EsherFlyer

Introduction
I started putting together some suggestions for this:

I then thought that it might be a good opportunity to explore how these things can be found using ITA Matrix. Although some of the other general ITA tutorials have been referenced in the main BAEC forum TP threads I don't recall seeing one that took into account some of the BAEC TP scoring vagaries. The below is how I do it, and I'm sure others have extra tips and tricks that we can hopefully share.

ITA (aka Matrix) has been around for a decade or so. In essence it is a tool for searching the majority of publically available air fares in a fairly 'low level', techie manner. It isn't as cryptic as a 'proper' travel agents tool, but certainly has a range of behaviours and tips / tricks that you would do well to master to get full use out of it - some of which are explored below. It was purchased by Google about 5 years ago and still has the same powerful capabilities it always had, but some of that power is now available in an easier to consume graphical form via Google Flights. If you work through all of the below then you'll see how they can complement each other.

This guide focusses on TP runs within the Continental US. These typically offer very good TP earning rates at ~Ł1 / TP for a few hundred TP, and are a great option if you happen to be in the US on a work trip, etc. They also avoid immigration worries as you will have already entered the US so as long as the flights are operating to schedule a generally stress free trip can be planned. If absolute value or over 1000 TP is your goal then looking at runs that start outside US (such as EU - US - HNL) or transit US on the way to locations such as PTY may well work out better.

Having said that, many of the techniques below can also help with planning trips in other territories, such as in / out of HEL to make use of its beneficial TP earning potential.

When reading the below you may be confused if you don't start with the basic knowledge that flying in Domestic First on AA in the US has the significant benefit of application of the 3-times multiplier for BAEC Tier Point earning. That means that a fare that is 'business class' in cost terms collects 60TP for sectors less than 2000 miles, and 210TP for those over that distance. See the main TP Run thread for further discussion. Key point is that we're looking for 2000+ mile sectors wholly within the US on AA that book into First to get 210TP, and then trying to add short sectors either end of that to get 60TP each time.

This overview consists of four main sections:

• Core TP Run Search: A simple initial search
• Refining TP Run Route: Using Google Flights to expand options
• ITA Proposed TP Route: Understanding how the ITA routing language can find 'hidden' gems
• Optimising Search Results: A few tips to get better results

Core TP Run Search
Looking at Post 2 in the 2016 TP Run thread we can see that both LAS and LAX are candidates for starting a 2000+ mile segment that will earn 210TP. Specifically, the destinations that will achieve that are:

• LAS - DCA, JFK, MIA, PHL
• LAX - ANC, BDL, BOS, CLT, DCA, HNL, IAD, JFK, KOA, LIH, MCO, MIA, OGG, PHL, PIT, RDU, TPA

So a direct flight to those locations in AA domestic First would earn 210TP. An onward flight to a local-ish airport will often add almost nothing to the cost, or indeed reduce it, and add an extra 60TP. That makes 540TP for a return trip.

Put them into http://gcmap.com and you can see that you can break the LAX set down into:

• Hawaiian: LIH,HNL,OGG,KOA
• Alaska: ANC
• East Coast: BDL,BOS,CLT,DCA,IAD,JFK,MCO,MIA,PHL,PIT,RDU,TPA

As a starting point (based on accumulated wisdom):

• The East Coast destinations give best outcomes. The below method can be applied to the Hawaii ones as well to show that it doesn't offer much as part of a direct run.
• A good candidate for getting a sample fare on the east coast is ATL - it's consistently a cheap destination. If you were travelling East to West then LAS is a similar contender.
• In this case we have a start date of 1 June.
• If you feed ITA a list of departure or arrival points it may fly you in to one of them, and out of another. This can be OK if you go into JFK and out of EWR, but problematic if it chooses BOS and IAD for example. To avoid this untick the "Allow airport changes" option.

Putting that into the boxes at http://matrix.itasoftware.com: after clicking the "Advanced Routing Codes" link to show all the fields:

Or:



Which means:

• Start from LAS or LAX
• Travel via one of those 2000+ mile stations to get 210TP, using a OW carrier (which will turn out to be AA)
• Arrive at ATL picking up another 60TP
• Travel back on a similar route
• Leave on a specific date
• Get back same day, next day if necessary
• In Business, which will be domestic F on AA for 3x TP earning
• Fly me out of where you take me to.
• Use LON as Point of Sale (POS), which can be important for avilability and also sets fare to GBP for easy understanding.

