Calchas

Who knows how LA manage their availability? I do suspect that the LA sector is the problem here. It may be that their pricing management system is more sophisticated than that! However I am tempted to agree really.

I spoke to ITA Helper last year with a OSL-LHR-SIN-SYD-PER-BNE and return J fare we found with unlimited stopovers allowed; it was findable on ITA and subsequently bookable. It's still loaded (although BA have now tightened up the routing table a lot on that fare). Anyway, ITA Helper seemed confident that the Matrix was handling the fare properly. Also again I have found many stopover fares in this way.

This is not the final route, I want to add in some more domestic stops. That should be allowed on the fare components I found but the Matrix suddenly starts piecing together the route with full J fares for each individual sector. Even including RIO knocked everything out of whack. So I have to persuade the Matrix to start with the right fares before I continue.

Globaliser

In step 2, ITA has returned a SCL-EZE flight on 3 September.

However, in step 3, you've put in 4 September.

So it could be as simple as different availability on the latter date. That might be why you also found this:-

Calchas

+/- 1 day is set, so the same search parameters apply for both searches.

Globaliser

I don't altogether trust that, because of the exponential growth in the number of possible combinations which has always led ITA to give up and not return some possibilities.

What happens if you limit the search to a single day for each sector, on the dates on which you got a positive result? Will ITA then return the flights originally found?

Calchas

The problem seems to be solved by specifying the exact flight number for the SCL-EZE flight. ^ The +/- 1 thing still works.

Calchas

And now I've run into the same problem adding in RIO. Hmm.

Ah, that's because the JJ8023 flight really only has waitlistable seats in D class.

I suppose I will have to ask the agent to waitlist me into D class under the fare, store the fare quote against the PNR and see if it comes back as HK. My guess is that it will. [Or maybe JJ are fed up of IB selling their £500 seats for free ]


Anyway, moral of the story is to specify the flight numbers you want. I think it is still a bug though, because there aren't that many ways of going from SCL to EZE and it could at least check if the direct flights are eligible!

Calchas

Update: I've had a reply from ITA Hacker, who looked into this for me. She/he agreed it was a bug and will open a bug report, but apparently fixing it is not a high priority because the /f flag is not officially supported.

She/he also assured me that this flaw does not exist in the product they sell.

Globaliser was right in that the route from PAR to SCL has something like 9*300 options per day to price and if it doesn't find the right one quickly it gives up.

ITA Support

I work on Matrix. We are planning to keep Matrix going for the foreseeable future. We had to completely rewrite the Matrix front end, because it was both (a) layered on an old backend system that was about to be decommissioned and (b) implemented using technology that was no longer maintainable given other changes behind the scenes. The old system was also being overpowered by automated traffic, and we had to address that because the site had become almost unusable. As a result we released v3 a little earlier than we might otherwise have preferred, with some missing features that were added over the following weeks.

The rewrite unfortunately also introduced some new bugs; I'm sorry about that, but that's pretty much inevitable in any software project of this complexity. We have been fixing those bugs as we find them. We just addressed two major issues:

1. Queries taking longer than about 60 seconds had led to timeouts triggering an error message saying "Unknown internal server error".
2. Occasionally, the service powering the airport auto-complete and the nearby airports feature became unavailable for about 15 minutes at a time.

There are still other bugs that we are working on. There are also issues that you may occasionally run into that have nothing to do with the rewrite and that may or may not be bugs (any pricing discrepancies generally fall into that category). We appreciate user feedback and do pay attention to it. If you find specific problems with the front end, please use the Feedback link within Matrix or report them in the support forum (https://productforums.google.com/for...rixandonthefly), ideally with as much detail as possible.

Please note, however, that apparently simple problems may be a consequence of complex interactions between many backend components, since flight pricing is a difficult heuristic-rich problem domain. So we cannot guarantee to fix things instantly, nor will all feature requests be automatically implemented as we're walking a fine line between powerful features, computational demands and usability.

In addition, some reported problems may require changes in underlying systems that have to wait until the relevant teams have addressed other, higher priority work. Finally, some reports may relate to extremely high compute-load queries and automated (scripted) queries: we do not guarantee, and have never guaranteed, that we will support such traffic.

TWA884

Thank you and welcome to FlyerTalk.

Globaliser

Welcome to FT, ITA Support - and thank you for the detailed explanation.

I sometimes think that those who runs bots, like spammers, should be strung up somewhere painful.

cysyuen

Matrix is down!!!

veeRob

Maybe they're putting back the old (working) system. ^

ITA Support

Something seems to have happened this afternoon that caused the site to start returning error messages. I don't know what happened (we didn't make any changes today), but I just restarted a service that seems to have cleared up the problem for now.

Calchas

Hello ITA Support and welcome to FlyerTalk.

As I have expressed to your colleague (ITA Hacker) and as you will see from the expressions in this thread, the Matrix is very important to the community here at FlyerTalk. Personally I use it almost every day to plan routes that I simply could not do without it---I would have to hire a real life travel agent I think!

So thanks for signing up and reassuring us that the project is being taken seriously. ^

feeder

Hi everyone,
does anybody know if the feature "showPricePerMile" is taken off ITA-software ?