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Old Jan 19, 2005, 6:25 am
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VPescado
 
Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: SQL
Programs: SPG Platinum; Hyatt Platinum; UA 1K
Posts: 3,170
Some notes on using ITA:

Using ITA can be as simple as putting in your from and to cities and letting it go, but there are some things that you can do to make it much more selective.

After the 'from' city you can place constraints on the outbound, and fter the 'to' city you can constrain the return.

For example if I were flying out of SFO and only wanted flights on UA, I would type:

SFO::UA+

You can use a different airline other than UA. The plus meant that you want one or more segments on UA. For a direct flight you could leave off the plus.

You can also demand a transfer in a specific city. For example if I was flying to the east coast from SFO and wanted to take a non-stop to LAX to begin my trip I would use:

SFO::UA LAX UA+

But wait, there's more! Suppose I really didn't wan't a codeshare on US. I could use the O: modifier which tells ITA that I want that airline's metal:

SFO::O:UA LAX O:UA+

Further, I can specify which fare buckets I am interested in. If I want to limit myself to L fares I can use the /F flag and BC parameter:

SFO::O:UA LAX O:UA+ /F BC=L

or if I was willing to accept L, S, or T:

SFO::O:UA LAX O:UA+ /F BC=L|BC=S|BC=T

Much of this is covered in the online help on ITA under the section on the language (although some of this is not).

Another useful trick I find for weekend MR's is that I'll be fine leaving Friday night (on a redeye) or Saturday morning. While allowing me to specify "This day or the next day" is one way of accomplishing this, simply changing "departing" to "arriving" and choosing Saturday
is a lot more efficient.

One additional note. Some people have noticed that ITA seems to have been "detuned" recently to not provide as good results. I have no idea if this is intentional or not (perhaps airlines and/or ITA's real customers are putting pressure on them), but I have seen some cases where ITA is not pulling back all of the possibilities it should, or where it decides that inventory is not available for a particular fare when it really is. Some suggestions I have for overcoming this detuning is to always tell it to search for a single passenger, and to try being very explicit with routings that you are interested in (e.g. spell out all the transfer cities that you want). BTW if anyone from ITA is reading this and the detuning is not intentional, feel free to contact me if you want some examples.

Yet another note on ITA: There is one unusual scenario that it will show something bookable that is not. It turns out that although a carrier may show inventory in some class on all segments of a multi-segment itinerary, they may withhold inventory when they are strung together (e.g. A-B-C-D-E might not have inventory available on segment D-E for itineraries beginning at A even though the inventory shows up as available on D-E otherwise). Unfortunately there really is no way for a non travel agent to find this out without calling the airline and asking lots of questions (it is highly unlikely that the agent you talk to will know what is going on, but asking the right questions you should be able to figure it out if you suspect that this is going on).

One last note: It seems that a lot of folks new to MR's are learning a bit about ITA and simply plugging in the to and from cities and increasing the number of segments until the perfect MR falls out. This tends not to be very productive as ITA will spend only a limited time on a search before returning the best results it could find. Try to be very precise with the info you give ITA. When chasing a particular fare, limit it to the fare bucket you need. When you find a grout routing between MIA and JFK that allows a connection in HNL (Ok, I can dream, can't I?) then make sure you put that in as an explicit connection point (e.g. MIA::AA+ HNL AA+).

Last edited by VPescado; Sep 18, 2005 at 12:42 pm
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