And if you find? The flight is even cheaper than you have already found.

If you are planning a trip and have already found a cheap flight, do not rush to buy tickets, because now you will find tickets even cheaper. And this is not advertising another govnoagregatora.

Everyone knows that airlines take their prices from the ceiling. Marketers invent ingenious non-transparent schemes for taking money from passengers in proportion to the financial capabilities of the latter. So that the rich pay for more tickets, and the poor - as much as they can.


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Price discrimination packs

From the arsenal of marketers there are several main ways of price discrimination of passengers:

1) If the trip does not capture the weekend, then this is a business trip, and tickets need to be made more expensive
2) If you fly from San Francisco to St. Petersburg, the ticket will be more expensive than vice versa.
3) If you fly to a small city through a large hub, the ticket may be cheaper than the same flight only to the hub.
4) If you fly one way, it may be more expensive than the same round trip ticket. Or, on the contrary, two separate round-trip tickets are cheaper than a single round-trip ticket.
5) Dirty tricks with cookies, heliocation, etc., when the price rises depending on your location, ticket search history, and so on.

Responsiveness

But for every tricky marketing nut, fortunately, there are bolts such as:

1) skiplagged.com - uses “hidden city ticketing”, that is, tickets with a transfer in the city you need, which are cheaper flights directly to your city. You just need to get on the transplant and score on the next flight segment.


After visiting this site, the United Airlines started foaming from the rage out of their mouths and they sued its owner. Fortunately, they lost the trial, and skiplagged it at the same time.

2) skypicker.com - this site is looking for tickets "in its own secret innovative way", and in fact it is looking for tickets in several separate segments instead of one ticket. That is, a single ABC ticket is often more expensive than two AB + BC tickets.

How to find cheaper

Both of these sites are good and really help to find “tricky” tickets cheaper. But there is a better way. The synergy effect occurs if you combine these two ways in one search. Two separate AB + BC tickets can cost less than ABC. But even cheaper it can cost two AB + BCD tickets or even ABE + BCD tickets.

Example

Let's try to find a ticket to Antalya-Kiev:
For more convincing choose the cheapest date. The cheapest of all is to fly on April 8 for $ 135, the sky-scanner tells us:


But in fact, the cheapest ticket is two separate tickets Antalya-Istanbul + Istanbul-Kiev-Kharkov:
1) Antalya-Istanbul direct flight for $ 21


2) Istanbul-Kiev-Kharkov for $ 60


Total we found a ticket for $ 81 instead of $ 135. And for the money saved, we can walk around Istanbul during a long transplant :)

We save not only money, but also time

Instead of the standard offer Moscow-Belgrade-Rome-Pisa with two transfers for $ 286


You can take two direct flights (that is, one transfer) Moscow-Budapest + Budapest-Pisa for $ 90

How to search for such tickets?

The algorithm is simple:
1) We find flights from the Starting Point to all possible cities no more than the estimated budget
2) For each city found, we look for tickets to the Endpoint, as well as to other cities (repeat paragraph 1), considering the current city and each transfer on the way to it as the Starting Point, and the maximum price = estimated budget minus the price to the current city

To optimize the algorithm, you can first look at which cities have cheap flights from End Point to force the construction of a tree of flights in the right direction. This is useful if you search for flights manually. And my friend was manually too lazy to sort through, so he wrote a small plugin for Chrome , which does it for him.

And please, do not tell anyone about this, take care of the nerves of air marketing.