i was wondering if anyone knew of any mileage run program or site that would allow someone to simply pick an airport, and find the lowest cpm on united from that airport.

someone created an excel sheet similar to that in the *wood forum. if this doesnt exist yet, does anyone know if it would be possible? and if it is, how it could be done? it doesn't really seem like it would be that difficult. i would be willing to provide a server to run it on if someone knows how to do it.

Fares change daily and sometimes more often than that.

It's a bit complicated given how often airfares changes and how many destinations/routing you can devise. Not to mention fuel surcharges and taxes.

However, farecompare has a page that does sort of what you are looking for:
http://www.farecompare.com/search/fl...sortby=ppm&p=1

i know, i was thinking about having it update with the change in fares like somehow connect to united to get those fares. somehow expedia, priceline, kayak, etc... have the fares updated instantaneously. i am not a coder, and do not know if this would be possible without united's permission. i was just curious if it was

It's akin to the Traveling Salesman Problem.

I have been doing some tinkering on this.

I wrote some perl code to take fare routing rules and come up with all possible routes. (Hopefully. UA's routing rules are so many lines long, but by using the timetable to trim down bogus routings it seems to process in reasonable time.) Then I have code that sorts those routes by distance and finally it looks through the timetable (using the published pdf timetable which I parse in) to find which routes one can actually fly. (Would be fun to play around with interesting constraints like equipment type, etc.)

Still it has got some issues though. But if there is interest I will keep working on it. I noticed it seems that AA uses an almost identical timetable format, so maybe the code won't have to be limited to UA but could also be expanded to the dAArkside.

One hang-up is that I am not sure where routing rules for fares can be found anymore. Farecompare, as mentioned by others is a great starting point for find good fares. I wanted to simply be able to go one step further once I had a specific fare and route in mind, to find the best flights. Eventually having those flights, it is a piece of cake to have ITA check availability using another script (to generate the ITA syntax to find those exact flights, etc.) which I toyed around with.

Sorry if this message is a bit incoherent or poorly written. I have a really bad head flu right now. It made my 5 segment transcon flight rather miserable.

It would be really easy if you just compile a list of every airport code you know of in the form:

lax; sfo; ord; iad; den; bos; ewr; jfk; lga; mht; sba; sea; mia; tpa; smf; ont; san;

and copy and paste it into ITA.

There, I even got the list started...people can go ahead and add to the list

PS - I wonder if ITA has a limit...

EDIT - yes, there is a limit. I got to "ATY"...

ITA has a limit on how much searching it will do. Ask a better question and it gives you a better answer. The more refining of the problem you do before turning to ITA the better. If you know you want to be on United metal, then using ITA is not the best option, except maybe to check fare bucket availability for specific flights on specific dates, but clearly others may be able to suggest even better ways to do that.

SFOtoBos; any chance you can share that perl code?

Would be interested as well....

You're replying to a thread from 2009. Also, SFOtoBOS hasn't been active on FT since October 2010.