Paul Butler, a freelance data hacker in Toronto, has built a better tool for selecting international flights.
Consumers can use this free tool to pick flights with real-time data derived from ITA Software by Google's Matrix Airfare Search. (Booking has to be done directly on airline's websites.)
The main purpose of this project, though, is to re-think how flight search data could be presented, using D3.js—a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data.
For example, a search for flights between New York City and London in March that looks like this in ITA Matrix "time bars" search:
Becomes this at the click of a button:
To give it a whirl, go to Butler's site, drag the "Visualize Flights!" button to your bookmarks toolbar, go to ITA Flight Matrix and run a search, select the Time bars view, and press the "Visualize Flights" button in your toolbar.
The button takes the data from any ITA Matrix "time bars" results page and re-presents it in a new type of bar graph.
This is what you're seeing, in Butler's words:
I wanted similar flights to be grouped together. Prices tend to cluster at various pricepoints due to competitive pressure, but these clusters theselves can have large variance.
To account for this I wanted to emphasize relative prices rather than ranked prices. Because international flights may involve unfamiliar airports, I wanted room for the city and full name of each airport.
Also, because international flights can involve many time zones, I wanted the relative times in each city to be shown.
With this in mind, I set the X-axis to the time and the Y-axis to the airports.
Flight options are represented as a curve travelling through the airports, with flat lines for connections. Each airport has its own time scale according to the local time-zone.
The flights are colored on a linear scale from the cheapest (green) to most expensive (red).
The exact details appear when the user moves their mouse over a flight, at which point the price and airlines are revealed.
Because I wanted to emphasize relative price, I had to de-emphasize carriers, but flights are colored by carrier when the details are shown.
Get the bookmarklet and more details from Butler's website.
Talk about high-quality, open-source visualization. Somebody hire this guy!