karlot_96

Thank you really help

any chance to filter on ITA a flight with stopover but with only 1 FARE and not a combination of 2 seperate FR i mean like CDG-GVA via LHR and get on ita only result who has 1 FR for CDG-LHR-GVA and not 2 fare CDG-LHR and LHR-GVA

thanks

Calchas

I have found on several occasions ITA was right and other sources (including the airline’s own website) was wrong. It requires discussion with a ticket desk in these cases.

andydd

Never tried searching for non stops. For those airlines I mentioned, non stop flights are not interesting for me.

Having said that, I think that ITA should know how to handle married segments. In any case, when one(OTA) can't handle married segments properly, then one would try to book in higher (-est) class (where married segment would always match) rather than showing a lower FBC. So ITA actually does quite opposite.

Btw, Turkish airlines is a customer of ITA, so it's really weird that ITA shows wrong availability for TK, almost always!

Globaliser

In an ideal world, yes. But we should remember that the ITA website is not (directly) a for-profit travel booking tool, but a massive free beta testing site. Its data sources are not necessarily live, nor are they necessarily complete. I can entirely understand why, if an airline is playing married sector games with its availability, a non-live website like ITA may have to get and use data that doesn't lead to consistently good results.But all one can infer from this is that ITA is being given false positives for availability in a lower booking class when the true married sector position is that there is no availability in that class. If that is the information that ITA is getting, then it's what is going to be used. It's probably just an unfortunate demonstrate of GIGO.

FWIW, EF has the same problem with married sector games: you can't set an alert for anything other than a single flight, which may give you false positives if you're fighting a married sector battle.

andydd

I tend to agree to all of your comments, except the one "ITA doesn't has live data".

It fails consistently for a few airlines, but ITA always had the live data.In fact, this is as close as you can get to the actual availability on the airline without a proper GDS.

GOOF/OTAs tends to cache data, ITA never did that and that's the whole reason..why it takes (took) soo.. long for ITA to pull results as compared to GOOF/Kayak etc.

Globaliser

I could be wrong about that, but it's not what I'd understood. IIRC, one of the speculated reasons for Google being interested in ITA was that ITA had also worked on the question of how and how frequently you'd have to cache data in this field to make query results good enough. (That's similar to the way Google's main search engine works - search periodically, cache and index, and use that to generate results.) If ITA were querying a live GDS every single time a user does a search, it would seem likely that the fees paid by ITA to the GDS for these searches would rapidly become prohibitive.

I also thought that the reason that ITA takes so long for some searches was because it allows some very wide-ranging and complex searches that rapidly result in literally millions of possible permutations of routings and fares. It's that that takes time. Usually, actual booking interfaces work with a narrower set of options (own airline only, for example) and give you a very limited set of result much more quickly.

diburning

Unless they're caching the entire GDS network every time at set intervals, they have to be doing live searches to return results for most itineraries. I'd understand if they cached the results for popular routes, but if I wanted to fly New York to Vladivostok, I'd be very surprised if they cached the fares for such an improbable route.

fuyao

Even GDS use cached data! Not as much as kayak, other metas or OTAs, but still they do. Thats why for certain airlines you get a segment sell error, cause of cached data. The only way to have real 100% accurate data is by direct access in GDS (for example Amadeus), but not all airlines support direct access and then you cant mix airlines anymore.

fuyao

This can have many different reasons, for example, point of sale (POS)
ITA supports POS for all departing airports, if you ask your U.S. TA, he can only sell tickets with a POS U.S..
Many fare buckets are only available for specific POS.
For example:
If you look for LH K space for U.S. --> Europe and you only search with EU OTAs which don't have access to a U.S. POS, you won't find any K space for many routes because K space is only shown available in GDS with a U.S. POS.

So if you find an itinerary on ITA with a different POS than your TA, the chances are very high he won't be able to price it for the quoted price.

gustavmahler

In this instance I think it was a point of sale issue. I hadn't realised that it was harder for UK TAs to book CX on ex-EU itineraries. I've had them do QR and BA before without a problem.

Thanks for all the help.

seks

If I put in YYC-BKK and specifying certain transiting airports, I get cheaper fares.

If I don't specify, I get more expensive fares.

Why is that? An example would be SFO and NRT as transiting airports.

Globaliser

Do you mean that if you don't specify any connection airports, you get YYC-SFO-BKK-SFO-YYC itineraries at a certain price, but if you specify SFO as a connection airport, you get the same YYC-SFO-BKK-SFO-YYC itinerary at a lower price?

If so, that should not happen.

However, if you narrow your search by specifying a connection airport like SFO, then it will often be the case that this will produce itineraries which will not come up on a wider search that does not specify a connection airport. Sometimes, these additional itineraries may be cheaper than those which are returned by the wider search. That's simply a consequence of the fact that ITA can only do so much in response to any single search, and it will often be unable to locate every possible result from a wider search.

Calchas

There is no reason not to cache fares; ATPCO only distributes fares once per hour (and less frequently at weekends).

Calchas

Specifying connection points constrains the search. If the lowest price satisfies that constraint, then you will be more likely to find it.

ITA can only price a handful of all the billions of possible ways to price your itinerary.

SJWarrior