drvannostren

Bah, still ongoing

Dieuwer

Same here.

s2w0w

Working fine on the mobile app. Website on the other hand still results in an error.

pjh981

May be a stupid question - but what does "QPX Capacity Exceeded" mean?

drvannostren

No idea sir I searched it last night and didn't really understand it, but then I'm no programmer or anything

pbartp

Appears to be working now.

drvannostren

I was JUST about to post the same thing, now I can have fun in the office again ...I'm such a nerd lol

psbaj

i was experiencing this issue this morning but now everything seems to work fine

Calchas

QPX is the name of the pricing system that ITA Software sells.

The ITA Matrix is one example of how QPX can be used. It is a demonstration intended to show off how good their work is, and presumably gives the engineering group some real world feedback.

More commonly QPX is used to power the search engines that airlines and TAs have on their websites.

Dieuwer

What other airfare pricing systems are there?

wto605

QPX works on airfares (and inventories etc.) the same way a search engine would work on the internet. Since they don't do any ticketing* (that would make them a travel agent with a really fancy website) their sales are B2B, and most alternatives are in-house (Expedia being the notable example) or simply an add-on to a GDS such as Travelport, Sabre, Amadeus, etc.. Some interesting (though very incomplete) wikipedia articles on the latter category:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comput...#Major_systems
(Yes it says CRS, but this covers many of the CRSs that grew into GDSs better than the GDS article itself).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global...ibution_System

*Google flights is technically separate from ITA software and instead of ticketing directly is redirecting you to a booking website (and making money off the referral). Once Google is no longer required (by the terms of their acquisition of ITA) to offer QPX to 3rd parties it will be interesting to see if this model changes.

P.S. ITA Software also sells their own CRS, although as far as I'm aware it's only in use by Cape Air.

If your question was more along the lines of "where else can I look" it's less about QPX and more about its application. For example .bomb uses QPX, but so do Hipmunk and Kayak (and Orbitz).

Dieuwer

Interesting you mention Hipmunk. I have noticed it can return more results than ITA. In fact, in one case Hipmunk returned something, while ITA returned nothing.
I also note discrepancies between ITA and Kayak.

Globaliser

I suspect that more is going on than simply what QPX does. My impression is that ITA filters results, even if you don't set search parameters that do that, and that the filtering is context dependent. Otherwise, the exponential growth of the number of possible results means that the number of potential solutions rapidly becomes unmanageable. Indeed, thinking about the original history of ITA, ISTR that the management of the unmanageable was one of the things that the original founders were interested in.

You also have to ask why ITA provides this service to the public (both pre-Google and now). I don't think it's out of altruism. Rather, this is a bit like a convenient way to get members of the public to beta test the software in a massive way, without ITA incurring any liability for the consequences of things going wrong. So, amongst other things, ITA may be using the interface to test the effect of different filtering mechanisms on the results provided. Other speculation in the past about the experiments that ITA does has included whether ITA varies the caching rate to see what is needed to provide mostly reliable results.

When you use a QPX-powered site that does real bookings, some of these limitations may not be in place. And hence the possibility that the real world produces different results from the experimental world of the ITA website.

Dieuwer

I disagree that there is "an exponential growth of the number of possible results".
In fact, considering that you can reach any destination on the planet by about three hops, the number of results would be: H1*H2*D, with H1 the number of airports connected to your departure point (hubs), H2 the number of airports connected to H1, and D the arrival point connected to H2.

Globaliser

That's only looking at the number of possible routes, not the number of possible results.

Take any one of the possible routes 3-sector routes. If there are 10 non-stops a day on each of the three sectors, in theory that could be up to 1,000 combinations in that one direction on that one route. Even if we whittle that down to 100 per route because those three flights have to be chronologically sequential, if there are 20 possible 3-sector routes from origin to destination, that's 2,000 theoretical possible outbound flights on that one day. If you do a +/- 2 day search, that's 10,000 theoretical combinations just to get from origin to destination. If, two weeks later, you want to return home and the same number of options are available across the five days of your search, that's 100,000,000 possible combinations of round-trip itineraries.