As a family that travels full time, we often spend months in a single region of the world. We tend to explore that region by all types of methods (bus, car, boat, train, etc).

We generally aren’t constrained by time or location, which sometimes leads to the Paradox of Choice and is a challenge for picking one destination over the next. And we also try to travel as cost effectively as possible. So how do we pick our destinations for flights?

A few years ago, I created a spreadsheet to help speed up the process of looking into flights from one region to another that easily accommodates lots of airports in a particular region. Introducing the Family Vagabonders Flight URL Hacker:

The Family Vagabonders Flight URL Hacker

Over time, I’ve found that Skyscanner does a great job of aggregating flights across many airline carriers and OTAs. Skyscanner also shows prices from a lot of the smaller budget airlines, which is one way we are able to keep our travel costs low.

The URLs from Skyscanner are deterministic and include a set of variables that you can manipulate. That means you can add a few rows of airport codes and dates into a Google Sheet to quickly find flights.

Overview of the process

First, I pick a destination region and start finding all the airport codes in that region and add them to the spreadsheet; the first tab in the Flight URL Hacker has a number of different airport codes that we’ve already used. For example, here are some of the major airport codes around Central and South America:

Second, I look at the airport codes around my current region. For example, if I’m currently in Madrid, I would also look at nearby airports, such as Seville, Valencia, Barcelona and Malaga (these are all easily accessible from each other by train travel, and sometimes the cost savings of one airport vs another can be thousands of dollars for our family).

Third, I combine the airport codes with a range of dates that we are interested in flying. Note that for this spreadsheet, the dates must be in a specific format like ‘YYMMDD. Here is what I would input to the cell for a flight on April 28, 2024:

'240428

This gives me set of cells with FROM, TO, DATE, <URL code that you copy and paste>, <blank price per person, highlighted in green>, and a calculated total price. Here is a recent example for travel to the Galapagos Islands, from either Quito or Guayaquil:

Finally, I start clicking the links and recording the prices of the “best” flights for us. We generally prefer a combination of low price, minimal layovers and not too early/late. For this example, it takes me a minute to fill out the spreadsheet and see that flying from Guayaquil to the Galapagos on April 30th is cheaper than flying from Quito for our family of five:

Tips and Tricks

As I go through the results on the Skyscanner pages, I pay attention to any airport codes that often come up as layovers between my chosen airports. Many times, these layover destinations are cheap regional airports, and sometimes we travel to these destinations and spend a few weeks exploring before we head onwards.

Getting Technical: how to adjust the spreadsheet

We’re a family of five, and the Skyscanner URLs have codes for the number of adults as well as number and ages of children. Once your children are teenagers, the prices are the same as adults. Here is the concatenated URL in the Google Sheet, with highlights on the number of adults and children:

This produces a search for 5 individuals, 4 adults and one child. In the Google Sheets template (which you can copy and save to your Google Drive), I include one tab for our family (four adults and one child) as well as for a family of two adults and two children, which you can see here: