# Help me find Airfare Search Websites that are more detailed, please

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-find-airfare-search-websites-that-are-more-detailed-please/332031>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 21, 2005, 4:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-find-airfare-search-websites-that-are-more-detailed-please/332031 "2005-11-21T04:21:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2005, 4:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-find-airfare-search-websites-that-are-more-detailed-please/332031/1 "2005-11-21T04:21:38Z")

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Is there any website that offers more air ticket permutations than the standard airline sites and pages like Expedia, Orbitz, etc?

When shopping for tickets I have found different websites that are good at different kinds of searches but never one site that will search any way that I want it to.

As an example, let’s consider a current search I would like to try. Let’s say I am in NYC and I have a 4 month window to travel, I wish to visit 2 different cities (let’s say Paris and London) and I’m flexible about how long I’d like to spend in each (say, between 1 and 4 weeks), the order that I want to visit them, and the dates that I depart and return. IOW, I have a lot of leeway to change my schedule/plans in order to get the lowest airfare.

I fly on Northwest/KLM a lot and frequently use their website. It’s pretty good. For example, I can search for a roundtrip ticket 3 days in either direction of the dates that I enter–the prices are displayed on a 7 x 7 (I think) grid offering a lot of choices. But, this feature does not work if I have multi-city/open-jaw flights or have flights that originate outside of the US or Canada. And, I can’t check prices for NYC to London to Paris to NYC and have it ALSO check for NYC to Paris to London to NYC.

Of course I could check every possible combination with separate searches but there are thousands–if not more–permutations. I think that this is the same reason that ticket companies/airlines _don’t_ offer such flexible searches–because it would take too much time and computational power to do so–but surely there is _some_ way that I can let my good ol’ computer automatically perform all these different searches for me.

Any help? Has anybody written a meta-airline-ticket-search thingie that I can use? Is there already a website that does this?

Thank you.

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**Author:** ![zoltar7](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/b38774/32.png) [@zoltar7](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zoltar7)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2005, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-find-airfare-search-websites-that-are-more-detailed-please/332031/2 "2005-11-21T05:37:15Z")

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[http://itasoftware.com/](http://itasoftware.com/)  
Click on “Looking for Airfares”, and then login in as guest.

Only problem is you can’t actually buy tickets from them–you have to either take their routing to a travel agent, or put the segments and times they come up with into one of the other sites and hope you end up with the same fare.