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Better Southwest Flight Search

Deploy to Netlify

Southwest is a great airline, but I find their flight search tool lacking. Since they don't publish their flight data, Google Flights and Kayak can't be used to search for their flights. The goal of this project was to build a better flight search tool for Southwest Airlines, inspired by features of Google Flights and Kayak.

Better Southwest Price Search Screenshot

Features

  • Multiple Airport selection for departing and arrival airports
    • e.g. Departure Airport(s): OAK, SFO, SJC and Arrival Airports: DEN, AUS. Shows flight results for each airport. I do this all the time with SWA, but I have to open multiple browser tabs for each route.
  • Range of Dates of departure
    • Flight results will display all of the flights for each date.
  • Filter by number of stops: Non-stop only, 1-stop no-plane change, Any stops
  • Filter by Departure time and Arrival time ranges
    • e.g. Depart between 10am-8pm or Arrival between 4pm-10pm.

Getting Started

First clone the repo and install the dependencies with yarn install or npm install:

git clone git@github.com:jappareti/better-southwest-search
cd better-southwest-search
yarn install

To build for development and watch for changes, run:

yarn start

In another terminal window, start the lambda function that queries Southwest.com:

yarn start:lambda

Loading sample data

While developing, you might not want to hit Southwest's servers on every page load. You can load some sample data by un-commenting a few lines of code in ./src/FlightSearchPage.js:

import sampleAPIresponse from "../data/2018-06-30-OAK-DEN-2018-01-12-14-49.json";

// ....

const sampleFlightProducts = R.map(
  transformFlightData,
  sampleAPIresponse.trips[0].airProducts
);

// ...
state = {
  flightProducts: sampleFlightProducts
  //....
};

Todo

  • Fix responsiveness and optimize for mobile devices
  • Add loading component styles (like Kayak) and animations
  • Add more descriptive error messages when request fails