Globaliser

Have you actually checked availability on the dates you want (which aren't visible to us)? I'm having no problems getting the fare (PNA46SNC) to show on ITA with a stopover in FRA outbound (IAH-FRA on 5 November, FRA-DXB on 9 November or 10 November, DXB-IAH on 15 November). It's the same fare as the cheapest possible non-stopover options, although the total payable will of course be a little different because of the different TFC to pay.

lamphs

Yes, I can get the fare for straight layovers, i.e. IAH FRA (3-4 hours) DXB. It is when I try IAH FRA (for a week) DXB, the fare increases significantly. Am I supposed to be able to do this via the multi city option?

Globaliser

Knowing that there is availability FRA-DXB on the applicable date for a non-stopover itinerary tells you nothing about whether there's availability for FRA-DXB a week later.

Have you checked availability for every single flight that you want to book? The attached has a six-night stop at FRA, but it's the same total price for seven nights.

lamphs

Thanks. You are doing this via multicity, correct?

Globaliser

Yes.

lamphs

Thanks. I'll let you know the result. I really appreciate the assistance!

zkzkz

Frankly Matrix has been pretty useless since this bug started:

The new Matrix does the same thing, so you have to know the precise origin and destination airports to do anything. Once upon a time you could search for flights to lists of multiple airports across Europe. I know the engine still supports it as many of the sites using ITA still do, but something broke in Matrix a few years back and reskinning the UI without fixing the behaviour is like polishing the chrome on a car that doesn't start.

Globaliser

Sorry, this is not right. You can have a list of destination airports in different countries. What is not allowed is origin airports in different countries.

BlueHorizonUK

I think they intentionally changed it so you couldn’t select multiple origin cities from different countries. It isn’t a bug.

anabolism

There's a discussion of this upthread. The ITA volunteers say it's because calculating the taxes for all the different options is too complex, IIRC.

zkzkz

It's definitely not about taxes which depend on the destination and the intermediate airports anyways. And they're not the same for all airports within a country anyways.

I think it's because fares available in different markets are different. That's why there's a "Sales City" field. But it doesn't help when you fill that in.

The bottom line is that they wanted to restrict the search space so the queries are faster and they picked something they hoped wouldn't impact usability and it totally did. Matrix is basically useless outside the US where it's absolutely common to choose from amongst multiple airports in multiple countries for flights. Even in Canada it's annoying not to be able to select US and Canadian airports together.

I actually wonder if they didn't remove that under pressure from airlines where flyers were finding better deals from such as ex-EU flights for UK fliers or PBG/BUF flights for Canadians.

Globaliser

Why would you doubt the ITA volunteers' explanation? Particularly when you've already shown that you didn't actually understand the limited nature of the restriction?So just run two searches.Two points about this:

1. The ex-EU deals were perfectly capable of being found, discussed and exploited by UK-based passengers without the existence of ITA, as a decade and more of participation on the BA board has proved. The real constraint on their wide use is that the bulk of the market does not want to go through the hassle of doing ex-EU flights even if it would save them money. Again, reading the BA board will give you insights into what non-FTers think.
2. Even with the restriction, ITA is still very good for identifying the countries from which the lowest fares are available. You just need to deploy a little bit of knowledge about fare construction, a little bit of know-how in using ITA, and a little bit of creative thinking. Once you have found the cheapest origin country this way, you can then focus your search on origins in that country. All this works despite the restriction. So if your hypothesis were correct, the ITA restriction is pretty useless for assuaging the airlines' concerns. That is a strong pointer to the hypothesis being wrong.

zkzkz

"Taxes were too complex" was actually not originally ITA Hacker's explanation. It was a proposed explanation by a FT user. Only after that speculation was posted did ITA Hacker say:
Which is pretty vague and could mean almost anything. I'm sure ITA Hacker didn't want to start a whole discussion and debugging session here which is pretty reasonable. But it also sounds like ITA didn't realize how much the feature was integral to the way people use the tool if they though "subtle errors" were worth removing the main feature that made the tool so valuable.
That only works if you were only planning to do one search previously. Things grow exponentially when the number of axes you were going to search over goes to two (let's try two different aircraft types) or three (lets try this airline in premium economy and that one in business) or four (lets try this fare class on this airline or that fare class on that airline) etc. The whole point of ITA being more powerful was being able to combine searches into one big one -- I can only just check every possibility one by one on any engine. But yeah, it's not such a big deal for Canada/US -- it's a *huge* issue for European flights where even regular users can have airports in 5 countries near them as another poster mentioned. And someone looking for a deal might have a dozen different countries they're considering searching.
The feature has only been broken since 2018. The right countries to look at was found well before that using the feature. UK-based passengers looking for deals are now basically stuck with the same two or three countries they found deals from in the past assuming they'll be the same ones in the future. Sure someone might stumble on another one one day from luck but maybe not if it's not an obvious country. The only reason we know the two or three countries in question are because people were able to search at the time.
Sure it was mostly just a bit of tin-hattery. The only way it would be realistic is if there was a major web site like Kayak or something offering this search and probably other options like split-fares or some such and the airlines who are major customers of ITA put together a list of features that offended them and it got caught up in that. They're not concerned with determined FT'ers they *are* concerned with surfacing things to regular flyers who didn't even know it was an thing.

PVDtoDEL

I ran into another bug in new matrix today: I was trying to do a multi-city search IST-LAX, LAX-SEA on the same date, and new matrix kept pushing the LAX-SEA search box above the IST-LAX. Had to use old matrix to get the desired behavior.

Globaliser

Sorry, this is wrong. Even with the current restriction on origins, you can still run one single ITA search today to see which of numerous countries look like they have the cheapest fares. In one single search, you can still test a dozen or more countries at once to find likely candidates.

So the restriction has not made ITA useless for this, nor does it mean that finding "new countries" involves luck. All it means is that you need to have to use just a little bit of knowledge and creativity. It helps to start with understanding what the current restriction on ITA searches actually is.

And it's not like there's an infinite number of other European countries, or that those who find new low fares are subject to some vow of omerta - the discovery of a "new country" would be quickly shared on websites like FT. Indeed, airlines should be much more worried about losing revenue because of information sharing on FT than they could rationally be about what ITA might reveal.For goodness' sake, ex-EU is written about in the travel pages of the mainstream UK press, the vast majority of readers will never have heard of ITA and never will. I can see why airlines might fear an erosion of revenue from ex-EU itineraries, but I can't see why airlines would be so terrified of ITA that they would apply pressure on ITA to conceal something.

Especially as it's something that can still be found on ITA - see above.