How to specify the booking code on ITA
 

I have a friend at ITA who has kindly provided me with some info about extensions to the ITA "routing language" that are not documented on the ITA website.

First up: how to specify the booking code

The extensions to the routing language are accessed by postpending commands after a '/'. There's a wide set of commands available, but there's no description of them available on the ITA web site. Unfortunately, each command applies only to one part of the trip, so they must usually be entered in each box.

CONSTRAINING BOOKING CODES:

Command is: "f bc=X" or "f bc=X|bc=Y|..."
Ex: Limit each part of the trip to travel on United and booking in the
L booking-code:
from: BOS:: ua+ / f bc=l
to : LAX:: ua+ / f bc=l
Or with multiple booking-code choices and no airline restriction:
from: BOS::/ f bc=l|bc=m|bc=y
to : LAX::/ f bc=l|bc=m|bc=y

More to come…

Thanks, I was wondering if this could be done.

Sweet. Thanks!

Why don't you ask your friend at ITA to add an option to display flight miles and cost per base mile. And then be able to sort the flights by either of those data items! It would make MRs SO MUCH FASTER to find!

I've already asked him to add a same-day-roundtrip option to the month-long search feature. I've also asked him for a lowest-fare-to-anywhere search, with an option to specify the minimum distance. He replied that these were on the ITA to-do list, but he would not provide a timeframe for completion.

I willl pass on further requests, but let's first come up with a priority list.

As for your particular requests, you might be interested in CoMETS, the cross platform standalone database application that I've been developing. It's approaching beta release; for a preview, I've posted some screen shots. If you have feature requests for CoMETS, this would be a great time to let me know. Please also let me know if you'd be interested in beta testing CoMETS.
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CoMETS update (18 Feb 2005): CoMETS Beta 1 is now available for both Mac OS X (password: ftcomets) and for Windows (no password required). When I find a little time, I will post a short movie demonstrating CoMETS' functionality and ease of use. When I find a little more time, I will release Beta 2. FWIW, I've been using Beta 1 for several months on my PowerBook and it has been rock-solid.

UPDATE: The CoMETS Movie is finally here. Check it out to see how CoMETS will give you maximum info for minimum effort.

Is CoMETS a tracker of past itineraries?
Or evaluator of future itineraries?
Can you describe its purpose a bit better?

Feature request: Biggest plus would be able to cut an itinerary right out of several major websites (Expedia, Travelocity, AA.com, etc) and paste it into CoMETS, parsing it all out so the user doesn't have to do all of the parsing for the computer.

Sure, I'd play with a beta of CoMETS.

One request for the ITA people, which I'd hope would be quick and easy: changing the settings to allow airport changes on only one of origin or destination. I'm often happy to change airports in my destination city, but if my car's at MHT, returning to PVD isn't a very good option (o:

As for Comets -- sign me up for the beta! It's great to see an app out there that's OS X compatible.

d.

Yes to both. CoMETS will track past itineraries, keeping running totals of miles, EQM, BIS miles, segments, $ spent, and cost per mile/EQM/BIS. You will be able to see where you stand YTD, QTD, MTD, or LTD (lifetime) in the quest to reach your next status threshhold. Optionally, you can also track flight details such as seat, equipment, tail, captain, upgrade type, etc.

CoMETS will also feature an integrated mileage calculator (inspired by the lack of a Mac version of rmyadsk's excellent Flying Fish mileage calculator). The calculator will add bonus miles according to your status and will let you manually enter special bonus items.

I'm game! Bring it on! Mile Tracker and Flying Fish are the only apps keeping me off the Apple platform since the latest release of Office for Mac!

A valuable ITA Software enhancement that should be easy to add since the information is already present:

A column for total miles in the search results which is sortable!

fabulous
 

What a great help. I have been using ITA and love it, but some of the enhancements that I have learned about on this board constantly improve the value of both ITA and this board.

I had been trying to book a rt on UA but I needed W fares to use a companion ticket. Before this I had to put in the request and then keeping jumping down fares until I thought I was in the W range. However, I would often get a mix of W and V fares or W and S fares. It was pretty sporadic.

This has just made my life easier.

Same thing for when I need to book an H fare for Int'l mileage upgrade.

Great! Thanks! ^ ^ ^

How do you get it to return business/first class fares on the month long search? / f bc=H will return CO coach fares, but I can't get bc=C or bc=J or bc=f or bc=Z to return any flights. :confused:

Good question. It seems to work OK for specific dates, but not for weekend or month-long searches. I'll try to find out more.

