Does anyone know if NWA plans to change the flight search engine on their website? I know today it's "Powered by Orbitz".

I really can't stand the thing. It's awful. The part that aggrevates me the most is that stupid message, "Sorry, the search engine is still busy processing your previous request. Please wait a minute and try your request again." UGH!!!!!

But worse, the search engine will sometimes return the ubiquitous error message like the following:
No Northwest Airlines, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, or codeshare partner flights were found between Brussels, Belgium (BRU) and Seattle, WA (SEA) that matched your request. Check our service destinations and routes.

Now that's a complete lie. I bought a ticket on their website between the same cities and if I search by schedule, it works perfectly fine. (And yes, I've modified the search to include anytime, morning, afternoon or evening flights).

Take a combo of the above two (search BRU-SEA, get the error page and then try to search AMS-SEA and get the warning that the engine is still processing your previous request) and you have one annoyed website user.

I can't wait for the day that NW changes their flight search engine...

-RM

Works great for me.

Even manage RST-BRU without problems. I think it offers a lot of flexibility compare to other airline website search engines.

Expedia surprise


added...


Trace flynwa.expedia.com; Start time 02/02/05 14:11:32
Tracing route to 66.54.33.135
50 bytes from 66.54.33.135: time=41 ms

[a part deleted so that no one knew where I work from]

9 25 10 152.63.87.34 0.so-2-0-0.tl2.atl1.alter.net
10 45 20 152.63.13.10 0.so-6-0-0.tl2.nyc9.alter.net
11 45 0 152.63.21.13 0.so-1-2-0.xl2.nyc4.alter.net
12 45 0 152.63.22.73 pos7-0.gw12.nyc4.alter.net
13 45 0 157.130.50.86 internap-gw.customer.alter.net
14 40 -5 209.191.128.97 border28.ge3-1-bbnet1.nyc.pnap.net
15 45 5 209.191.130.150 eds-3.border28.nyc.pnap.net
16 * * Timed out
17 45 0 66.54.33.135 res.nwa.com
End time 02/02/05 14:11:40
host reached

Ok, now that's awesome.

That search engine easily finds BRU-SEA, but the orbitz-powered search engine on nwa.com can't find it.

Thanks!
-RM

RobOnLI

I do not know when they switched it over but res.nwa.com and flynwa.expedia.com is the same machine, the same IP address. See lookup on res.nwa.com and flynwa.expedia.com


res.nwa.com.
66.54.33.135

**complete**
flynwa.expedia.com.
alias = res.nwa.com.
res.nwa.com.
66.54.33.135

**complete**

I've just been buying to book two awrad trips. See nice avail -- plat? Anything i try to select, i get "sorry teh flight you selected is not available." Keeps going like that. Nothing selectable.

Good catch on the IP addresses being the same for the two URL's (res.nwa.com and flynwa.expedia.com). Still doesn't explain why one can show me BRU-SEA availability and the other one cannot.

I agree with the other poster that NWA.com offers more flexibility than many airlines websites (UA comes to mind)...but it's fundamental for their website to be successful to produce search results between city pairs that they actually serve and that valid routing exists. That is above all, the #1 function of an airline website. Freq flyer info, etc. is just a nicety compared to being able to buy a ticket.

-RM

I got BRU-AMS-SEA (and reverse) to work as multi-cities.

This is only my hunch.

Each search is set to take maximum of X seconds. If no fare is found within this X seconds than you get no availability message. Simply, the search expired.

I think it has something to do with the load on the server. The higher load the longer the search query takes. The more complex fare (like 3 leg vs 2 leg) the higher chance you get the "no availability" message, if the server is under high load.

This is the same "no availability" message one gets when there is truly no availability between the given city pair.

An analogy could be found in google.com. When google.com is under high load they do not search the whole index. They search only a part of it.