demolineux

I want to make a multi city, there are direct flights to the UK by BA between the first and last city. The city in the middle is in the US and there are direct flights by AA.

Google flights tells me the price is say £1020 incl £20 to call up (something like that). Then when I try on the BA website I get error or it doesn't show the right flights.
Separate tickets naturally comes in at £2600 as it would be three one way journeys.


Are the google flight prices accurate, and is that what BA would tell me if I telephoned them?

BA6501

Yes, it should be a valid quote.

wilsnunn

It can be hit and miss with some of the more complex routings on Google Flights. Sometimes the BA call centre can exactly match it and sometimes the cost on their end is absurd and leaves you wondering why it showed so cheap on Google.

zebranz

Before I call usually duplicate on ITA and get Fare Basis to give to agent (if needed) to see if available on the flight(s).

Steve_ZA

The reason why it gives a “Call up” option is because the flights are likely not available on the website, as you have discovered.

flatlander

I can think of at least three ways that a search on Google Flights, or almost any other search mechanism, can disagree with another search mechanism:

1. G Flights is using cached information or cached search results that is out of date (tends not to happen to an actual booking system since the closer the customer is to paying the more important it is to be accurate, while G Flights is making many speculative searches to provide you with the all-carriers-whole-month calendar and you have to store some information from previous searches to make it fast)
2. G Flights has fixed time to return you a search result and will stop exploring more esoteric combinations of rule restrictions, so it may not find a complex combination of rules that prevents a cheap flight combination from being sold (almost every such search mechanism has a timeout, unless you're making a very specific enquiry on one journey and not many routes and times)
3. G Flights has a logic error that combines flights wrongly (can happen to anyone)

You'll see how 2 and 3 can also happen to BA's systems, and we frequently see reports of BA unable to price a complex itinerary that others can price, and vice versa.

Edit to add, trying to remember some info I heard from insiders:
Internally, Google has a very large set of machines that are calculating many possible routings/dates/prices, so the lookup when you search is almost instantaneous. Their coverage of routes/dates is very good but can't be 100% (99.99% maybe). If you run off the end of that pre-calculated set, either they'll do more calculation on the fly or just not return you some results that are possible but unusual. They also have to keep their calculations up to date and you might see a short delay, or of course their information source (GDS) could sometimes be unreliable.

In the end, no-one's perfect.

These factors also apply to hotel prices (I have some experience in that end of the travel business).

Globaliser

This is the best thing to do. If ITA will give the price, using the correct POS, then a call to BA will almost certainly get you the fare.

Remember to deduct £10.50 each way (technically, per fare component) from the ITA fare quote to allow for the GDS fee that ITA quotes include but BA does not charge if you book directly, even if BA charges the offline fee (which it does not always do).