It's a bug
 

I am assured that this is not by design; I have reported it as a bug.

Hi, SeattleFred. Thanks for your helpful contributions to FT. Please count me in for beta testing of CoMETS as well, Mac and/or Windoze...

Judging by the screenshots, it sets to replace my yearly spreadsheet for tracking my itns, miles, promos, etc...

Actually, I didn't see a feature for tracking promotions, but if that could be implemented, that would be great. If you'd like some ideas as to how to do that, please PM me and then I can e-mail to you how I've been doing it (which I think would integrate well).

When using the ITA softare site and selecting flights using business class, the booking details (summary) for the flights would likely be displayed as a J or J1234 fare. But when you look at the individual flights codes it displays them as being C class. C class on Air Canada is a discounted business class code which is also shared with upgrades. Why would the fare summary be quoted as a full fare J while the individual flights be displayed as a discounted C class?

Thanks to SeattleFred for revealing the hidden features on ITA.

Bump for a great itasoftware thread

buried in a thread on the United web site is an incredibly good tip at using ita to check out runs.

so here with full credit to lucky9876coins it is:

Once you've determined your best destination and price, go to the ITA site: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/prego .

Since you want to fly as many segments are possible, try some test dates and something like:

Quote:
From: SEA:: o:ua o:ua o:ua+ /f bc=v|bc=q
To: NYC:: o:ua o:ua o:ua+ /f bc=v|bc=q


Of course, replace SEA, and NYC for whatever cities you want. This will do a search for flights on UA metal, at least 3 legs each way (add another o:ua for 4+ legs), in classes V and Q only (these are always the cheapest two that qualify). (Note from MRAOK: replace ua with your carrier if you don't want united)

If the price you get is much more expensive than what you got in travelocity, try a weekend or month-long search. Notice however that there's a bug and you won't be able to get to the flight list in this way; but you will be able to see which dates are cheaper, so then you'll have to do a search on those days.

Finally, you won't be able to book this using united.com (unless you're extremely patient AND lucky), so you'll have to call united reservations and insist until you get an agent that knows how to book a MR.

Just want to verify: Are you saying that V and Q are the cheapest fares that can be used for a multi-city MR? Other cheaper fares can be used for some MR. Please clarify. Thanks. And thanks for dredging this up, very useful.

I was using the ITA software to try to build something out of BKK. I am trying to go to DEN in C class, but the fare to DEN is over 500$ more than to LAX for example (return) on DL. So I was wondering if there was a way to specify that I want a Y connection from LAX by doing:

From: BKK::DL+ LAX /F BC=Y
To: DEN:: /F BC=Y LAX DL+

This returns absolutely nothing. :( Is there a way to do this correctly? Is the ITA software not capable of specifying fares per segment? Or is combination with a Y fare really not authorized?

Try building your itinerary as a multi-segment trip. You can specify the booking code for each segment (although you don't need to specify a bc for Y):

Segment 1
FROM bkk::dl dl /f bc=c
TO lax

Segment 2
FROM lax::dl+
TO den

Initially, I had selected "Business class or better", hence my /F BC=Y
I have now tried your suggestion trying to connect through SEA (or LAX) and it still is the same frustrating result.
BKK-LAX/SEA is only 1715$ and BKK-DEN is 2327$ in Y and 2400+ in C/F between DEN and LAX or SEA.
I guess I should just buy two tickets. One ways between DEN and SEA are very inexpensive (140$ each way) and I'll save over 400$ for some short flights anyway.

Old Availability Info on ITA
 

Just tried to find a fare for LHR-IAD-BOS-LAX-SMF/SFO-LHR with UA on ITA. It gives me W class availability throughout, but when I call United and quote the entire fare basis code, no dice. United.com has shown no W class on LHR-IAD for hours, ditto for UA phone reservations, but ITA still has it. Why? How long does it take ITA to update its info?

It's hard to say what exactly is going on in your case, but I've run into this very same problem myself. I've gotten several MR's to price out without problem on ITA, and United agents / UAL.com can't book them, despite my seeing plenty of availiability in the fare buckets I want, even using more advanced tools like Apollo/Worldspan.

My old theory was that this problem just had to do with ITA's availability just having a lag time vs. United's internal availability, but now I think it may have to do with the way ITA deals with availability on so-called married segments.

