[Web Informant] 6 April 2009: A new way to search for flights with Optifly.com

[David Strom]

Web Informant 6 April 2009: A new way to search for flights with Optifly.com

You gotta like someone who can reel off the three-letter airport codes
for such obscure places as Reykjavik Iceland (actually they have two
airports, KEF and RKV), the Congo (BZV) and Colima Mexico (CLQ). Then
perhaps it is no surprise that Bryan Cooley's latest invention,
Optifly.com, is a nice service that figures out which airlines fly
between any two city pairs around the world.

Those of us who are frequent flyers know that any business or leisure
travel journey begins with the first step of a Web search of potential
airlines that can carry our tired and cramped bodies squished into a
coach middle seat. And while Expedia, Orbitz and their ilk are
reasonably good at computing fares, they don't do as good a job of
incorporating the low-cost carriers like Southwest, RyanAir, EasyJet,
and others that have cropped up over the past decade. Even Kayak.com,
which is one of my favorite sites to narrow down a search of which
airlines offer service, isn't as good as Optifly in identifying the
various routing paths that are available.

The site, which will launch "real soon now" according to Cooley, is
the essence of simplicity. You type in your two cities that you want
to travel, and it produces a Google map (or Earth) mashup showing you
the connection points. "Most international trips require at least two
or three flight segments," says Cooley, and this means it can get
complicated. His service will also show you nearby airports too. The
site still has some small bugs but works well.

But behind its simplicity lies some very sophisticated search
algorithms, and as someone who studied optimization theory in grad
school I can appreciate this. Cooley tells me "When you consider there
over 40,000 unique flight paths, there are in excess of 100 billion
route possibilities to consider for a few hops, and we can handle
routes with as many as 10 hops, something that the flight booking
services can't even begin to deal with."

What the site doesn't do at all is optimize for costs, but based on
its route visualization and transfer points, you can do that research
using the usual travel booking sites. Once you find a connection city
that will work for you, you can do a better job narrowing down how you
are going to book your ticket and probably get a better fare as a
result. Cooley says it has saved his early beta users hundreds of
dollars in ticketing fees, which is a good thing we can all agree in
these penurious times.

Optifly's challenge is to stay on top of the many airline routing
changes that are posted each day – while most of these are individual
flights they still do change their routing and frequency of service.
The site will show you which flights aren't available on certain days
of the week, which gets complicated especially when you fly across
transpacific and you arrive almost before you depart, or skip a day
depending on which direction you fly. Once upon a time I skipped my
birthday going to a speaking engagement in Tokyo – that wasn't a fun
trip. Another time I celebrated my birthday on a flight to Taipei with
a co-worker on our way out to Computex.