me

Flying in Europe

I'm planning a trip to Barcelona, Spain and Birmingham, UK right now and figuring out the best way to get from one to the other is surprisingly difficult. If money doesn't matter, then it's relatively easy to find a flight on any of the major airline booking websites. But be prepared to 1) spend 4-5x as much money and 2) be stuck with weird, long connections as there aren't many direct flights from Barcelona to Birmingham. The answer is to fly one of the myriad discount airlines. The problem though is that there's no centralized website that lets you search the tickets of all of these discount airlines from one place. A few different websites try (e.g. www.wegolo.com, www.sidestep.com, www.skyscanner.com), but none of them have complete coverage of all airlines (or even complete coverage of any one airline it seems). Furthermore, even with the discount airlines, there's still a dearth of direct flights. So you end up planning a flight to a nearby city and connecting by train. But now you have to start scouring the map for all of the airports within 1-2hr train ride of your destination. And there's no website that's designed for that. Is it so much to ask for a comprehensive and thorough multi-modal transportation website that will tell me the fastest, cheapest, and most hassle-free way to get from point A to point B anywhere in the world using whatever combination of airplanes, trains, buses, ferries, etc. is most suited to the task and within my constraints of departure/arrival times?