Every want to just go fly somewhere but didn’t care where it was, as long as it wasn’t too expensive? SYS-CON Media reports that FareCompare has integrated Google Maps to show you flight costs from your origin. For example, the closest major airport to my current location is Newark Airport, so if I do a search on EWR (Newark’s airport code), it brings back Google Maps with flight cost information from my departing city (Newark in this case) to other cities in America.
Currently Cleveland is the cheapest place I can fly to, according to FareCompare, at $118. Now this is a smart way to use the Google Maps API and differentiate your site from the hundred other airfare search engines.
Before posting this story, I asked Gary Price if he wrote up anything like this before. And as you can imagine, Gary did. His post was named Getting the Airfare Buzz from Kayak.com which shows a similar use of Google Maps and airfares. Here is the same search on EWR but at Kayak.com Buzz.