Originally Posted by
Calchas
Interestingly, QPX and their web showcase, ITA Matrix, will happily generate quotes where different passengers have different booking codes and different fares. It will also use special fares for children separately to adult fares when there are mixed ages on the quote.
It suggests that some computer systems can handle itineraries like this, whether under one or more PNRs is not clear.
Mainstream airline systems can obviously book child fares on the same PNR as adult fares.
However, ITA doesn't have to make a booking to generate the multi-fare quotes that it does. I think it's simply taking availability information and making calculations based on that. So it's not a good indicator of what actual booking systems can/will do.
Take, for example, a situation in which availability is N2 Q1 O1. If you ask ITA for a quote for two people, it will probably give you a price for one Q fare and one O fare. But if you were to try to book this in real life, you might find that there is actually only one seat available in either Q or O, but not one in each - and you therefore could not book one Q and one O on that flight, whether in one booking (if possible with that airline) or two separate bookings. I don't think ITA would or could know that, given what it does - and so its multi-fare quotes may not always match what is achievable in real life.