ITA Hacker

Thanks for the suggestion; we'll see what we can do.

Please do keep in mind, though, that you're using undocumented features of the website that we never really intended to support fully.

ITA Hacker

There has been some internal debate here as to how much of this functionality we should support and/or document. The route language part (the portion between the "::" and the "/") is documented pretty well, but the rest (after the "/") is not documented in any public place.

ITA Hacker

There's another undocumented feature that does this, the "-codeshare" flag.

You can use it like this:
From: BOS::US+ / -codeshare
To: CHI

aktchi

How much effort would it be put it all in one place? I would happy to help if needed.

Features on my wish list:

1. Distance, cost/mile columns and the ability to sort according to them.

2. A truly flexible date search. Currently we need to specify the trip length, so the return is not truly flexible. I understand that you can't check seat availability in such a situation.

ITA Hacker

The documentation exists, but is not public.

This would not be too hard to add, but it would not include things like 500-mile minimums or different mileage computations that some airlines do for "direct" flights with stops.

It's not just about availability, it's about conserving processing resources. Our existing "month-long search" already takes a LOT more processing resources than the single-day searches do. If we opened it up completely we'd probably have to buy 10 times as much processing hardware to back the site.

aktchi

In that case, I for one would certainly urge you to release it. What is the point in revealing it one command at a time?

I understand, you can't be expected to do calculations tailored to specific loyalty programs. However, a basic idea of total miles flown or cost/mile would still help people.

You may well be right, but I would like to understand thos a little better. Do you mean that (a) one month-long search takes much more time than one specific-date search, or (b) month-long searches as a group are consuming more resources than specific-date searches?

Right now, as you don't have a six-month search, to take one example, I end up doing six one-month searches. Not sure if that saves any resources. Similarly, if you didn't have the month-search, I would probably end up doing a large number of specific date searches to get an idea.

OTOH, some times I am only interested in a 15-day period, but end up doing month-long search, which is sort of wasteful.

So my gut feeling is that if you let people choose the time frame they are interested in, that might not be too bad for resources. This could at least be worth a pilot program.

However, I would agree that that if people are checking wide horizons, it is impractical to check seat availability. Give them the fares and let them pick what interests them, and then check seats in the next round.

PS. I know some people here will feel like lynching me for saying this, but I find ITA to be a valuable tool and wouldn't mind if there was "premium" version with modest subscription rate if it also contained the functionality we presently find at Expert Flyer (booking code availability).

ITA Hacker

(a) is the main factor. (b) is also true, because of (a).

At a very basic level, the difficulty of the search depends on the product of the time windows. So a 30-day search with two possible return dates for each outbound day is (naively) 60 times harder than a search with single-day outbound and return. Now, there are some clever things that you can do to make it not really 60 times harder, but it's no where near as easy as a single-day search.

Changing the search so that it does 30 days with 30 possible return dates for each day, would make it 900 times harder than a single-day search (or 15 times harder than our current calendar). We'd have to make up for that by buying more hardware and/or having searches take a lot longer. Making the searches much larger in that way might also run into internal resource constraints on the existing hardware (memory and such), so it's not clear it would even be possible.

Compared to the processing cost, availability checking is basically free.

SuperFlyBoy

This url (http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=hacker) appears not to work on my system....

Yup, I would be one of them!

GivenRandy

On ITA, how would I specify that at least one of my segments be on DL? If I only want DL, I can do something like:

BDL:: DL+
COO:: DL+

But, what if I want at least one segment to be DL and the other(s) can be any airline?

aktchi

How about: F* DL F*

GivenRandy

Works great! Thanks!

hughw

I have 2 routings that work well as simple RT fares, but I would like to combine them so that they can be booked on a single ticket for luggage interlining and "protection" in the event of a late connection.

It's easy to book EWR-LHR RT as a business fare on CO in book code R. It's also easy to seperately book LHR-BUD + FCO-LHR on BA in booking code=O. I've tried to combine them as follows

Jan 17
From: EWR :: co / f bc=r
To: LHR :: co / f bc=r
Jan 18
From: LHR :: ba / f bc=o
To: BUD :: ba / f bc=o
Jan 25
From: FCO :: ba / f bc=o
To: LHR :: ba / f bc=o
Jan 25
From: LHR :: co / f bc=r
To: EWR :: co / f bc=r

When I do this, I receive a "no Trips Found" error message. ANy suggestions of what I'm doing wrong or is this an impossible query?

sbm12

I'm not sure why you are trying to for ITA to show it that way. If you know that the flights are there and that the fares are there, why not go directly to a booking engine? A decent multi-city search should be able to piece it together. If you want to talk to a human to do it you can try the co.com hold + support desk trick to have them add the BA segments once you've got the CO segments reserved and priced correctly.

There is also a small chance that the R and O fares do not allow end-on-end pricing, but I'd be surprised by that.

hughw

I'll give it a chance.

BTW. Do you know whether you can add a paid segment to a mileage award flight again so that luggage is interlined, etc.?

hughw

Do you know of any booking engines where you can specify the cabin by segment? I want to specify business for TATL segments and coach for european segments.