Hi,

I've been playing around with KML for a couple of days and came up with a data feed that gives you the cheapest current airfares from your city (if you live in US or Canada) to either: the top 25 list of cities, a supplied list of cities, or every city in the US/CA that has a fare filed from your city.

The URL looks like

http://rssbeta.farecompare.com/rss/google-earth-network-link

by default it will try and resolve your IP address into the nearest airport and use that..If for some reason this isnt the airport you want to leave from you can add

departure=CityCode to the URL.

At the moment it only accepts City Codes (i'll fix this over the coming days) so for those of you in Chicago, Washington DC, New York, Orlando, Houston...you'll need to use CHI,WAS,NYC,ORL, HOU and not ORD, MDW, JFK,LGA, MCO, IAH

Without any other parameters on the URL fares to the top 25 cities are returned,
if you want to specify your own cities add

destinations=LAS,NYC,CHI,SEA

to the URL.

If you want ALL cities in the US add

nofilter=yes

to the URL.

Examples
--------------
http://rssbeta.farecompare.com/rss/google-earth-network-link?departure=DFW

Shows top 25 cities with prices from Dallas/Fort Worth

http://rssbeta.farecompare.com/rss/google-earth-network-link?nofilter=yes

Shows all cities with prices from the default airport

http://rssbeta.farecompare.com/rss/google-earth-network-link?destinations=SAN,LAX,BUR,LGB,SNA

Shows fares to airports in Southern California.


The KML should update every 2 hours - in reality fares only change 3 times a day Mon-Fri at approximately 1000EST, 1230EST, 2000EST

Placemarks are created for each city with the name being the lowest airfare plus the name of the city. The description of the placemark contains a hyperlink to take you to a page displaying the rules for the fare.


Comments, suggestions welcome....