Asiana Club - Searching for OZ via ITA, Orbitz, etc

I'm not an OZ flier but question came up recently in the course of another thread (http://flyertalk.com/forum/showpost.php?p=10846473&postcount=8). A great OZ fare didn't turn up in a search for NYC-SIN on ITA or Orbitz, nor on flyasiana.com, but did show up on ITA and Orbitz (and apparently bookable) when forcing segments explicitly as JFK-ICN-SIN-ICN-JFK.

Is this common? Makes me mistrust the search engines a bit.

Thanks,
ivk5

I know what you mean. It is very frustrating. I'm now in the habit of using airline preference on the search engines to get Asiana. Who really knows how those search engines work? I'm a programmer myself, and I have no clue. As far as I can see, not all engines have the complete list of airline codes in their databases. Some months ago, when searching for a low fare, the Asiana site listed the low of $1300., so I went to Priceline, and found one for under $950. on Asiana.

I found out that when you give a broad route specification (i.e. NYC-SIN-NYC on any airline), the search engine tends to look at only a small portion of the possible routings.

If you want to get a real bargain, you need to specify as many details as you can. The possible details can be: specific airline(s), no. and location of the transfer, fare bucket (or even better, specific fare code and/or city-pair), etc...

More constraint you give to the search engine, the better chance you can find routings with good price.

ITA has a somewhat complicated but very powerful routing specification syntax so take advantage of it. As an example, have a look at this post (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showpost.php?p=10600007&postcount=6).