Originally Posted by Yaatri
In my opinion this is short sighted. I would be travelling more if I could see fare rules. But the flip side is that people would make a sample booking just to view the fare rules and not purchase a ticket. MAking a sample booking maynot always work since the fbooking might not show the fare whose rules you want to see.
To book a flight by going from fare rules to a booking...
a) is used only by an extremely small fraction of air travelers.
b) generates more messages per booking than 'traditional' methods (on avg).
I think to maintain a tool to do this, and to supply the GDS access for such queries, would cost more than it could bring in. For example, I may check fare rules between 20 city pairs each day (on average), for a month or two until I come up with something I like. That is 20*60*2=2400 messages for one booking (20 cities, 60 days, query/result msg). And that doesn't even consider the availability queries and actual booking queries, which could tack on a few hundred more messages. While I don't have any metrics available to me, I can't see how the 'average' or 'traditional' airfare purchaser would generate that many messages for an average booking. By the very nature of what we are trying to do, we need more information than the average traveler, which ends up costing more money and consuming more computing resources.
Simply put, 'we' are such a small fraction of a percent of air travelers, that even by catering a tool to our needs, I don't think they could recover their costs or justify such a feature in a business plan review, because there just aren't enough of us. In fact, there are only a few hundred 'semi regulars' on the FT MR board. Expedia, for example, targets a market where millions of travelers purchase tickets. For them to add in features which appeal to one or two thousand of their customers... well, I can't see it happening.
Just my opinion, but I can see why the larger companies won't devote the resources to making fare rules available.