fare rules
 

I personally use farecompares flyertalk page (thank you very much) and the fare listing site for specific city pairs (like http://www.farecompare.com/flights/-.../schedule.html).

On the flyertalk search page I would like to check alliances rather than just individual airlines and specifying a date range would help as well.

The fare listing tool would become much more valuable if one could display fare rules for all fares published. Obviously full rules including routing rules would be great.

Thanks for considering FT input.

I also use the FT page on FC for identifying what may be available. It allows me to quickly scan for deals on my preferred routes. It's fine that you cannot verify inventory. It usually takes just a few mintues on ITA to find the seats.

Now for my suggestions...

1. The information I get from FC which I consider most valuable includes the current minimum fare and valid dates of travel for that fare (after clicking through to the calendar). I use to be able to quickly find the booking class by going to the calendar, but the calendar has since changed. So, now I use EF to get the booking class for the fare/dates of interest. It would be a time saver if you could display the booking class for the displayed fare right in the table. Then, if I click through on a city name, show me the calendar for the carrier/fare that was displayed in the table. By that, I mean if I clicked on a line which was showing an AA fare, show me the AA calendar for that fare (not the generic origin/dest calendar for all carriers).

2. And a minor point... Change the column heading "Todays Price" to "Current Price", as the fare can change multiple times a day.

3. Now, for what I really want. I would like to supply the following parameters as inputs:

- Range of dates: <start date> to <end date>
- Preferred origin (or no origin at all)
- Preferred carrier
- Select either MR (to minimize cost/mile) or SR (to minimize cost/segment)

The result of the query should be a list of destination cities and all-in fares, ranked by cost/mile (in the case of an MR) or cost/segment (in the case of an SR), taking into account all valid fare routings and minimum mileage rules (e.g. 500 miles/segment minimum on AA). The results should include the routing determined to offer the best cost/mile or cost/seg.

I can appreciate the difficulty in coding that, given the various taxes, surcharges, and routing rules that exist. But hey, you asked for suggestions. This would save me a few hours per week. :)

Thanks for listening (reading), and thanks for the effort you put in to support the FT page.

By the way, what happened to the International fares?

Ever since it turned into a bait-and-switch site, I haven't used it. Phantom fares are useless, as your website has turned out to be.

No international fares! :(

Are International Fares Gone forever? What Happened?
 

NOPE.
They still do not work on FareCompare.com/search/flyertalk.html?departure=(insert your city code here)&fares
Anybody know the reason. Are they gone forever?

Any idea when this is getting fixed....I loved Farecompare but I think they have dorked it up...many carib and mexico fares not showing up...This stinks...

Apologies guys.

We wrote some new category 12 fuel surcharge and YQYR surcharge code
and in the process bollocksed up the generation of fares in certain regions
of the world.

Should be fixed now.

Let me know if you still find issues (especially fuel surcharge issues)


G.

It does not work for me, but maybe we are talking of a different webpage. The one FareCompare was kind enough to create for FlyerTalk that I refer to is: http://www.farecompare.com/search/fl...e=0&sortby=PPM
Even though it was not perfect, it gave a good estimate of the lowest PPM cities and the days the lowest priced fares were available. I wish that it would have given the exact fare with all charges, which it did not. It was better than nothing! I wish we had it back. (But since I'm wishing I also wish I had a million bucks.)

What the *bleep* is going on?! I need my intl price search! May not be reliable, but what else is there?

International cities?
 

Still not getting the international cities on the listing where you can sort by PPM. I made my living in the tech area so do understand some bugs can be tough to find, but have some more M&Ms and coffee and find it PLEASE!

Romelle

I loved that listing, and thought kind thoughts at you every time I used it.

Should also consider Kayak's "Buzz" as it displays fares that other website users have found, it shows the dates and airline as well. Prices listed are usually a/i. Obviously subject to change but it works fairly well.

http://www.kayak.com/buzz

Searches are typically done by continent. The fare displayed doesn't display where the price was found (as Kayak is a meta-search).

Formatting
 

Does anybody else have trouble with the formatting farecompare uses? I read my email in gmail, and disdain FC's HTML formatting for the following reasons:

1. I have several alerts tied to the airline. I only want to know about that airline's price drops. (But I have lots of other alerts where I want to know all price drops!) Last time I used FC's HTML formatting, it doesn't even show the airline involved. So this forces me to text formatting, which would be fine.....

2. Except that in the text formatting, every alert runs together on it's own 2 or 3 lines. (i.e. there are no tabs, and thus no collumns) This makes it extremely difficult to read at a glance. I tend to have so many routes programmed into my FC profile that it's not uncommon for me to get 100 alerts per fare compare update. I'd like to be able to scan these quickly, which basically means there should be some sort of format -- I'd LOVE to have it tabbed, such that the origins are all in a column, the destination in the next column, the price, and the airline. And shrinking the font size would be nice too, so that lots of data fits on each page.

Of course, I could download every FC alert email, load it into Excel (or write my own parser in TCL/PERL), but this just seems like a pain to have to do 3x per day.

I realize that I'm talking about substantial formatting changes to these alerts. (Although I seem to remember that in the early days of FC, they did look like what I describe!)

Why can I not change the city code on the YUP page? Every time I've tried, my computer freezes.

BTW, thanks for the Buzz link, civicmon. ^

So, no one is having any trouble with the YUP page?!

Sometimes I also have to restart the page to enter a new city.