I usually use the "Time Bars" view of the results and sort by departure time. By setting the Price slider to my maximum goal I can then easily scan up and down to choose a departure slot and trip duration that looks good. It's worth exploring the various options to see what works well for the way you absorb this information.

In this case that finds LAX-CLT-ATL-CLT-LAX as a long day trip (6am-12pm) for Ł577, which is pretty good.

Caution is needed when using lists of departures, waypoints and destinations like this. LAS-CLT-ATL would be a valid route from the above, but would fail to meet our goals since LAS-CLT is not a 2000+ mile route. So either split the lists up so that every outcome is valid, or check each result carefully to make sure it is offering what you want. Its worth putting our candidate into GC Map to make sure we really have 2000+ mile segments.

Having found something reasonable you could stop searching there, book it and use the next hour or so for something else .

Refining TP Route using Google Flights
Alternatively, we can take a quick look at http://flights.google.com for other candidate destinations. Set Business class, date, LAX starting point, and OneWorld as airline. On the map look for East Coast locations that are a reasonable price or of other interest, and we'll see if we can reach them via a useful route.

In this case BOS, NYC, IAD and MIA look OK to me pricewise. About Ł100 more than ATL, but I might hang out there for a day and actually make the trip culturally rewarding as well . So change the ATL destination to BOS,NYC,IAD,MIA and see what comes up. I found LAX-CLT-IAD-CLT-LAX @ ~Ł680 which would give just shy of 24h in IAD, and would tempt me as there is lots to see there . Don't forget to double check sector lengths!

ITA Selected TP Route
Final thing that occurs to me with starting around LAS is that you can often get a West Coast connection before the trans-continental, adding an extra 60TP - or 120TP for the round trip making 660TP total. We know which West Coast airports we want to get to from LAS / LAX as they are the ones that have a 2000+ mile route out, and hence this is the list of stations from Post 2. In other words we want LAS/LAX-WWW-EEE-DDD where WWW is a West Coast station at the start of a 210TP sector, EEE at the other end of that sector, and DDD is a further East Coast station.

If doing a 'mega search' listing all the routing points it's often worth dropping PHX on the West as it seems to lead to too many sub-2000 mile 'false positives' . You may choose to leave it in, but watch out for the following sets of West-East coast sectors that the search may find but are less than the magic distance:

• LAS-PIT, LAS-CLT
• PHX-CLT, PHX-TPA, PHX-PIT, PHX-MCO, PHX-RDU, PHX-MIA, PHX-DCA
• SLC-CLT, SLC-RDU, SLC-TPA, SLC-PHL, SLC-MCO

With that warning in mind let's design that mega-search.

You probably see the snag here that we don't know where to head for, hence the ???. There are many candidates given the routing flexibility we are showing . But ITA can help us here @:-). We can rewrite the above adding "F" (from the ITA routing language specification) where we want a flight. These implied in a default search by wanting to use aircraft to get between destinations, so the following is exactly equivalent to the previous :

The magic is to shuffle things around a bit to give us the equivalent:

But the ??? is meaningless and can be removed to simply let ITA find two flights to and from somewhere. We'll also make an additional change to help ITA by saying we want non-stop flights by using "N" in place of "F" (so it can more quickly ignore direct, stopping ones):

Searching on 1 JUN finds things at ~Ł850, which is OK for the 660TP but not ideal. 2 JUN is better, with LAS-LAX-MIA-TPA-CLT-LAX-LAS FOR Ł712.

ITA is having to do a lot of work here, and may have discarded some useful results along the way while trying to give us an answer in less than a minute, so it's worth trying the (supposedly) equivalent:

As predicted that does find a few new alternatives at ~Ł725, but nothing outstandingly better.

Final sanity check by putting our favourite ATL where we removed the ???. Although ITA might have found this it may also have missed it due to its optimisations. That gives us a Ł723 route, so we're doing slightly better with the Ł712 TPA one.