There's a thread HERE that gets into the problem of married segments on MR's. An example of this might be: UA has a W fare published from LHR-BOS, and a W fare published between LHR-IAD. Inventory management may decide that it doesn't want to sell any more seats for travellers flying just the LHR-IAD segment, so they set the availability for the flight you want to W0:

LHR - IAD.............W0......


However, they still might want to sell W seats for LHR-BOS, specifically on the routing LHR-IAD-BOS. If this were the case and you searched for LHR-BOS, you would see something like:

LHR - IAD.............W9......
-> IAD - BOS .......W9.........


So, for the very same flight number on the very same day, W may or may not be available depending on what connections are/are not made. This is married segments at work. Based on my own experiences, it seems like ITA sometimes may marry segments differently than United. For example, United's system may not marry the LHR-IAD and IAD-BOS segments, and therefore not see the availability, whereas ITA's system does. (Although in my case the problem was usually the other way around; ITA didn't marry segments whereas united did).

I don't know what advice to give you more than what's in the linked thread. I've occasionally succeeded in booking these tickets through a combination of persistence and luck, but I don't quite understand why I've managed to make it work.

This may not add much to the discussion, but I have been having my own problems lately with united.com not finding itineraries accessible on ITA. I am trying to book a NYC-BUD-SFO routing. In my case, I use the multi-city search on united.com, so I see that there is V availability across the entire connection outbound and return (so I think the married segment thing is OK), I read the fare rules for each (and I think I meet them), I check that the V fare is offered on that date on that route, and yet united.com prices it as Q in one direction and H in the other.

I hadn't tried calling yet, since I am not buying just yet... But I was figuring that it was just some united.com bug that would be worked out on the phone. Sorry to hear that you are running into problems on the phone... now I am less optimistic!

Responding to my last post... before disparaging ITA or United, I need to disparage myself... I called and spoke to a United agent, who showed me where I was missing something in the fare rules.... Problem with gary_nj, not with ITA or United.... Sorry!

blah, wrong screen. Please delete.

Wirelessly posted (Opera/9.51 Beta (Microsoft Windows; PPC; Opera Mobi/1718; U; en))

Thanks for bumping the thread.

I had this thread bookmarked. It should be a sticky!

I thought premium cabins were excluded from searches other than those for specific dates .. ?

Another good shortcut is using negation
Instead of /f bc=X|bc=Y

if you wish just to EXCLUDE cheap booking classes, you can do this:

/f ~bc=W&~bc=V&~bc=N

and then you get no W,V,N in your results

Most used by me, as those classes earn me just 50%

stupid question, but how do you bookmark this thread?

Aplogies... but where can you use codes?
 

I was trying to locate flights with O, R, or E seats (Skymiles) on Delta. I could not find on the ITA website the place to enter in the codes to select airline and bucket class. Thank you!

Help with Delta...
 

OK, now I figured it out. You just put it in the box with the airport code. My apologies for being so slow.
But, I was having trouble building delta queries for O, R, E, etc. Does anyone have suggestions? I used
SFO:: dl+ / f bc=e
JFK:: dl+ / f bc=e

every time i try this i get an error: "Illegal command-line prefix:bc=x" where x is whichever class i specify.

for example, something like
ATL:: dl+ / f bc=x
CHI
returns an illegal command EVERY time, regardless of what class i try. any suggestions?

ATL:: dl+ / f bc=y
CHI

just worked for me with no errors.

mrredskin

You need a space between ATL and the first colon. And then no spaces between "dl+" and "/", and "/" and "f".

I'm not sure about the last "bc+x" since it is not a code I've used. I didn't get a syntax error message from it, just "no flights found" or something like that.

When you are fighting a line of code, the way to attack the problem is to go back to square zero and just introduce one element at a time.

ATL
ATL :: (note the space between "ATL" and "::")
ATL :: dl+ (another space between "::" and "dl+"
ATL :: dl+/f (note the lack of space between the "+" and "f"
etc.

Submit each one successively, and don't go on until you have that one working.

That way you know exactly which element is causing the problem.

ITA is very syntax sensitive, unlike lots of other systems now that try to help you by guessing what you meant.

Romelle

Great post. I think I learned more about ITA in the five minutes it took to read than the five years I've been on FT.

thanks, brah. you don't actually have to have the space between "ATL" and "::", tho. for some reason, everyone was using spaces between the "DL+/F" in their posts, which was wrong. got it working, now!

and i was just using "x" as a random variable.. not a specific fare :)

Actually, only your last is necessary - "/f" was the problem.

ATL:: dl+ /f bc=y