One more thing: more departure cities

Last week, we discussed airport coverage. This week, we’ll talk about a new feature related to departure cities.

When I began working on Midway, the primary use case was to find an airport where two people living in different cities could easily meet, ideally with a direct flight.

I recognized that other use cases existed, such as family reunions or company retreats, where individuals from multiple cities would attempt to find a common destination.

I decided to limit the feature to six maximum departure cities. While this may seem arbitrary, I believe it will cover 99% of the scenarios. Here’s an example with 4 cities.

One feature I’d like to add as an option is allowing for a common departure city when there are more than two cities. This would make sense for those who want to meet in one of the departure cities, as the number of potential candidates decreases quickly.

With that done, the core features of Midway are implemented except one, a big one. Searching and booking flights. And this is not an easy one. There’s a little bit of the chicken and the egg problem here. Some of the biggest API providers are either very expansive (Amadeus was offering a pay-as-you-go tier until one month ago) or they require having a certain amount of MAU (monthly active users or visitors) to have access to their data.

This led me to realize that for now, I need to focus on the discoverability of Midway. I’ve already written about it here. However, this requires some SEO optimization and reaching out to reviewers who can hopefully include Midway in their travel tool roundup. I’ll likely publish a few posts on this, but not as frequently as before.