You found a flight for $89. Great price. But it departs at 11:30pm, connects through two airports with a 38-minute layover at the first one, and lands at 2am the next day. Is that actually a good deal?
That's the question the agony score answers. It's a single number from 1 to 100 that captures the total suffering of a flight — not just the price, but everything that makes a journey painful.
The Formula
The base agony score starts with three components: price divided by 10, total duration divided by 5, and 50 points per stop. A $300 nonstop flight lasting 200 minutes scores 30 + 40 + 0 = 70 base points. A $150 one-stop flight lasting 400 minutes scores 15 + 80 + 50 = 145 base points. The cheap flight with the connection is actually twice as agonizing.
The Penalty System
On top of the base score, specific penalties stack for flight characteristics that make the experience worse. Red-eye flights departing between 10pm and 4am add 15 points. Early morning departures between 4am and 6am add 10. Arriving after 11pm adds another 10.
Layovers get special treatment. A micro layover under 45 minutes adds 35 points — that's the stress of sprinting through an unfamiliar airport praying your connection isn't at the other end of the terminal. Long layovers over 3 hours add 20 points per excess hour — that's the boredom tax of sitting in a terminal watching your life tick away.
Friday evening departures between 4pm and 8pm add 15 points. Every frequent flyer knows that slot — maximum airport crowds, maximum delays, maximum agony.
Normalization: The 1-100 Scale
Raw agony scores vary wildly depending on the route. A DFW-to-JFK search might produce raw scores from 70 to 250. A DFW-to-LAX search might range from 40 to 180. To make scores comparable, we normalize them to a 1-100 scale within each search result set.
The lowest raw score in your results becomes 1. The highest becomes 100. Everything else is distributed proportionally between them. This means a score of 1 is the best option in your specific search — the least agonizing way to get where you're going.
Deals: When Agony Drops Below 25
Any flight scoring 25 or below is flagged as a deal. These are flights where the price-to-suffering ratio is exceptionally good — the kind of flight where you book immediately because the combination of reasonable price, short duration, and good timing almost never happens at once.
Why Not Just Sort by Price?
Because the cheapest flight is often the most miserable one. It's the red-eye with two stops and a 38-minute connection through a hub that's under construction. Sorting by price tells you what costs the least money. The agony score tells you what costs the least life force.
That's the whole system. Price, duration, stops, and penalties — normalized to 1-100 so you can instantly see which flight is the least painful way to get from A to B. Scroll toward zen.
