Originally Posted by
flyingdervish
Does anyone know if there's an online tool that will let you specify that you want 15,000 miles and you have 700 dollars (for example) -- and tell you where you can go?
It could disregard specials and promotions, etc. And I could sort through the airlines and alliances manually if necessary.
If it doesn't exist, does anyone want to collaborate on some software development with me?
Farecompare comes close. If you need more than 5,000 miles you can just select regions that you know are beyond that (for instance, I'm on the East coast, if I need 15K miles I'd only select Asia/Australasia and not North America/Europe.
Then you can select an alliance (or airline if you want to be specific) and sort the total cost column by price; then I would take the O/D and go to ITA and play with dates/routing.
If you want to automate it you can probably use Greasemonkey to create a nice script for Firefox/Chrome - but to me it seems like more trouble than it is worth.
I think any more than that and you'd need to pay ITA for the API/access to actual fare information.
http://www.farecompare.com/search/flyertalk.html