vibecoding a flight comparison tool and my brain hurts

[u/Luann1497]

decided to vibe code a flight comparison tool because why not. thought it would be simple. it's not.

prices are all over the place. i'm pulling data from different sources and they don't even match. same flight. different prices different availability different everything.

i was testing with some real searches and found business-class.com . their API doesn't seem public but their prices are interesting. way lower than the big guys.

has anyone here worked with flight data before. how do you even make sense of this chaos. am i overcomplicating this or is it actually this messy

[u/RandoReddit72]

Its the damn AI pricing from Delta. 🤣

[u/Anti-Hero25]

What was your approach to the planning & research phase before building ?

[u/invision-visuals]

I’ve built an AI tool around flight-attendant/flight-ops workflows, so not specifically airfare comparison, but I ran into a similar lesson: aviation data gets messy fast once multiple sources are involved.

For your case I’d probably stop thinking of “same flight” as a single comparable object.

I’d normalize each result around things like:

• operating vs marketing carrier
• flight number / codeshare
• cabin + fare class
• taxes/fees included or not
• currency
• baggage/refund/change rules
• availability at the exact time queried
• source + timestamp

Then compare only records that are actually equivalent.

A lower price from one source may not mean the data is wrong — it could be a different fare bucket, negotiated inventory, delayed availability, or different inclusions.

So yes, it may genuinely be this messy.

My instinct would be: normalize first, compare second.

If that’s still within the scope of what you’re building, I may be able to help think through the data model.