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Old Jan 10, 2011 | 1:53 pm
  #13  
sbm12
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Originally Posted by adamak
How about just showing the charts from various airlines? Say, I plug in JFK-SIN. The AA chart says 67.5 1-way NA to Asia 2. BA chart says 150K RT. Will this be easier (as you only have to feed the charts & the countries' zones)?
That's more or less the goal, though we're trying to actually display the information rather than just point you to the chart. Where it gets wonky is where various partners get involved in some programs. CO is easy because 90% of the partner routes and options are just the same as if flying on CO metal. UA has a separate chart if you're flying *A or non-*A partners. AS has a separate chart depending on which specific partner you're on. So if you asked JFK-AUH the CO price would be mostly fixed, the UA price would depend on whether you were on QR or LH/LX/other *A partners and the AS price would depend on whether you chose BA or AF as the partner to fly with.

Parsing all that data (much less collecting all of it) turns out to be pretty complicated. We have charts of countries, zones, carriers, miles required and lots more very useful data and we can do most of the standard stuff pretty easily. It is getting that last 10% of the permutations perfect that we're struggling with. For now we might just go with the dreaded "*-These are the best case scenario numbers" type of disclaimer and see how much strife it causes. But we are absolutely trying to get it right.
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