After many weekends and many unforseen obstacles its a great pleasure to announce my RyanAir weekend website. This website serves a simple purpose. Quickly identify possible weekend excursions during a weekend.
How does it work?
As user you chose your country of origin and then scroll to a city near by you. With a quick look you can identify where can you fly to for a weekend for the next four months. Then you can browse the possible weekend roundtrip combinations organized per price or weekend.
In the following screenshots, I first select Belgium as origin country, then browse through the valid destinations and decide on Edinburgh.
Next, I’ve clicked the Open Flights link from the Grouped By Weekend column. Once I open a destination then I see the lowest and highest price on the top. If I’m still interested based on the lowest price, I can identify a weekend with a competitive price. For this reason every price is color coded:
For every combination of origin and destination the minimum and maximum fair is calculated and then split in four zones by 25% each.
For example if the lowest price is 50.00 and the maximum is 250 then the color coding will be ranked like this:
Color coding helps me quickly go over the data and identify the weekend with the most competitive price.
What qualifies a valid weekend?
Although this is a subjective concept I’ve hard coded the site to keep only round trip flight combination that fullfil the following conditions:
- Outbound flight departs to target city from Friday 17:00 or arrives there until Saturday 13:00
- Inbound flight departs from target city from Sunday 18:00 or arrives back until Monday 9:00
This allows a minimum of one night spend in the target destination and a one and half to two days spend visiting the city and its landmarks.
Acknowledgements
This site is generated by parsing the RyanAir API and therefore all date belongs to RyanAir and is accurate upon rendering time. Due to physical limitations, only the next four months are processed from the RyanAir API.
The about page is auto-generated and reflects to the actual data upon rendering time. This is always the most accurate description of how the site is rendered and operates. To give an example, if the parameters of what consists a valid weekend change, then this section will be updated accordingly
What defines a valid weekend?
This site is focused on short city trips during a weekend. A valid journey is one that:
- Departs to target city from Friday 17:00 or arrives there until Saturday 13:00
- Departs from target city from Sunday 18:00 or arrives back until Monday 9:00
Building this web site is proof of concept of what can be achieved using light weight tools such as PowerShell scripts, markdown and a static web site generator. If you are interested in the storyline and technical background then please read my next post RyanAir Weekend - Behind the scenes.
In either case I hope you find the site site useful. Please provide feedback and ideas here or help contribute at github.
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