My seemingly underserved usecase for these sorts of tools is:

I want to go somewhere this weekend or next weekend. I don't know where, but I'm ready to get out of Dodge. Show me some cities for these weekends with how much it'll cost to get there.

My use case is "When is it the cheapest to get me out of here?". I can take vacation days at pretty much every date so I do not really care when I go on vacation. The destination does no really matter to me either.

Unfortunately, I found Kayak Explorer does not work for this as it does not allow me to see flights at a day for day granularity. http://www.adioso.com does a much better job. I can just search for stuff like "SEA to anywhere" and it will show me what I want.

It's a great concept, but Explore doesn't have enough data--rather, cheap tickets--to be actually useful. If you don't mind doing multiple searches, http://matrix.itasoftware.com is much better at finding deals.

Goes to show, Kayak should have this easily accessible from their front page.

Really cool display. Reminds me of http://www.padmapper.com. Would be really nice IMO if the various "price tags" or indicators were colored according to price... so expensive flights were colored red, cheap flights were colored blue etc.

Skyscanner.com has been doing this for a few years for european flights. It looks like they've expanded into the US and have also de-centralized this feature of their website: http://www.skyscanner.com/news/articles/2010/06/006690-searc...

When I lived in Germany, I used to plug in a month, see the cheapest flights, and just go somewhere for the weekend.

Adioso.com is so much better suited for this kind of stuff.

adioso asks you to fill a form* and press a button.

kayak just shows you the map.

* even though that form is really simple and pretty, it's still a mental speedbump

The best interface is no interface.

They have an impressive NLP search powered by a crazy backend, that map will be pretty trivial for Adioso to build I'm sure :-)

Awesome idea. But anyone know why flying around the US is so much more expensive than flying around Europe? Flights out of LAX start at $80, and you'll barely get past Colorado until around $200. From London, they start from $30 and you can get anywhere in Europe for under $200.

I really should've made the most of it while I lived 'across the pond'.

Because the US is big and fuel is expensive.

LA -> Denver is 837 miles. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+los+angel...)

London -> Rome is 892 miles. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+london+to...)

LA -> NYC is 2,462 miles. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+los+angel...)

You can fly the longest flight I can think of in Europe in the same distance. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+Lisbon+to...)

Also: competition from rail travel (which also benefits from the shorter distances and greater population density).

Prices dropped in Europe when air travel was deregulated in Europe. Right now, it is illegal for any non-US airline to operate any domestic stop within the US, so competition is much harder to come by (whereas in Europe, discount airlines can open freely). Add this to the fact that the US is big and doesn't have tons of hubs like Europe, and it makes sense that travel is so expensive. Fortunately, us US folk can get frequent flyer miles easily (hell I've earned over $5,000 of free tickets in the last year alone, without spending more than $200)

-M

Prices are volatile. I don't see you getting anywhere from London to anywhere for $30 these days.

Hah, my first search on Ryanair from London Stansted to Pisa one way was 20.99 GBP, or ~$34. Prices are still insanely cheap

I have two thoughts. One, this is really cool. And two, I wonder what Hipmunk thinks of this?

They shouldn't think, they should start copying and in the process make it better.

Bear with me: imagine you could see where your friends have traveled on this map. You enter a budget range much like you do and it shows you the options. Then, you could see any pictures your friends took on such trips. And with a FB message/email, you can ask them how much they spent, where they stayed, what places they loved, how the food was, etc.

Okay, who has built this?

Sounds like http://www.dopplr.com/.

This is sweet! Have been looking for something like this for a while

Seems like a cool idea, but doesn't have enough fare data. If I leave from Chicago Midway and check non-stop flights only, I can go nowhere in the continental U.S.

I'm 93% sure that this discovery will have a detrimental effect on my bank account.