I have tried many engines and many sites, but none that really has the versatility I would like.

I am a very creative and very poor traveler, and I'm studying in Europe but have to get home (Cali) and around the States as well. In Europe, I can get to any gateway for pennies and don't mind length or inconvenience. Basically, I would like to be able to specify a number of possible departure cities (not necessarily close together) and a number of possibile arrival cities and then see the best prices for a couple week spread. (an ex: MUC, or PAR, or DUB, or LON to SMF, or NYC, or LAX, or ORD; between 7/31 - 9/8 = ?$?)

A couple of sites do parts of this, but even the "and nearby airports" option and the "flexible dates" option rarely coincide. Am I just asking too much? What is the most powerful and versatile (free) search engine that you know of?

Welcome to FlyerTalk!

I don't know of any, and I doubt there will be any soon, simply because this is a very difficult thing to compute. What you are asking for is a program to consider every possible combination of every possible fare between every possible routing between many combinations of cities, over the span of a month. And I'm sure you also want it in less than 10 seconds, along with everyone else using the website at the same time. I really don't mean to sound rude at all, but just think about the scale of the problem.

But yes, a tool like that would be great, and many many people wish for such a tool! As a computer scientist, I'd be in awe of such a tool.

The best free tool I know of currently is ITA , but I don't know about its usefulness in Europe.

Oops, and I forgot to mention checking availability on all legs of the flights as well.

A note on ITA though, I've found that when searching by the month, sometimes the prices it displays in the calendar are larger than the price found after clicking on the day. That's probably just due to the time restrictions of the search and the huge complexity of such a month-long search of all trips of various lengths.

You can do a month-long search on our site matrix.itasoftware.com and put lists of airports (separated by semicolons) in the "From:" and "To:" boxes.

But as YYJGuy said, the broader you make the search, the more likely it is that we will miss a particularly good fare on a complex routing.

We've been doing some work recently on improving the result quality of month-long searches, so hopefully you'll see discrepencies less often in the future.

Thanks for the ita links. This is the tool that powers expedia or orbitz isn't it? Anyway, I am glad for some new ideas.

I guess I came across rather enthusiatic. I know that what I described doesn' exist; it would be the holy grail of search engines. I just want to know how close people have come. I forgot to add the part where a search tool takes yours settings and then searches for the same spread on all the major search sites to check for competing fares. In fact, you could have it run itself daily with pre-set alerts that get sent to your email, along with a ring tone to your desktop.

Thanks for the pointers so far.