In last week’s blog, I mentioned that I wind up taking a lot of codesharing flights since I moved to the Tampa Bay area.

Having moved to the beach in Florida, where my nearest airport is Tampa, it’s a whole different story than when I lived in the New York metro area. Tampa Bay is the third-largest metro statistical area in the Southeast U.S., after Miami and Atlanta, and the 13th largest in the whole country, with 2.7 million people. But for the most part, ‘you can’t get there from here,’ nonstop at least. In Tampa, we mostly have to fly to an airline’s hub and catch a connecting flight.

I didn’t realize how spoiled I was by having my choice of JFK and Newark for just about any international flight I wanted.

It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve lived off the beaten path. I was an innkeeper in Vermont for a couple of years, where the nearest shopping mall was 78 miles away. But I found that I could drive a half-hour to Keene, NH and take a puddle-jumper to Boston, which again can get you just about anywhere. Plus taking the puddlejumpers is actually much less hassle. The airport is tiny, the plane is tiny, you can show up a half-hour before takeoff, it’s easy to get your bags back, and then you start over at the major airport.

In Tampa it’s actually more complicated. Thanks to codesharing, it’s actually harder to find the most efficient or cheapest route. When I look at a timetable it’s going to show me the codeshare partner routes first (24 hours in transit for an 11-hour flight? no thanks!). Sometimes I wind up going to the airport’s list of airlines and checking them individually to see who goes where.

It’s not just international, either. Last year I wanted to go to New Orleans–which if I had a big enough boat or a strong enough telescope I could practically see from Florida’s Gulf Coast–but there are not even any nonstop flights between Tampa and New Orleans.

I know, I know, it’s all about there being enough traffic to make it worthwhile. For example, when I had to fly to Israel, I knew Delta had nonstop flights out of Atlanta, which as the nearest hub, one would expect to use. But the flights to Israel are at night, and because Atlanta is relatively close to Tampa, seems like the most demand is for morning flights in order to accomplish a day’s business. So I would up flying to New York, because there was less of a layover.

Anyway, I just heard about the travel site Mobissimo.com, which finally takes all these variables into account. If you want to go to Poland, for example, and there are much cheaper fares to another Eastern European country, it will show you those too, and then you can look into cheap connections. If you want to go to a beach, it will show you other beach destinations that have lower fares–for example, if you’re in California and thought you wanted to go to Hawaii but actually could go to the Caribbean for less.

If there’s a long layover in your flight path, it will also suggest trains that go there for less, if available.

I know that most business travelers just want the easiest connection, but if you obsess about deals like I do, and you ‘can’t get there from here’ easily anyway, it’s nice to know that you’re not alone.

–Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer