I use Tripit to keep track of our trips – that means I have only one place to go if I want information about upcoming (or past) travels. But it’s nice to have some of the information on our calendars, too – not every little gory detail, but the big things, like start/end dates of a trip and flight info. So I wrote a program to extract selected info from Tripit and put it on the calendar.

And then I rewrote it in September to use a MySQL database to keep track of changes so that I could tell what was happening, especially when the airlines make changes to flights. All was well.

Until October 27, when the program stopped working – Tripit rejected my requests with a “403 – Not Authorized” HTTP error. I hadn’t made any changes to the program for weeks, so I filed a bug report and went on about my life. I wasn’t traveling (much) so not having the calendar get updated wasn’t a big deal.

But now that we’re starting to book travel again, I was getting seriously annoyed. So I spent some time tonight figuring out what was going on, and I eventually figured it out – there was an incompatibility between the Tripit server and the Python code they’d supplied to access it. In particular, the server was rejecting requests which included the default User-Agent set by the Python library. I modified Tripit’s code to explicitly set the User-Agent to match a typical browser, and everything worked again.

What a pain!

We were supposed to have gone to Africa in 2020; the trip got postponed to 2021, and then again to this year. We’re hoping that it’ll actually happen this time – so we’ll need flights.

I wanted to book the flights through the cruise line (AmaWaterways), but their best offer required flying through Qatar with very long layovers and flights at inconvenient hours, so I decided to do my own research.

Google Flights had some very attractive Business Class fares, but they were through consolidators with dicey reputations, which did not appeal. I kept playing with the site, and got it to offer flights on KLM – the interesting thing was that it quoted two prices: $16k for the two of us if we booked round-trip tickets, or $13k for exactly the same flights if we booked outbound with KLM and the return with Delta.

That inspired me to look further, and I eventually found an even better choice – outbound on BA through Heathrow (with an 8-hour layover, which should be long enough to make the connection) and returning on KLM (booked on Delta) through Amsterdam. Total price: $11k for refundable tickets.

The flights will still be long, but my wallet will hurt less, and we’re protected if we can’t make the trip. And if prices go down, we can cancel and rebook.