Google Flight

google-flight

A minimalist alternative to browser automation for one job: get a flight price fast.

Where kimi-webbridge / browser-harness drive a real page (open a tab, wait for render, click through an autocomplete dropdown, scroll a virtualized calendar, screenshot to verify), this skill sends one HTTP GET to Google Flights' search endpoint and parses the JSON payload embedded in the returned HTML. No browser process, no CSS/layout, no screenshots — just a request and a parse. That makes it both faster (~1-3s vs 10s+ for a single browser navigate) and lighter on RAM (no Chromium tab at all).

When to use this vs. a browser tool

Usage

uv run scripts/search_flights.py --from TPE --to MAD --depart 2026-10-22 --return 2026-10-31 --currency TWD

uv run reads the PEP 723 header at the top of the script and installs its pinned dependencies (fast-flights, typing_extensions) into an ephemeral env on first run — nothing to pip install by hand, nothing to leave installed afterward. Battery included.

Key flags:

• --from / --to — IATA airport codes (e.g. TPE, MAD), validated as 3 letters and case-normalized; must differ from each other
• --depart YYYY-MM-DD — required, strictly validated (see Lessons #6)
• --return YYYY-MM-DD — omit for one-way; must not be before --depart
• --adults — 1-9 (Google Flights' own UI cap), default 1
• --currency — e.g. TWD, USD (blank lets Google pick); validated against the ~70 codes fast-flights actually supports
• --max-stops N — filters client-side (the library's own server-side stop filter crashes the parser on some routes, see below — don't pass it upstream); must be >= 0
• --depart-window "HH:MM-HH:MM" / --arrive-window "HH:MM-HH:MM" — filter the outbound leg's clock-time departure/arrival, e.g. --arrive-window "12:00-18:00" for "must land in the afternoon". Supports windows that cross midnight, e.g. "22:00-04:00" for red-eyes.
• --format json|table — json for another agent/script to consume, table for a human to read
• --limit N — cap results (sorted by price ascending), must be >= 1

On success it exits 0 and prints results. On failure (bad input, no results, or the upstream parser choking) it prints a JSON {"error": ...} to stdout/stderr and exits non-zero — check the exit code, don't just check stdout is non-empty.

Lessons this distills (from manually driving Google Flights in a real browser first)

1. Long-haul date math is a trap. A 19-hour TPE→MAD flight departing Taipei at 00:30 can land in Madrid the same calendar day — Taipei is far enough ahead of Madrid that the timezone gain outpaces the flight time. If you want "arrives afternoon on date X", don't assume you need to search --depart one day earlier; search --depart on X itself first and check the actual arrive field the script prints. Verify, don't guess.
2. Round-trip here means "outbound options + total price", not two paired legs. Google Flights' own UI is two-step: pick an outbound flight, then it shows you return options for that specific fare. This script's --return flag reproduces step one only — you get a real round-trip total price, but the itinerary printed is the outbound leg; the specific return flight isn't resolved. If you need the actual return time pinned down, treat this script's price as a first-pass estimate and confirm the return leg with a browser tool.
3. The reverse-engineered parser is fragile, in two different ways — and one of them was fixable. It decodes an undocumented, unstable tfs protobuf param and parses embedded JSON that Google can reshape at any time.
   • Whole-query failure, root-caused and patched: a sweep of ~20 routes found fast_flights.parser.parse_js does price = k[1][0][1] for every raw itinerary entry with no bounds check — one entry missing price data (common on TPE→LHR, TPE→BNE, TPE→JNB, and intermittently others) crashed the parse for the entire result set, discarding every other good entry along with it. That was a fixable bug in a 15-line loop, not an inherent fragility, so this script monkey-patches parse_js at import time (see patch_resilient_parser()) to skip only the bad entry and keep the rest. Pass rate on the swept routes went from 33/40 to 40/40 after the patch. If a future fast-flights release changes the parser's internal shape, the patch fails closed (falls back to stock behavior with a stderr note) rather than breaking the script.
   • Per-result failure: even with the patch, one specific result can still have its leg date/time left as None by Google's payload — seen on TPE→SYD. This isn't a parse crash, it blows up later while formatting that one result. The script catches this per-row (IncompleteLegData), drops just that malformed result, and reports how many were dropped — a route returning 5 good results and skipping 1 bad one is normal, not a sign something's broken. A caught error now means "this specific route/date is still unresolvable after the patch," not "the library is generally unreliable" — treat it as fall back to a browser tool for that one query.
4. Don't trust server-side max_stops. Passing it into the upstream query crashes the parser outright on some routes (empirical finding, not documented upstream). This script filters stops client-side instead — always fetch unfiltered, then narrow down in Python.
5. Results aren't identical to what you'd see logged into Chrome. Google Flights personalizes by session/cookies/locale/IP. A price and itinerary set fetched this way is a fast, real, but independent sample — don't be surprised if a browser session run seconds later shows a different cheapest option. For anything price-sensitive, sample both and take the lower bound as your target, not either single number as gospel.
6. A malformed --depart/--return fails silently, not loudly — validate it yourself. Passing 15-09-2026 (an unambiguous non-ISO string) to fast_flights.FlightQuery didn't raise; it silently resolved to 2026-09-09 and returned real, plausible-looking results for the wrong date, with nothing in the output signaling anything was off. This is far more dangerous than a crash — a crash gets noticed. This script now validates --depart/--return as strict YYYY-MM-DD and --from/--to as 3-letter codes before calling into the library, specifically because the library won't catch this class of error for you.
7. A wide fuzz/stress pass caught more of the same pattern — silent nonsense accepted, or a clean crash for a case that should be a one-line input error. Swept ~90 more combinations: 24 non-TPE routes spanning every continent (round-trip, avg ~1.6s), plus deliberately bad input. Findings, now all fixed with upfront validation instead of relying on the library:
   • --adults 0 silently returned real results for a booking with nobody on it; --adults -1 and --adults 50 both raised an uncaught exception deep inside the library instead of a clean error. Now rejected upfront: must be 1-9 (Google's own UI cap).
   • --depart-window/--arrive-window with no -, an out-of-range hour (25:00-26:00), or plain garbage all raised an unhandled ValueError/traceback from inside parse_window. Now caught and reported as a clean input error.
   • A window that crosses midnight (22:00-04:00, for red-eyes) used to silently match nothing, because in_window only checked start <= t <= end — impossible when start > end. Fixed: in_window now special-cases start > end as a wraparound window.
   • --return dated before --depart was silently accepted and searched anyway. Now rejected with a clear ordering error.
   • A --currency value fast-flights doesn't recognize (e.g. a typo like XXX) was silently echoed back as the result's currency label even though Google may have priced in something else entirely — a mislabeled-price risk, not just a cosmetic one. Now validated against the ~70 currency codes the library actually supports.
   • Negative/zero --limit and negative --max-stops produced confusing but "successful" output (e.g. --limit -1 silently returned all-but- the-last row via Python slice semantics) instead of telling you the input didn't make sense. Now rejected upfront.
   • Three determinism runs of the identical query back-to-back returned identical prices — the "deterministic" claim holds for same-session, back-to-back calls; it's cross-session/day drift (point 5) that varies.

Files

• scripts/search_flights.py — the whole skill. Self-contained (PEP 723 inline deps), runs via uv run.