Miles/rewards search engine
 

Hello guys,

I was introduced to this whole new world of mileage "junkies" just recently and i got hooked (got a business class seat already http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif)

In any case, I'm also a software developer and I'm just wondering if there is any need for a miles/rewards search engine.

If so, what kind of info and features would you want in such an engine? I'm looking to build one so that I can search for more rewards, bonus miles, etc. The engine would crawl airline sites, car sites, frequent flyer content sites, etc.

I'd love to get feedback from this forum. You guys would be my users!

Thanks in advance.

Welcome to FlyerTalk softwaremaker.

How about a portal in which you register the programs that you want information on, and it automatically sends you emails with promotions on these programs.

List your hometown and searches for "Mileage Runs"?

There are a thousand possibilities. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

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Another evil plot for world domination through the use of points and miles.

In a perfect world, I would love a site that searches all of the airline fares and mileage programs, including current bonus mileage promotions, and calculates the cents per ff mile earned cost of a particular trip.

A person could put in their departure city and perhaps their status level in their ff accounts (so that your program would know to double their flight miles for example if their ff program gives them double miles for their elite status) and your program could factor in current bonus promotions, and the cost of the ticket to arrive at the cost per ff mile earned. This would help for pure mileage runs as well as "normal" travel.

Farebrowser, created by jimbob, was a great tool for mileage runners -- instantly providing a listing sorted by estimated cents/mile for all fares from a given city. That at least does part of what you're thinking of, and the idea could perhaps be expanded to include calculation based on elite bonuses and such. Unfortunately, it's been down for quite a while now, but you can check out the details at: http://www.moonlightlabs.com/farebrowser.html

Lets not forget credit card bonuses.

Thanks for all the feedback so far. Would anyone of you pay for a service (like mileage runs calculations, etc.)?

Say something like:
$0.25 for a one day search
$1.00 for a one month search
$5.00 for a one year search

Thanks in advance.

I don't know what you mean by mileage run calculations, but if it is just giving the miles for each segment this can already be done for free. If it is finding a mileage or segment run, that might be interesting.

I always thought it would be great to have the ability to search car rental web sites using different AWD#'s for AVIS or CDP numbers for Hertz. See the following threads:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum77/HTML/000061.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum79/HTML/000282.html

At present I just check each one manually and it can be pretty time consuming. You could input your list of codes. Don't know if it could handle coupons as well. Sometimes they require usage of specific AWD/CDP codes.

Just to clarify...

What I meant was calculation of the cents/mile, taking into account your frequent flyer status and potentially, other bonus promotions to come up with the cents/mile calculation and of course, the price of the ticket...something MileageSeeker suggested.

How about something that tells you the value of your points/miles if you were to redeem them or transfer them to another program. For instance, your 20K Starpoints are worth 25K AA, 25K CO, 55K QF, which equals 1 domestic round trip. Or, your 200K HHonors points are worth X numbers nights in a class X hotel. Etc...

The rules for each program get pretty complicated, so if you could simplify it and tell people what their options are, it would be valuable.

That being said, it would have to be pretty spectacular for me to pay anything for using it.

Good luck.

I think I would probably pay a nominal fee for a service that found and calculated mileage runs. I would think that it would be quite a challenge to program though. Good luck!!

If it was able to do a great job in searching for mileage runs I will dish out the $5/year http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

I concur on the cents/mile for mileage runs.

Another feature I'd like is something that will let me search for specific fare classes--this is not easy to do on NW, for example--and compare those flights to available upgrade inventory.

For example, let me search for a NW seat SEA-BCN that's a B class fare and corresponds to available upgrades (Z on ITN, I think).

I would pay $<unsure>/year for that, no question.

-alan in seattle

...and oh yeah, make it a Web service so I can do all sorts of interesting things with it like wireless.

-alan in seattle

yes.