Flight + hotel finder for one specific trip pattern: flying out of MSY on Tuesdays into JFK or LGA (nonstop, Delta preferred, cheapest refundable fare), and boutique/4-star hotels under $350/night in SoHo, Nolita, Lower East Side, Chelsea, or Greenwich Village.

Built for one person's use, not a general-purpose app.

Earlier drafts of this app tried an embeddable Travelpayouts widget (Aviasales/Hotellook branded search boxes). That's not what this app does now — it uses Travelpayouts' plain JSON APIs as a data source and renders everything in our own UI. Given the budget, a custom flight/hotel pricing engine from full scratch (own scraper, own inventory) still wasn't the right trade — but "our UI, their data" is.

• Flights tab — flights.ts calls the Aviasales Data API (/v1/prices/calendar), a plain JSON endpoint returning the cheapest cached fare per day for a route. High confidence: single GET request, documented and tested against the real API shape.
• Hotels tab — hotels-live.ts calls the Hotellook engine API (engine.hotellook.com), a two-step MD5-signed search (start, then poll for results). This one is unverified — I built it against Travelpayouts' documented signature spec but couldn't load their full gated help article to triple-check it, and have no token to test against. Treat the first real run as the actual test; if /api/hotels/live returns an error, paste it back and I'll debug against the real response.

Both fall back cleanly (mock flight data / curated-list-only) when their env vars aren't set — nothing crashes either way.

The hand-curated neighborhood/boutique hotel list (data/hotels.ts) stays alongside the live hotel search, because Hotellook's citywide NYC results don't carry "SoHo vs. Nolita vs. boutique aesthetic" — that curation still isn't something any free API does for you. Each flight row also links out to a plain Google Flights search (no API, just a pre-filled URL) as a "verify the real price" check, since Google has better US-domestic fare coverage than Aviasales.

• Flights tab: real data once TRAVELPAYOUTS_TOKEN is set (falls back to a mock table otherwise). No refundability field exists in this data source — that column shows "Check" and relies on the Google Flights link.
• Hotels tab: live NYC search once HOTELLOOK_TOKEN + HOTELLOOK_MARKER are set (shows a config/error message otherwise, never crashes), plus the curated neighborhood list always.

1. Register at travelpayouts.com (free, no minimum traffic). The marketing site is aimed at travel bloggers monetizing content, which reads oddly for "add search to my app" — but the underlying APIs work the same regardless of how they're marketed.
2. Find your API token in your Travelpayouts Profile → API token section (this is separate from the widgets/Projects flow — you don't need to create a Project or set up any widget for this).
3. 👉 Add it here: https://www.val.town/x/unlikelyarchivist/nyc-flight-hotel-finder/environment-variables?key=TRAVELPAYOUTS_TOKEN
4. For hotels, you also need a marker (your partner/affiliate ID, findable in the same account area — it's used for attribution, distinct from the API token): 👉 https://www.val.town/x/unlikelyarchivist/nyc-flight-hotel-finder/environment-variables?key=HOTELLOOK_TOKEN 👉 https://www.val.town/x/unlikelyarchivist/nyc-flight-hotel-finder/environment-variables?key=HOTELLOOK_MARKER
5. Reload the app. If the Hotels tab shows an error instead of live prices, send me the exact error text from the yellow box — that's the real signal for what to fix in hotels-live.ts.

Worth showing both rather than picking one:

• LGA is Delta's home domestic hub in NYC — it usually has more Delta departures/day and connects to more of the network, so it's often the cheaper, more frequent nonstop option for domestic city pairs like MSY.
• JFK is Delta's international/long-haul hub — still serves MSY nonstop, but with fewer daily frequencies; can occasionally undercut LGA on price depending on the week.

• Combining flight + hotel dates into one trip cost. Flights and hotels query independently right now (hotels defaults to a generic 30-days-out date range). A v2 could pass the Tuesday she picks in the flight table as the hotel search's check-in date.
• Round trip / return date. Her trip length varies trip to trip (not a fixed pattern). Not built into the flight data yet — /v1/prices/calendar as used here is one-way; a round-trip version would need a second call per candidate return date.
• Refundability. Not available from the free flight data API. Stays a manual "Verify" click through to Google Flights.
• Matching live Hotellook results to the curated list. Right now the live section and the curated list are two separate blocks, not merged — matching them by name would be fragile without Hotellook's internal hotel IDs, so they're kept apart rather than faked into one list.
• Configurable origin/destination. Currently hardcoded to MSY and JFK/LGA. Fine for v1 (one person, one route).
• Alerts. Not built — the plan is to fold this into a combined morning-brief automation across this app and the client-appointment-tracker app once both exist, rather than building separate notification plumbing here.

index.ts                          ← Hono backend: serves frontend + /api/flights + /api/hotels + /api/hotels/live
flights.ts                        ← Aviasales Data API (real once TRAVELPAYOUTS_TOKEN set; mock otherwise)
hotels-live.ts                    ← Hotellook signed search (untested — see "Architecture" above)
data/hotels.ts                    ← Curated neighborhood hotel list
frontend/
  root.tsx                        ← HTML shell (+ iOS home-screen meta tags)
  index.tsx                       ← React entrypoint
  components/
    App.tsx                       ← Tab layout (Flights / Hotels)
    FlightsPanel.tsx               ← Flight table + Google Flights verify links
    HotelsPanel.tsx                ← Live hotel results + curated picks list

Template updates and upgrade paths for existing remixes: CHANGELOG.md