Originally Posted by
gomike
Did you try to replicate your ITN on Kayak.com then link to a travel site?
I did. I tried aa.com, kayak, sidestep, orbitz, travelocity, quixo, Zuji, and a few others. Please see below for specifics.
Originally Posted by
WillTravel
Why don't you post what you are trying to book, and someone may be able to help you?
The itinerary was CHI-ROM-DEL-LON-CHI. It became clear pretty soon that AA had the best CHI-DEL fare (LLRIND) and it would be best to book this as a CHI-DEL round trip with stops in Rome and London. Moreover AA was the best choice for the CHI-ROM and LON-CHI legs.
The most troublesome leg was ROM-DEL. Most "majors" want to fly you back to LHR, AMS, CDG, FRA, etc, turning an 7-8 h distance into 16-24 hour flights. ITA produced two interesting options: A nonstop on Eurofly, a carrier unknown to us and no AA miles; a 1-connection flight on Royal Jordanian, convenient departure/arrival times, full AA miles. After some back and forth we chose RJ.
As for the DEL-LON leg, there are tons of flights but most have bad timings, or no/low AA miles. Again ITA helped us pick Finnair as the best compromise for us: full miles, great connection, good arrival time.
With the eye towards miles, I changed LON-CHI to LON-xLAX-CHI. So the final desired itinerary was ORD-FCO-xAMM-DEL-xHEL-LHR-xLAX-ORD.
It was not difficult to buy this ticket. We called AA and for $10/ticket, they were able to find the flights we told them to find. Their price (despite same booking classes) came to $50 more than ITA and I'd have liked to discover if someone could have sold the ITA routing at their price.
But one thing we could not do was to get this itinerary to come up at aa.com, kayak.com, orbitz.com, any of them. Their results were dominated by inept choices and there was no way to specify either a flight, an airline or connecting airport for an individual leg. On many portals I could specify 1-3 "preferred" airlines, but there was no way to say which leg I prefer them for,
that I want ROM-DEL on RJ or DEL-LON on Finnair. If I specified RJ and Finnair as preferred, the search engine would offer ROM-DEL on Finnair with 24 hour layover in Helsinki, and DEL-LON on RJ.
I forget every detail at every portal, but the end result was that (i) I could not replicate my ITA itinerary at any online agency or aggregator, (ii) I could not purchase the ITA itinerary at ITA-quoted price anywhere, (iii) it was easy to book the ticket with AA over telephone, but at a higher price than ITA said it should cost.