpractical if the search is only interactive and all results are lost when the browser cache times out, it would be best if there is an engine which saves the results it found for my trip for my account, and then being able to broaden my search query and add new results to the old search.

I am attempting to find the best trip from Europe to South-East Asia departing in January 2016 and returning to Europe in March or April 2016, and some search engines limit the trip length to 30 days, making them useless for me.

And ability to do all the above while at the same time constructing and open-jaw multi-city flight would be perfect, but search engines which do broad dates and large group of airports without open-jaw/multi-city are also useful.

Using the Iberia.com flight search I was able to find quite interesting cheap open-jaw flights Warsaw - Beijing with return Singapore - Madrid for just 330 EUR total (mostly by British Airways, with last leg on Iberia Express), and no flight search engine I tried showed me these flights! Even http://www.flightnetwork.com/flights/ doesn't find that flight at all if I put these cities and dates, only showing another more expensive flight with 2 stopovers (instead of just 1 on Iberia) instead. Well, actually it does list almost exactly that flight, only with the last leg marketed as British Airways too (instead of Iberia Express) and the price being 606 EUR instead of 330 EUR.

So I will use that example to test the search engine greatness. The example dates for the 330 EUR flight are 5 January and return on 24 March. Test this before posting your answer. Iberia has a lot of such flights on different dates with different European and Asian cities, but allows to only manually search one specific city/date combination at a time, making it hugely time-intensive process to search what all the possibilities are.

I know about Flighfox marketplace too, I just want to know what are the most advanced automated flight search engines out there besides Azuon and Matrix, because they both miss important airlines for me (Matrix doesn't have some low-cost airlines I think and certainly won't mix alliances/LCCs on a single trip - i.e. combining separately bookable tickets).

Please do not post answers which do not at least fulfill point 1. and 2., as I know already most of the common flight search engines.

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    I'd love this too, but from my searching, reading and trying out every new one I can get my hands on for the last several years, I fear the answer is simply - there is none that meets your requirements :/
    – Mark Mayo
    Commented Sep 3, 2015 at 14:15
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    What's wrong with the Matrix?
    – Calchas
    Commented Sep 3, 2015 at 16:59
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    @CalchasL the main deficiency of Matrix is the lack of LCC, and AFAIK it won't do something like Kayak's Hacker Fare (combining several separately bought tickets from different airlines/alliances into one trip). Also the date-range specification is a bit limited, especially in Multi-city. I would like to specify that the whole trip must begin not earlier then 1 January 2016, and end not later then 23 March 2016, and last at least 60 days, and everything in between is allowed. On Matrix this requires many queries. If just the airlines I mentioned where added to Azuon it would be all I ask for.
    – lowtoxin
    Commented Sep 3, 2015 at 18:24
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    @OmegaTerus 32 major airports, and 80 possible start dates, and 60+80 possible end dates? That kind of query is simply too computationally expensive for any kind of flight search engine to complete. It would probably takes days to compute that, by which time it would be out of date. Matrix allows your query to take sixty seconds (they did increase it to 90 seconds when I discussed it with them) and gives you the best of what it found so far.
    – Calchas
    Commented Sep 6, 2015 at 5:25
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    @OmegaTerus I fear that you will not find quite what you want because the kind of problem you want to solve is simply not amenable to a brute force search as engines use. I don't want to dissuade you—like you I do lots of multicity trips—but I think your time is better invested in understanding the fare policies of numerous airlines so you can predict what is going to be cheap and what isn't.
    – Calchas
    Commented Sep 6, 2015 at 5:37

5 Answers 5

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Basically, no. I know you won't like the answer, but like many others on this site, I've also looked for such a site, and finally someone posted in the [chat] a document about Flight Computational Complexity. Essentially, for just San Fran to Boston on one day there might be 30,000 combinations to search, let alone other dates and so on, and for a long flight where it might take 5-6 airports, there can be 10^15 flight combinations! Multiply by dates, classes, multiple people on the site, and essentially it's just not possible to do such a complex search, using optimised versions of Dijkstra's shortest path calculations and others - it's too much to process.

