Originally Posted by
Globaliser
Why would you doubt the ITA volunteers' explanation? Particularly when you've already shown that you didn't actually understand the limited nature of the restriction?
"Taxes were too complex" was actually not originally ITA Hacker's explanation. It was a proposed explanation by a FT user. Only after that speculation was posted did ITA Hacker say:
We turned off multi-country-origin queries because there were subtle errors (taxes and other issues) in QPX's results
Which is pretty vague and could mean almost anything. I'm sure ITA Hacker didn't want to start a whole discussion and debugging session here which is pretty reasonable. But it also sounds like ITA didn't realize how much the feature was integral to the way people use the tool if they though "subtle errors" were worth removing the main feature that made the tool so valuable.
So just run two searches.
That only works if you were only planning to do one search previously. Things grow exponentially when the number of axes you were going to search over goes to two (let's try two different aircraft types) or three (lets try this airline in premium economy and that one in business) or four (lets try this fare class on this airline or that fare class on that airline) etc. The whole point of ITA being more powerful was being able to combine searches into one big one -- I can only just check every possibility one by one on any engine. But yeah, it's not such a big deal for Canada/US -- it's a *huge* issue for European flights where even regular users can have airports in 5 countries near them as another poster mentioned. And someone looking for a deal might have a dozen different countries they're considering searching.
Two points about this:The ex-EU deals were perfectly capable of being found, discussed and exploited by UK-based passengers without the existence of ITA, as a decade and more of participation on the BA board has proved.
The feature has only been broken since 2018. The right countries to look at was found well before that using the feature. UK-based passengers looking for deals are now basically stuck with the same two or three countries they found deals from in the past assuming they'll be the same ones in the future. Sure someone might stumble on another one one day from luck but maybe not if it's not an obvious country. The only reason we know the two or three countries in question are because people were able to search at the time.
So if your hypothesis were correct, the ITA restriction is pretty useless for assuaging the airlines' concerns. That is a strong pointer to the hypothesis being wrong.
Sure it was mostly just a bit of tin-hattery. The only way it would be realistic is if there was a major web site like Kayak or something offering this search and probably other options like split-fares or some such and the airlines who are major customers of ITA put together a list of features that offended them and it got caught up in that. They're not concerned with determined FT'ers they *are* concerned with surfacing things to regular flyers who didn't even know it was an thing.