(in)flexible flight search

I've come to rely heavily on websites which advertise various flexible flight search options, like nearby alternate airports and flexible date options. For just these reasons, plus nearly always the lowest-price result, I've been recommending kayak.com unreservedly. At least for international searches, there are serious shortcomings with both kayak, and my second-favorite site, orbitz.com. Yesterday, I did a flight search on kayak, and I've repeated it today, for which ticking the "include nearby airports" box results in the lowest-priced result being $900 more expensive. Surely including additional airports shouldn't omit the original search! Similar things happen, unfortunately, with the flexible date option.

I suspect I understand the problem, which is that properly searching for flexible dates and/or airports is a very time consuming process, and your average user simply doesn't have the patience to wait for good results. So the sites don't bother with that, they just return mediocre results quickly. The point is easily illustrated on orbitz. They've got a very handy, in theory, feature: search for a flights which result in a trip of a flexible length, across a range of days. Perfect! Tragically, it simply doesn't return good results. When I searched for a 10-12 day trip from SEA-AKL, between 15 Jun 09 and 15 Jul 09, Orbitz flexible date search feature dutifully (and quickly) returned a lowest price of $1819. However, by doing a traditional search (i.e. departing on a fixed date and returning on a fixed date), on orbitz, and repeat it across the dates which were part of the flexible search, you get much improved results, by about $250! The moral of the story is that if you're thinking of visiting NZ (or the UK, and you should be!), you'd look at the former, rather than the latter... Hopefully at some point there is a flight search site which can do flexible and accurate searches quickly, or perhaps just one which takes a while but emails you the results later?

dates 06/15/2009 to 06/26/2009, price $1,826
[...]
dates 06/16/2009 to 06/28/2009, price $1,819
dates 06/16/2009 to 06/29/2009, price $1,586
dates 06/17/2009 to 06/28/2009, price $1,819
dates 06/17/2009 to 06/29/2009, price $1,568
dates 06/17/2009 to 06/30/2009, price $1,826
dates 06/18/2009 to 06/29/2009, price $1,599
dates 06/18/2009 to 06/30/2009, price $1,826
[...]
dates 06/20/2009 to 07/02/2009, price $1,826
dates 06/20/2009 to 07/03/2009, price $1,599
dates 06/21/2009 to 07/02/2009, price $1,826
[...]
dates 06/23/2009 to 07/04/2009, price $1,826
dates 06/23/2009 to 07/05/2009, price $1,617
dates 06/23/2009 to 07/06/2009, price $1,586
dates 06/24/2009 to 07/05/2009, price $1,599
dates 06/24/2009 to 07/06/2009, price $1,568
dates 06/24/2009 to 07/07/2009, price $1,826
dates 06/25/2009 to 07/06/2009, price $1,599
dates 06/25/2009 to 07/07/2009, price $1,826
[...]
dates 06/30/2009 to 07/11/2009, price $1,826
dates 07/02/2009 to 07/15/2009, price $1,827
dates 07/03/2009 to 07/14/2009, price $1,820
dates 07/03/2009 to 07/15/2009, price $1,820
dates 06/30/2009 to 07/12/2009, price $1,618
dates 06/30/2009 to 07/13/2009, price $1,587
dates 07/01/2009 to 07/12/2009, price $1,600
dates 07/01/2009 to 07/13/2009, price $1,569
dates 07/01/2009 to 07/14/2009, price $1,827
dates 07/02/2009 to 07/13/2009, price $1,600
dates 07/02/2009 to 07/14/2009, price $1,827
[...]
dates 07/04/2009 to 07/15/2009, price $1,827

Labo(u)r-day weekend

We'd been planning for some time to spend the first bank holiday weekend we've had here hiking in the Coromandel, a penisula about two hours drive to the east of Auckland. We'd been told the traffic over there would be really awful, so decided just to do two days, avoiding the Friday night/Saturday morning traffic. This turned out to be a rather good plan, due to heavy rain most of Saturday. The rain continued into Sunday, making our drive out of Auckland less than pleasant. However, the forecast was for the weather to clear, so we continued on undaunted.

The nice man in the Kauaeranga Visitor Centre was clearly very bored, but he promised us the weather would clear, so we collected our hut passes and started on our way. The hike up was fairly steep, with many steps hewn into the rock, and we got a little damp, but by the time we arrived at the Pinnacles Hut all forecasts were correct and the sky was beautifully blue.


After a quick cup of soup in the hut, we made our way up to the top of the Pinnacles themselves. More a scramble than a hike, the last portion of the walk was well worth it - at the top was a secluded spot with wonderful views, fit for any very special occasion...