I don’t know if I’m still on the nomination committee for the MF Genius Awards, but if I have any sway I’m nominating the hell out of the guy who is making the upcoming Flyspy website. This blog explains it better than I can, but essentially it’s a tool for creating over-time graphs of the cost of flights from and to airports that you specify. The AirCanada website has been getting good at providing something like this functionality, but a general purpose website which can search across airlines a la Expedia et al and provide easy to digest graphical data is a brilliant edition to the problem of wringing best-value pricing information out of the airlines. It seems a whole lot as though the airlines have been using limitations on our access to knowledge of flight pricing (which is an immense and sticky hodgepodge of a topic, incidentally) as a way to leverage a little more money out of us, putting us on flights that are more expensive just because we aren’t aware that there is a slightly cheaper flight that we happened not to search for. Traditionally this is of course a function of the geniuned trickiness of developing effective search and retrieval tools for that information, but I feel like we should have been making much more progress on this problem than we have been. The last quantum leap was the introduction of the aggregate search sites, but this looks like another major step forward. I’m looking forward to it going live in a big way.

Now if only I was a student again and could get a student card I could afford to travel again.

Oh, hey, wait…