You can create your own flight contest and note exactly which cities you want to visit and we'll find you the best/cheapest itinerary. We're discussing now about opening up the results of this RTW contest for a smaller fee, would anyone else be interested in that?

Don't miss an opportunity to provide encouragement for people to create tempting routes. e.g., requester posts bounty for interesting trip. Pays the winning expert. Then the public can pay a smaller fee (to the requester) to piggyback on their info.

e.g., requester might've paid a $250 bounty, but they can make it back from 50 people buying the info for $5 each, less FlightFox's fee.

Love the idea, BTW.

I think people most of us are curious to see the detailed results but I don't think more than a few people would be willing to shell out any $. Perhaps consider opening up the detailed results for this contest as a one-time-thing? I think that the interest+publicity you will receive (in addition to already being #1 on HN) would greatly out-weigh the few hundred bucks that you might get from a handful of people who'd seriously be willing to pay to see these results.

When a post is on top of HN, I don't think we're used to seeing the meat of the content stuck behind a quasi-paywall.

EDIT: It looks like you've posted the results publicly now, nice.

Love the idea; we'll definitely give it some thought, especially how the experts can profit from these fees well after they post the flight option.

Aside: we really didn't expect this post to get to the top of HN. Our intern was running around the apartment saying, "I told you we should have planned better."

I'd throw in 5 or 10 bucks to see that.