Google's possibly our best bet one day, given their processing capabilities - they've bought ITA Software, and Google Flights is getting good. However, not yet. For now you have to do what all the 'experts' do - use the tools you know work 'well enough' for various areas - skyscanner for Europe/Cuba, kayak for others, matrix.itasoftware for clever paths or advanced routing codes, and so on :/

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  • I know its computationally expensive, but the way to make it realistically work in practice would be to have the search engine save the results it found so far to my query, an then when I modify the query, add the results to the previously found results, and allow me to sort and filter on all the results. So for example I search for flights departing on 5 January, it finds some results, then I search again for 6 January, it would find some more results, but would combine them with the 5 January results so they are displayed in one list. And I could repeat the process until I am satisfied.
    – lowtoxin
    Commented Sep 6, 2015 at 13:54
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    Bearing in mind flight prices are updated and often change every few hours...so even as your searches are being done, they can become out of date too :/
    – Mark Mayo
    Commented Sep 6, 2015 at 13:56
  • Also, while you are saying its impossible, Azuon does do exactly what I want, and does not have a 90-second timeout, and allows me to run the search for hours, it just doesn't have all the airlines I need included.
    – lowtoxin
    Commented Sep 6, 2015 at 15:07
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Try Adioso. They specialize in broad/vague searches, both by time and destination, and cover many (although not all) low-cost carriers as well.

Don't expect to find all possible flights with this though: due to the reasons explained in Mark Mayo's answer, the sheer number of combinations available is so huge (especially with broader searches) that it's impossible to cover them all.

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  • You're right, Adioso is great
    – Astor Florida
    Commented Jul 17, 2016 at 7:17
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Kiwi meets both requirements 1 and 2, allowing searching across broad ranges of dates and airports, including open jaw searches. In my experience it gives a pretty good representation of the cheapest options, especially multiple-ticket options.

For your example, you can do a single search from "Western Europe+Central Europe" to "Eastern Asia+Southeastern Asia" departing in next 30 days returning in 60-90 days. The cheapest results it's finding at the moment are €353 for Air China round trip from Paris to Taipei (or Hong Kong), followed by €400 for Swiss from Amsterdam to Phuket City. Of course the results change frequently---but I think that's unavoidably caused by actual changes in the airfares.

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  • Note: As of May 2019, this functionality of Kiwi.com is now broken, at least for me. It now only shows specific flight results if the destination is entered as a single city or list of cities. Hoping they bring it back like it was...
    – krubo
    Commented May 24, 2019 at 0:57
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If you travel enough to make it worth the price, take a look at the numerous (but expensive) tools at OAG

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My copy of Azuon does include Etihad, Cebu, & KLM. They request that we tell them about ones they don't handle. I am surprised that it does not include Iberia, Czech, & Lufthansa. Oddly, the scroll is broken so I can't look for Qatar & Turkish.

I would suggest you do the search(es) on Azuon, see which dates/routes have low prices, and use that info to search again on other sites.

UPDATE: Beginning late 2017, Azuon has always said (falsely) there are NO flights between two countries. I think it was Korea and Taiwan, but it may have been one of those and USA. Several different multi-week time periods. Similarly, for several months, Azuon has consistently said that ONLY Southwest flies to/from ANY city in USA on ANY day in those months. I gave up on Azuon and canceled my subscription. Now I use Kiwi to tell me the the best date and airport for a good price, then check the same flight on other sites where it is usually three to five percent cheaper. After finding a good deal, sometimes I ask Flighfox to find me a better one.

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  • Note the date of the original post.
    – choster
    Commented Jul 7, 2017 at 18:52
  • Azuon has a dissadvatage, you can't search on a map nor a whole area.
    – skan
    Commented Apr 7, 2018 at 19:02
  • Azuon does not let you search on a map, but if you type "Spain" and hit return, the box fills up with a list of all the airports in Spain. And if you go to the radius section, you can add all the airports within some distance from Spain. If you want to ALSO search France, type France, and all their airports get added. Or "Europe" or "North America" etc.
    – WGroleau
    Commented Apr 7, 2018 at 20:44

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