splitfare 🎟️

A flight-hacker's scanner for short trips: split tickets, trip-shape search, and it knows what's on when you land.

Booking sites answer "how much are flights on these dates?" splitfare answers the question you actually have:

"Find me any weekend next month — out Friday or Saturday, landing before 2pm, home Sunday night — and tell me who's playing while I'm there."

It prices the direct fares and every viable split-ticket combination (separate cheap tickets glued together through hub airports — routings no booking site will show you), sweeps whole months by trip shape, and pairs every candidate window with the destination's event calendar.

Demo above: London → Berlin weekends in September for 2 people — every Fri→Sun window priced, with Berlin's club calendar (Resident Advisor) per night.

What it does

• Split-ticket routing — direct fares plus self-transfer combos through your chosen hub airports (same airport, enforced minimum connection, home the same day), ranked by total price for your whole party.
• Trip-shape search — sweep a month for the cheapest N-night window with human constraints: out on these weekdays, land by this time, home by that time.
• Overnight positioning — when landing early is impossible same-day, it prices flying to the hub the evening before and catching the morning flight.
• Events fusion — every candidate night shows who's playing, via pluggable providers (Resident Advisor worldwide, Ticketmaster, Skiddle, Ibiza Spotlight — or write your own in ~30 lines).
• A phone dashboard — publish renders a static site: browse every window by day, tap into flights, alternatives and lineups. Host it anywhere.
• AI-agent native — an MCP server exposes the whole thing to any MCP-capable assistant (Claude, etc.), plus an ask command for plain English from the terminal.

Quickstart

git clone https://github.com/teatimedev/splitfare && cd splitfare
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e ".[mcp]"
.venv/bin/splitfare init     # your airports, hubs, party size, events provider

Then:

# price one out/back pair — direct + split combos + what's on
.venv/bin/splitfare window 2026-09-04 2026-09-06 --events

# sweep a month: cheapest 2-night windows, Friday departures, land by 2pm
.venv/bin/splitfare scan --month 2026-09 --nights 2 --out-dow fri --arrive-by 14:00

# render the phone dashboard (static site in ./site — host anywhere)
.venv/bin/splitfare publish --month 2026-09 --nights 2

# plain English (drives the tool via the `claude` CLI if you have Claude Code)
.venv/bin/splitfare ask "cheapest weekend next month for 2, landing before 2pm?"

The first scan of a month is slow (~1.5 s per route-date, politely rate-limited). Results cache for 6 h; after that everything is instant.

Picking your hubs

Hubs are what make split ticketing work: airports with cheap budget-airline service from both your home and your destination. Think Ryanair / easyJet / Wizz bases — Stansted, Luton, Barcelona, Bergamo, Vienna, Warsaw… 5–10 is the sweet spot; every hub adds ~4 lookups per date, so more hubs = more combos found but slower scans. The init wizard walks you through it.

Using it with your AI agent (MCP)

splitfare ships an MCP server, so any MCP-capable assistant can hunt flights for you:

claude mcp add splitfare -- /path/to/splitfare/.venv/bin/splitfare-mcp

Three read-only tools: splitfare_find_flights (one date pair, full detail), splitfare_scan_month (cheapest windows across a month), splitfare_whats_on (event calendar). Your agent gets structured JSON — routings, per-leg booking links, connection gaps, lineups — and can reason about trade-offs ("£15 more but you'd land 6 hours earlier and Four Tet is playing").

Three things to know:

1. Run splitfare init first — the server reads the config.json next to the code (or at $SPLITFARE_HOME). Without it, tools return a setup hint.
2. Uncached calls take seconds-to-minutes; scan_month with deep=0 on a cold cache can exceed some clients' tool timeouts — start with specific dates or deep=4.
3. Prices are totals for the configured party, in your configured currency.

Configuration

splitfare init writes config.json:

key	meaning
origins / destination	IATA code lists (several codes = searched together, e.g. all London airports)
hubs	self-transfer candidates between them
adults	party size — all prices are totals for the party
currency	ISO code; used for fetching, display, and booking links
min_connect_minutes	self-transfer buffer (default 120; separate tickets — bigger is safer)
flight_sources	["google"] or ["google", "ryanair"] (Ryanair's public fare API as fallback)
events.provider	see table below

SPLITFARE_HOME relocates config/cache/site for pip installs.

Events providers

provider	coverage	key needed	notes
resident-advisor	clubbing, worldwide	no	area_id: ibiza 25 · london 13 · berlin 34 · barcelona 20 (others: ra.co → your city → id in the network tab)
ticketmaster	concerts/festivals, worldwide	free, instant (signup)	$TICKETMASTER_API_KEY; set city in config
skiddle	UK clubbing & gigs	free (apply)	$SKIDDLE_API_KEY; optional lat/long/radius
ibiza-spotlight	Ibiza only	no	includes door prices
none	—	—	flights only

Adding one is a single function in providers.py.

Flight sources

Primary data comes from Google Flights via fast-flights — the only free source that aggregates all the budget carriers. Ryanair's public fare-finder API (no key) is available as an automatic fallback. For the curious: Amadeus retired its self-service API in 2026, Kiwi's Tequila closed to new signups, and Duffel doesn't carry Ryanair/Wizz — scraping the aggregator remains the pragmatic play, which is also why this is a run-it-yourself tool and not a website.

How it works, honestly

• The Google source can break whenever Google changes things. Treat prices as estimates and book each leg directly with the airline — every result links to a matching search.
• Split tickets carry real risk. Separate bookings mean no missed-connection protection. The tool enforces a minimum gap and shows the gap on every result, but the risk is yours. Prefer long gaps.
• Be polite: requests are rate-limited and cached. Don't hammer it.

Development

.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"
.venv/bin/pytest tests/ -q

PRs welcome — events providers for your scene, flight sources, and routing improvements especially.

License

MIT.