I often rely on Orbitz to price out trips, in fact I used the software that powers Orbitz for quite a while before Orbitz came online. I’ve just noticed something recently with my results, and I’m wondering if anyone else has the same thing happening.

I live in the Bay Area, so I don’t really care whether I leave from SFO, SJC, or OAK as long as it’s United ;-) So with my Orbitz searches, I often use SFO as the departure city but select “and airports within 100 miles” thinking that will produce the optimum cheapest results. The other day, I think to myself, why not just try SJC for a change, and what do you know, the results spit out $100 cheaper for the same days and same destination. No matter what I do, when I enter SFO as the departure city, I can’t get those other cities and better prices to come up. I wonder if 1) the system has so many SFO options that it just can’t process the other cities 2) it doesn’t actually know that SJC or OAK are located within 100 miles of SFO.

Has anyone else seen this? Does it happen to other places outside SFO? I can give my exact search if anyone would like to see my results.