The Flightfox promo stories seem to come up on HN regularly. Last time I fell for the bait and decided to try it out. Unfortunately, the experience as a real user was nothing like what these advertisement blog posts imply. Here's my Flightfox experience.

My main issue with these promo stories (the last one was for a round-the-world trip if I remember correctly): They give you the idea that on Flightfox you can post complex travel plans that are difficult to search for otherwise and get good results. That's actually not true. The form you fill out to create a "contest" is basically the same as the search form on any travel search engine, in fact simpler. I tried finding an itinerary for me and my girlfriend where the outgoing flights are to different destinations (Zurich and Berlin) but we return together (from Berlin). Luckily, there is a comment field for more complex specifications. Unluckily, the "experts" seem to ignore the comments. Out of three suggested itineraries I ended up with, one didn't get us to the places we asked for (and was more expensive than our own best result), and one added flights I explicitly didn't ask for (and was more expensive than our own best result).

In case you are wondering what the third result was: An amazingly cheap price and a useful travel itinerary. You need to pay the finder's fee to see the booking instructions by the "expert", so I did just that. The excitement didn't last long: The expert must have misunderstood the Brussels Airlines website because the price he quoted was for a different travel date. He kept insisting that the deal exists even after I alerted Flightfox to the situation. Ironically, Flightfox claimed to see the same cheap deal until I sent in an annotated screenshot. Travel experts who don't understand the standard pricing grid on travel websites don't have much expert cred in my book...

In the end, I emailed Flightfox about the poor outcome that I paid $50 for. After some back and forth they gave me a link through which I was supposed to request a refund. That link didn't work. After writing them again, the link worked and I got my money back. The time I spent replying to incorrect replies from "experts" and annotating screenshots, however, is lost forever. The only good thing I can say about Flightfox is that their support always replied very quickly and professionally.

One final point on those promo stories: On their example contests, Flightfox offers rewards of $500 and naturally get tens of results. I don't book my travels on a PR budget and therefore don't have that much cash to spare for finder's fees, which probably explains why I only received three results, all of which were useless in one way or another. So be warned: If you want to get as many and as good results as they do, you should be ready to put some cash on the table.

I hope this helps a few other people here put the amazing Flightfox promo stories into perspective. If you have cash and little time to research flights yourself, Flightfox will probably work for you. Me cash-strapped grad student is back to playing with Kayak, Orbitz & Co myself while waiting for the next installment of travel porn to get voted up on HN.