ITA Arrrrgh
 

Off and on I have tried to put in two stops only to find it won't accept it. Okay fine, a day later it does.

Current problem is I found a decent airfare PHX-XMN, but can't book it. On orbitz it lists the fare, but when I click I discover it is all sold out. Other sites don't show the fare.

Does ITA show fares that are already sold out?:confused:

IME, I find ITA to show things that are available and bookable. There is an option near the bottom of the search page "Only show flights and prices with available seats" if checked.

Good luck,

Whitey in YUL

Make sure your sales city is correct in ITA... that can impact the available fares, especially if they are restricted by country.

But generally, if you do not uncheck the "Only show flights and prices with available seats" option, ITA is very good at giving accurate results. A real travel agent should be able to book the seats using ITA's fare construction.

Same for me these days. I found MUC-SIN-FRA with EK in August for 599€.
The "available option" is checked and the sales city is also correct. Nevertheless, I haven't found an OTA yet, where the fare is bookable.

Did you check the fare rules? Maybe there's some bizarre exclusion in there.

I couldn't find any suspicious rules. Also FRA-SIN-FRA is displayed for a cheaper price than the bookable ones I find on several OTAs.

Sometimes ITA has probelms with EU itins. KL, AZ and LX fares (maybe others too) are either completely missing or otherwise unbookable classes are displayed as available. I guess you can add EK to the list.

I think it's a crap shoot trying to price out some ITA itineraries online. Even when I have precisely recreated an ITA itinerary in another booking engine, it's not unusual for the price to differ -- sometimes by only a few cents, and sometimes by thousands of dollars. This isn't always ITA's fault, because ITA is more flexible than some booking engines can be. For this reason, I use ITA merely as a starting point.

If I can't recreate an itinerary that ITA finds, sometimes I'll try with hipmunk, because hipmunk takes me directly to a booking engine where I can more easily confirm the quoted price.

I didn't know about the box to check that would be available flights only. Just figured they were. What I found annoying was that I tried fights from LAX and PHX to XMN found the same three dates that looked good.

Tried the airline site, vayama, orbitz, kayak etc...and could duplicate fare for any dates it showed starting from either point.

However, since I use it as a starting point as someone mentioned, I remember to check the box for a better basis. :rolleyes:

Thanks all.

Don't know if it applies to the OP, but from what I can see, ITA does cache availability and the refresh time has lengthened since Google took over. Must save a few pennies. Anyway, I have seen several examples of inventory out of sync with "real" sites (every one I can recall was a USA domestic segment). Trouble is it now seems it can take hours before the cache gets refreshed.

Hope it helped, natalie! :)

Makes a whole lot of sense, flyingbrick.

Ortbitz and some other OTAs find the fare, too, but when trying to book, it says "We're sorry, the fare for that itinerary is no longer available."
I thought, this was related to caching. But I looked two days ago and today it still shows the fares. Shouldn't they be removed from cache after a while?

My experience is that this usually happens when I'm trying to construct a multi-segment itinerary using the multi-city bookings on OTAs and each individual segment has higher availability than the segments married together. For example, on an SFO-IAD-LHR itinerary, the SFO-IAD segment may have availability, and the IAD-LHR segment may have availability, but SFO-LHR with the IAD connection doesn't in the same bucket. I suspect that most OTAs don't recognize that until they try to price the itinerary and the previously disjoined segments are married.

I am having big time trouble with it today. Will not allow me to pick cities within xx number of miles (although the miles search was 300 before, but now 2000).

The stop option gray out to only non stop. Make it impossible to find fare with force connection :(