Search engine for multi-city AND multi fare classes?
 

I'm trying to figure out if there is a search engine for AA/BA with which I can look at a multi-city routing using different fare classes for outbound and inbound flights.

Example: I'm looking to price out AUS-FRA; CPH-AUS. I'd like to go outbound on economy, but the return (on BA metal) has what appear to be "friendly" fares in WT+ or CW.

If I use BA or AA's website, I can't cherry pick different classes of flights on a multi-city (though I can if I build as "straight" / non multi-city round trip). Matrix gives me the same problem, but at least I can look at how the fare is built on the final screen.

I still can't really build a fare (including the pile of taxes required) this way. The only way I know how is to call the airline directly and get them to price it out for me. So I'm wondering, is there either a sneaky way to do this in one of these search engines, or is there another search engine out there that

If you know the specific fare class you want for each portion of the multi-city, you can use this code in the Advanced Routing box in Matrix. /f bc= then the fare class. Example:

AUS-FRA
AA+ /f bc=o

CPH-AUS
BA+ /f bc=t

Multiple fare classes can be specified by repeating the code /f bc= so I guess you could specify all fare classes for economy on the outbound, and for premium economy and business on the inbound.

One small clarification to this. Multiple fare codes requires a vertical bar between commands since the backslash is a terminal string in the syntax. The /f is the terminal command and the vertical bars add variables in that command. It's why you can't look for fare classes and alliances simultaneously. Example:

/f bc=s|bc=q|bc=o

Edit: the site keeps removing the vertical bar in my example so I used exclamation points. Sorry, that's weird.

Recently I had a survey appear on google/flights, probably because I use it quite frequently.. Anyway, the fact that one can't do mixed cabin class searches on outbound vs inbound flights was the "complaint" I submitted about the usability. I mean there a lot of times where I prefer to have Biz on the nighttime flight, but PE on the return daytime flight to save some $'s since I'm not going to sleep anyway.

It shouldn't be too difficult for them to implement, for crying out loud :p

Yeah, one would think that Google of all companies would be far better qualified to do this than AA/BA.

Funny...I just saw this thread that I'd posted from a couple years ago, and it seems like nothing has changed. AA is relatively functional when it comes to doing multi-cabin ticketing, and they can even pull off multi-city/multi-cabin ticketing most of the time. BA will work for either multi-city OR multi-cabin, but not both. Google is capable of doing multi-city, but seems incapable of multi-cabin, and it's wonderful for doing open-ended destinations, but I can't seem to trick it into doing open-ended originations. Matrix can do multi-cabin, and it works great (i.e. you can do calendar searches with it) if your'e set up as a fairly straightforward round trip--even with multiple cities in your search. Matrix can even do multi-city multi-cabin, but it can be cumbersome, and I feel like it often yields inaccurate results--even then, you're still limited to doing specific dates (or the old +/- one day thing).

So I'll ask this question again two years later--are there any services I'm missing for fare hunting? Here's my dream (and yes...I realize that this is a very choosy beggar dream): I'd love to be able to do an open-ended origination, a closed-end destination, a duration, an open-ended calendar, and "fuzzy" cabin selection (e.g. "United States" to BKK for 1 night in the next 6 months in Business in one direction and Premium Economy the other). Maybe that's too much for a search engine to parse, but Google seems capable of doing a good chunk of that (not so much that complex cabin selection) but only with a "set" origination (or up to 5 of them).

I'm with you. I can't believe someone like google/flights hasn't figured this out. My main beef continues to be mixed cabin fare searches across all OW airlines. Should be simple enough.