Originally Posted by
FrozenFlyer
I can't seem to get either Kayak or AS to price anywhere near $400 for this routing. Then again I'm new to this, so perhaps I'm doing something wrong. Tried a Sat. outbound with a Tuesday return in August. Tried multi-city Kayak and AS website. Neither had enough space for the entire routing. Am I missing something?
If you want to book this full routing on the AS website, you actually need to book two separate tickets.
On the outbound, plug in the following routing:
ANC-PDX
PDX-SEA
SEA-LAX
LAX-DCA
Then, make sure you choose to search by
price rather than by
schedule. (A bug, which may or may not have been fixed, in the AS website makes it so that searching by schedule adds the consecutive fares together rather than pulling the published fare.)
Book a
second ticket on the return for:
DCA-LAX
LAX-SEA
SEA-PDX
PDX-ANC
If you desire, you can also add a stopover in SEA or PDX in either (or both!) direction for no additional charge. Remember, though, all of your flights need to be scheduled to depart on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Saturday, so if you're doing a stopover in SEA on a Saturday night, you can't continue on Monday--you'd need to wait until Tuesday for your next leg. Also, make sure your travel dates are between the fare validity dates of August 17 through November 17.
There is one other restriction you may encounter that may not let you price the routing out on this fare: all of your flights need to have T class available. If ANC-PDX-SEA and DCA-LAX have T class but SEA-LAX only has G or higher, you won't get the T fare. The AS website doesn't make this easy to see. The easiest way is to subscribe to a service like ExpertFlyer ($9.99/mo) that allows you to see fare availability on specific flights, or you can mess around with ITA's complicated-but-flexible routing language on a month-long search and search for this itinerary. Here's what I would do for the latter option:
Go to
http://matrix.itasoftware.com
Click "Month-long search" at the top of the screen
In the "From" field, type "ANC :: AS AS AS AS" (no quotes)
In the "To" field, type "DCA :: AS AS AS AS" (no quotes)
Adjust your preferred search period and desired length-of-stay
Click "Go"
Doing the above for a search in September, I find several dates with $400rt fares available. Clicking one of the fares brings up multiple travel options available at that fare. You can then take the dates you find and plug those into the AS website's multi-city booking tool using my above instructions.