airflair

Airflair is a tool which considerably streamlines searching for airfare.

Specifically, it enables searching in a variety of ways which are either too cumbersome or impossible to do with conventional services such as Google Flights, Skyscanner etc.

• One-way flights over a range of dates.
• Round-trip flights over a range of departure dates and a range of return dates.
• Multi-leg trips, where multiple destinations can be chained, staying at each one for a number of days.

Currently the data source is the Skiplagged API. More may be added in the future for redundancy.

Installation

Binaries are available at releases.

Building from source is trivial, assuming you have Haxe installed.

apt-get install -yqq build-essential g++
haxelib install --always build.hxml
haxe build.hxml

Usage

This tool works with IATA 3-letter airport codes. If unsure about what airport codes correspond to a location, start with the airflair search command.

$ airflair search washington
WAS: All Airports - Washington, District of Columbia
BWI: Baltimore/Washington Intl Thurgood Marshall - Baltimore, MD
DCA: Ronald Reagan Washington National - Washington, District of Columbia

All flight searches typically follow the following pattern.

$ airflare <options> <dates> [ORIGIN] [DESTINATION]

• <options> may be a series of filters used to narrow down the search, such as --direct, --max-stops N and so on.
• <dates> may be either --depart DATE or --depart-from DATE --depart-to DATE for an one-way trip search. Adding --return DATE or --return-from DATE --return-to DATE will instead perfom a round-trip flight search.

For all the available options consult airflare --help

Multi-leg trips

Multi-leg flight searches are performed by chaining more than two airport codes.

$ airflare [ORIGIN] [DEST 1] <stay> [DEST 2] <stay> [DEST 3] ...

• The flight from [ORIGIN] to [DEST 1] will be on the date specified by --depart.
• Any additional destination must be preceeded by a stay <stay> option, which is one of:
  • --stay N: stay for a number of days
  • --until DATE: stay until a specific date
• Any additional destination may also be preceeded by the --transfer flag. This flag indicates that a self-transfer will be performed from one airport to the next, so no flight search will be done for that leg. This can be useful if a trip might include some travel via train or bus.
• The --return options are invalid for multi-leg trips. The trip ends at the final destination in the sequence.

Dates

The following date formats are supported:

• YYYY-MM-DD
• DD.MM (current year)
• YYYYMMDD
• DD.MM.YYYY
• MM-DD (current year)
• DD/MM/YYYY
• DD/MM (current year)

Currencies

The default currency is USD.

To change the currency used set the following two environment variables:

• AIRFLAIR_DEFAULT_CURRENCY: set to one of the supported currencies
  • USD
  • EUR
• FREECURRENCYAPI_KEY: an API key for freecurrencyapi.com (free)

Examples

One-way trips from Amsterdam to Athens in the first two weeks of March

$ airflair AMS ATH --depart-from 01.03 --depart-to 15.03

Round-trips from Amsterdam to Athens on specific dates

$ airflair AMS ATH --depart 01.03 --return 12.03

Round-trips with a specific departure date, but a variety of return dates

$ airflair AMS ATH --depart 01.03 --return-from 05.03 --return-to 08.03

Round-trips spanning a specified number of days

$ airflair AMS ATH --depart-from 01.03 --depart-to 03.03 --days 5

$ airflair AMS ATH --depart 01.03 --days-from 5 --days-to 7

Multi-leg trip: travel from Amsterdam to Athens on the first weekend in March, stay for 5 days, then travel to Warsaw, and on the 12th return to Amsterdam

$ airflair AMS --depart-from 01.03 --depart-to 03.03 \
           ATH --stay 5 \
           WAW --until 12.03 \
           AMS