Improving ITA Search Results
There are a couple of things that can be done to help ITA not discard options that might be interesting, and are especially useful if the initial searches seem to be timing out:

• Add "; maxconnect 180" to the end of the advanced codes if trying to do the whole run in as little time as possible. This will cause lengthy (potentially next day) connections to be discarded, with the double benefit of decluttering the results but more importantly keeping real candidates in the list as ITA takes an initial glance at contenders.
• Using N:AA in place of just N to say "non-stop flight on AA" will also focus ITA's attention on the most relevant flights. The /alliance bit does a lot of this, but it does seem to change things sometimes.
• Using shorter lists of stations can again help ITA not accidentally discard the gem you were seeking. Breaking each of the East / West coast lists in half and trying the 4 combinations may find something. Or after a while you'll learn which ones are good candidates for what you're aiming for and which can be removed with little effect.

Summary
So after trying a number of techniques for finding routes that take more or less time, include leisure time, etc the outcomes are:

• 540TP @ Ł577 just running
• 540TP @ Ł650 with a day in BOS
• 660TP @ Ł712 just running

Once ITA is finding routes you like the look of you may want to book it . Often you can find the same route / fare simply by entering it on AA.com. Alternatively, use ITA Matrix Powertools to help you book them directly with AA. It's more techno-magic, but best head over there to see how it works than me try to explain. Suffice to say it can sometimes be the only way to book what ITA finds.

EDIT: LOL - just realised I did 1 June and not 1 July. Exercise for the reader ...

Tiffywren

Thanks EsherFlyer, I'm one of those who finds ITA all a bit daunting and so tend to just use google flights, I'll give it another go now

oscietra

a logical, well set out and interesting post - I do hope you can add it to the wiki. thank you

madfish

Thanks for sharing. ^ A few screenshots may be a useful addition to show what the input should look like.

Quick question. Why set POS to London? If you were to look to book direct with AA does their site automatically select POS depending on where you log in from?

EsherFlyer

I'll try and add some. I didn't want to make it longer (ie more screen space) than needed.

I think it uses credit card info to set POS, which can mangle some fares that you might see if it was left blank (implying US in this case). I don't recall ever buying a fare that I was aware of this happening on, so in some ways it is just a habit for me to set it so that I can compare fares easily. I could set the Currency box for similar effect.

EsherFlyer

I'm not sure it belongs in the TP Wiki as that is largely reserved for fare info.

I'd be happy to make this a Wiki Thread if that is what you had in mind. Votes on that by end of day and I'll comply .

henkybaby

Another big plus of ITA is that it can force pricing, but for that you will need the script that is referred to here: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...-lh-lx-tk.html.

On some itineraries forcing the TATL to be on a certain carrier can reduce price or create favourable fare conditions, like $75 instead of $600 stopovers on AA. The script will generate a link to AA's booking page for that scenario, without the script you simply will not find those fares, unless you're using a TA or have access to professional booking tools. It is explained here (#70 and onwards). A very helpful poster named maxvor is the specialist.

There are some really valuable tricks but I am sworn to secrecy and there really is no point PM'ing me, as I don't understand half of what people are telling me.

armouredant

Tease!

LondonElite

Excellent resource EsherFlyer! Thanks for this ^

EsherFlyer

Request to Mod...

I think the title I originally chose is a bit ambiguous. Adding "within", "intra", or "transcon" into the thread title might help.

KARFA

Nice guide and explains a lot more on what is there in the TP run thread. I think I'll add a link to this in the TP run reference posts if that's ok.

EsherFlyer

Of course. I wrote it to add to the community resources.

alwaysquestions

Some really good ideas and explained simply, thanks!

Unfortunately though, I think LAS-CLT is only 60 tps as it's only about 1915 miles ie 85 miles short of an extra 150 tps

Cheers

AQ

EsherFlyer

Well spotted. That's exactly the thing I called out a bit later . I wonder if I mistranscribed an LAX route. Either way I'll fix when I get a mo.

alwaysquestions

I nearly got caught out by that route earlier in the year

Fortunately the flight "suffered" an AA cancellation and I was able to reroute via LAX and got an extra 60tp 😆
AQ