Originally Posted by
GentleGiant
Never seen n used before in the search. What does that do / signify?
It means a non-stop flight, which helps the ITA fairies cranking the query to discard routes of two or more sectors between the points.
Putting 'f' there would allow direct flights (ie, stopping at an intermediate point on the same flight number) to be considered as well, and IIRC just listing the routing points would additionally look for connecting flights (on different flight numbers).
ITA will return potentially misleading results if you don't help it discard 'fluff' sometimes. For example, if I put ANC,HNL,OGG (plus the other two Hawaii stations that elude me at the mo...) for the destination then I get fares at ~£4000 because the cheaper ones aren't found fast enough, but ITA still wants to return something.
That long list of East Coast stations is a bit ambitious as it gives the fairies a lot of things to look at in the time available, but works in this case. If the fare results that came back were higher than expected / wanted then trimming that down to 3 or 4 at a time would be my next step, and / or using things like '/ maxdur' and '/ maxconnect' to discard overly leisurely routes (BTW, they become '; max...' if used with '/ alliance ...').