flight-search-strategy

flight-search-strategy is a skill for Claude Code from borski/travel-hacking-toolkit. It costs 48 tokens per session (1,616 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A flight-search plan that checks several flight sources, including airline sites, travel search tools, and award-seat databases. It explains which results to trust when prices differ.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to search for cash fares, points bookings, Southwest flights, hidden-city routes, and unusual combinations of flights.
Why use it?
Different flight sources show different airlines, routes, and prices, so checking only one can miss better options. This gives a consistent way to compare the results.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is python3 skills/southwest/scripts/search_fares.py --origin SJC --dest DEN --depart 2026-05-15 --points.

Part of the travel-hacker plugin — 48 skills, 1 agent, 6 MCP servers shipped together

Good fit Use it to search for cash fares, points bookings, Southwest flights, hidden-city routes, and unusual combinations of flights.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/flight-search-strategy

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install travel-hacker, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 48 skills, 1 agent, 6 MCP servers.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for flight-search-strategy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/flight-search-strategy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/flight-search-strategy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/flight-search-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/flight-search-strategy/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for flight-search-strategy

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/flight-search-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit/flight-search-strategy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,616 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 3 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium MCP Rug Pull · line 59
    Docker image references without a specific tag (:latest is implicit) or digest (@sha256:...) can be silently replaced by a malicious image.
    Fix: Pin the image: image:tag or image@sha256:abc123
  • medium MCP Rug Pull · line 75
    Docker image references without a specific tag (:latest is implicit) or digest (@sha256:...) can be silently replaced by a malicious image.
    Fix: Pin the image: image:tag or image@sha256:abc123
  • low Tool Misuse · line 59
    Tool parameters are crafted to achieve unintended or unsafe behavior. Parameter abuse can bypass intended safety checks (e.g. shell=True, --force, dangerous glob patterns).
    Fix: Validate all tool parameters against an allowlist. Reject dangerous parameter values (shell=True, --force, -rf /) and use safe defaults.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00048 $0.01616
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00808
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00323
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00162

Measured 11d ago against content hash 5c0be488cebe, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

flight-search-strategy scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/travel-hacking-toolkit/skills/flight-search-strategy/SKILL.md · 114 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 114 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Flight Search Strategy

This is not a pick-one list. Each source returns different results, different prices, and different airlines. Missing a source means missing options. The priority order determines which price to trust when sources disagree, not which sources to skip.

Priority Source Strengths Blind Spots
1 Duffel (skill) Most accurate cash prices. Real GDS per-fare-class data. Bookable. No Southwest. No award pricing. Offers expire in 15-30 min.
2 Ignav (skill) Fast REST API. Market selection for price arbitrage. Free. No Southwest. No award pricing.
3 Google Flights (skill, agent-browser) Covers ALL airlines including Southwest cash prices. Free. Economy/business comparison. Prices can be inflated vs GDS. No points pricing.
4 Skiplagged (MCP) Hidden city fares. Zero config. No Southwest. Can be noisy on small markets.
5 Kiwi.com (MCP) Virtual interlining (creative cross-airline routings). Zero config. Returns garbage on small markets. No Southwest.
6 Seats.aero (skill) Award flight availability across 25+ programs. The crown jewel for points. Cached data, not live. No cash prices. No Southwest.
7 SerpAPI (skill, optional) Google Hotels search. Destination discovery (Google Travel Explore). NOT for flights (inflated prices). Hotels and "where should I go?" only.
8 Southwest (skill, Patchright) Fare classes, points pricing, Companion Pass. All 4 fare classes, cash + points. Pre-built Docker image: ghcr.io/borski/sw-fares. Or local Patchright (headed mode). ~20s per search.

The Standard Flight Search Workflow

Run ALL of these in parallel: Duffel + Ignav + Google Flights + Skiplagged + Kiwi.

Skiplagged and Kiwi are keyless MCP servers — they are available in every properly launched session. Attempt the tool call before ever claiming MCP is unavailable, and never substitute improvised browser scraping for these sources (see fallback-and-resilience).

Read the full file on GitHub · 114 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 114 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 5c0be488cebe

Subscribe to this mod's changes

flight-search-strategy is a skill published in the GitHub repository borski/travel-hacking-toolkit (659 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 1,616 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.