Is there a flight search engine that combines flights from different airlines?

Since there seems to be a lot of confusion about what you are looking for, it could be useful to have a summary of what has been suggested (thanks and +1 to everybody who answered!). There are several types of tools you can use to find routes combining flights operated by different airlines:

• Airlines’ websites typically sell flights from other airlines (not only codeshare or partners from the same alliance but also flights that can be sold through interline agreements). Obviously there are many limitations but they can find at least some multiple airline combinations.
• Online Travel Agents (OTA) will combine products from multiple providers and sell them directly to you (typically using a GDS behind the scenes). OTA include Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and in Germany Opodo, Lastminute, TravelScout24, HolidayCheck (apparently no naked flights) or Thomas Cook.
• Search engines or aggregators search various data sources to find potential connections but redirect you to other websites (either airlines or travel agents) to handle the booking itself. Aggregators include Kayak, Momondo, Skyscanner, Hipmunk, Adioso and Google Flights.
• Other tools can also be useful. For example, Matrix Airfare Search from ITA lets you look at the details of the fares and use advanced routing codes to refine your search. Unlike all other search engines, it does not provide any link to book the ticket. I don’t know much about it but KVS Availability Tool might also be relevant.

The various search engines have slightly different functionality (filtering, specifying complex routes, selecting airlines, exploring various destinations, comparing prices when you are flexible on the date, etc.) Some are more focused on naked flights, other push hotels, car hires, or packages but nearly all can find multiple airlines combinations and many can beat your EUR 3000 price on FRA-YLW. Among the search engines listed above, at least ITA’s Matrix, Kayak, Momondo, Hipmunk, Adioso, and Google Flights can also filter by time of arrival.

One thing that very few sites do is combine separate tickets (i.e. list flights that for some reason can’t be booked together as one ticket). Generally speaking doing that is a bad idea since when anything unexpected happens (delay, cancellation, luggage problem), you’re on your own. Because of that most search engines won’t show a “connection” that involve a low-cost airline as these often don’t handle connections or sell tickets through third parties at all. Still, at least rome2rio and Kayak seem to do that in some cases (but, because of the drawbacks noted above, they will only display it if nothing reasonably similar as far as price and duration is concerned is available). azair and Kiwi.com, which specialise in low-cost flights will also do that for you.

For travel agents or aggregators, expanding resources on flights that can’t be sold, expose travelers to a lot of problems and might not even be that much cheaper does not make sense. Given that your unspecified connection over LHR was apparently significantly more expensive and cumbersome than the ones found by most websites (including the Condor/Westjet solution mentioned by jpatokal or djhurio), there is no reason why it should figure prominently in anyone’s results. Yet, if you drill down their results, rome2rio, Google Flights or Momondo all have FRA-LHR-SEA-YLW or FRA-LHR-YYC-YLW connections around EUR 1800 (at the time of writing) that sound very much like the one you described.

Now, if you are looking for an exhaustive search engine that could find any arbitrary connection then that does not exist as far as I know. Everybody who knows something about the industry seem to agree that it would be much more difficult than you suspect (see this earlier answer and this presentation for a glimpse into the issue). Note that the problem is not so much finding a route (that’s a well-known problem) but also getting all the data in the first place and coming up with a price that can be booked. All the tools listed here are designed to find actual bookable tickets, not idly explore flight routes.

If there is a specific reason why you want another connection than the ones found until now, then you need to explain what that reason is. Otherwise, it’s difficult to meaningfully search for it. In any case, the problem is not merely that your solution involves multiple airlines because all search engines are fully able to find such connections.

Matrix by ITA Software is excellent for this: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/

It’s capable of giving you very complicated fares, and can find some good deals.

You can’t book directly from Matrix, it just shows you a fare and a price, but you have to go back through the particular airlines website, or over the phone. This isn’t a problem, usually flight search tools just add a surcharge, and you are better off booking direct with the airline.

I personally like Hipmunk.

http://www.hipmunk.com/

Shows the results in a Gantt chart so you can easily see flights available from a certain time period or arriving by a certain time period. You can also easily see how many layovers there are, and are sortable by price, agony, and other factors.

You might try:

http://www.comparavel.com

which compares flights across different airlines.

Disclaimer: The owner of this website belongs to my family.

http://www.momondo.com/ is pretty good.

I attempted to input your search, modify if I screwed up 🙂

link to Momondo search (click “Time of day (Outbound) Arrive” and set the right slider to 17:00)

PS: remember to clear your cache before ordering your tickets since many airline companies jack up the price based on your interest and OS choice (Mac users are often met with higher prices).

Edit: additional search options are enabled once you make your initial search, like, show only flight times before 5pm.

Try the Skyscanner. It seems there is a 1-stop flight through YVR for € 918 (at time on writing). And another one through SEA. Please check the dates!

A long time ago, when I was interested professionally in airline data sources, I remember reading somewhere that at some point Travelocity was the best search engine to find multi-airline tickets (I don’t mean the usual partner airline / codeshare arrangements, but actually multiple unrelated airlines). Supposedly they had developed some proprietary technology in-house that allowed them to find, price and issue such tickets. I don’t remember how reliable this information was, and the situation has probably changed many times over since I looked at it, but I still check Travelocity for tricky flights.

As for “bulk-download the flight schedules … and I’ll program it myself” – this is an incredibly hard problem, especially once you add fare calculation (thousands of pages of tariff rules) and availability data. If you can really do this, I am sure there are some recruiters at ITA Software (now Google) who’d like to talk to you : )

Also, keep in mind that if you buy two unrelated tickets and the first flight is delayed for any reason causing you to miss the 2nd flight, you’re pretty much on your own, whereas if it’s a single combined ticket the airline will generally do whatever it takes to get you to your final destination.

UPDATE: Since I mentioned ITA Software above, I’ve tried their search and it seems to be giving good results for your itinerary. Try it here: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/

Kayak.com does this in two ways.

First, for connecting flights, it’ll search from A to B and you can select ‘multiple airlines’ in the search results. This combines tickets and airlines to find cheaper combinations.

Secondly, It has a flight type called a ‘Hacker Fare‘ where if it finds one, will display it as such. It consists of combining two one-way flights from different airlines to create a cheaper overall flight.
For example, Melbourne to Christchurch return, it may find a Jetstar flight going there, and a deal on an Air New Zealand flight coming back.

I’m a fan of Rome2Rio, which is very good at this sort of thing since it covers most budget airlines. They suggest the following combo:

July 27
Condor DE7070
FRA 2:35 PM
YVR 2:10 PM
10hrs 35min 

Layover next day in Vancouver (YVR) 18hrs 10min 

July 28 
Westjet WS218
YVR 8:20 AM 
YLW 9:11 AM
51min

Price US$1,114 one-way at time of writing.

Expedia.com definitely provides this functionality. Using your example, the three cheapest flights are multiple airlines:

• Condor + Alaska
• Icelandair + WestJet
• Airberlin + Iberia + Air Canada
  (though both the first two are actually British under the covers).