A Coding Challenge for Myself: Programming an Efficient Wizzair Route Overview Tool to Ease Route Planning for Frequent Flyers Preferring to Choose the Wizzair Network :-)

Update 04.11.2024: The latest Wizzair routes for November, with up to three legs & for all available departure airports, can be found here.

Hello, fellows! 

There may be some All-you-can-fly members around here, or simply some dedicated Wizzair flyers, who were wondering how to ease route planning in an efficient manner. Then continue reading! 

When Wizzair announced the first European flight subscription under the product name "All you can fly" in mid of August 2024, I quickly raised the question to myself, what could be an efficient way to do the route planning in this upcoming year. Quickly, people like me came up with exciting approaches to this challenge, and within several weeks some web-based solutions implemented by enthusiasts like me, were brought online, e.g.

• https://multipass.replit.app/ (currently probably the quickest and best search engine which even considers actual AYCF seat availibility)
• https://the1491club.com/somewherex (a pretty solid solution with some useful features, however not really accurate at the moment when it comes to AYCF seat availibility)
• https://ninja.veikus.com/planner/ (outdated)

However, as I am not a professional in this field at all (I did almost 100% learning-by-doing ), I do not see myself as a real competitor to these solutions. But I was still excited to challenge myself and wanted to learn and grow by realizing this challenge. Therefore, I still continued with creating my solution, my idea, that I am now presenting here in this post of mine. It is very intuitive and straight-forward, and the mechanics behind work according to the following three basic steps:

1. Data collection: Collect publicly available flight data about Wizzair-operated routes from the internet
2. Data structuring: Merge and restructure the collected data to a timetable format
3. Data processing: Derive route combinations and store the data in a table-based format, supporting quick and handy sorting and filtering functions.

Of course this approach is not ideal when it comes to data space requirements or user-friendliness, however I like about it, that it is very functional, can be easily maintained (as it is fully python-based and does not require external ressources such as subscriptions or licensens) and respects legal aspects of the web scraping that is applied to gather publicly available flight data from different thirdparty online sources together with calculations to estimate for example the flight duration. Also, the results can be easily processed further or analyzed as per the individual needs. And las but not least, the results give the user a full picture of what the Wizzair network as to offer.

The actual features of the tool at its current development stage:

Based on the latest Wizz Air flight schedule (Winter 2024/25), a python script derived and listed all possible direct routes and stopover routes with up to two transfers possible within the wizzair network in a table format.
Due to the large number of possible combinations and travel possibilities, generated route lists are saved separately (one file for each of Wizz Air's departure airports).
The resulting Excel files also include further relevant (or interesting) data for each route. 
The columns on the far right contain a selection of predefined "sorting keys" and "filters," which can be used in combination with Excel's built-in autofilter, efficiently helping to quickly reduce the database to a subset of individual routes of interest.

Example: Filtering Dortmund (DTM) to Abu Dhabi (AUH) route options by Wizzair in the early Winter Schedule 2024/25:

[...to be continued... ]

I look forward to your feedback. And of course, your ideas for improvements are welcome too! 

Wherever you "go": Happy flying!