ja_user

Subject is easy enough. I know all the standard ITA language by heart, but I now have a desire to fly a 777 & 747 domestically (i don't care which carrier). I want to be able to search for any one segment on a type of equipment.

Something LIke this (I just don't know the equipment query.)

MCI:: XX+ ~equip=747 XX+
LAX:: XX+ ~equip=747 XX+

Any ideas?


Mod, Please move this to the MR discussion forum.

thegingerman

I've never heard of it, but it certainly could be possible. I've found ITA pretty good at responding to user requests, so if you just ask them you'll probably get your answer.

ITA Hacker

Unfortunately, we don't currently support this, though it wouldn't be hard to add. I'll look into adding it in a future release.

ja_user

Thank you for your reply. I am sure others would use it occasionally, but probably not often.

It would be especially usefull if you could exclude equipment by segment, as well as include.

So we could say NOT ERJ RJ3 or whatever. I know that there already exists a keyword for prop's, I just don't remember the syntax.

GivenRandy

Any change? I am currently looking for 744 and 772 flights from New York to Europe (any country).

aktchi

Thanks for keeping an eye on this forum and for being responsive to requests. I am sure some people will find this feature useful.

However, the feature that FT universe will go crazy about is what I had requested in another post: Add the columns for Total Miles and Cost/Mile to the results and make those columns sortable. That too should be easy to program in and will be greatly appreciated.

To OP: In the meantime, ITA already has a command to avoid propeller planes that will put you 1/2 way there.

GrizShel

Been searching fares for some international trips and I have been alarmed at how inaccurate ITA matrix fare searches have been recently.

For example, WAS-MNL, TPE-WAS open jaw on Delta (or other airlines) economy fares or MNL-YVR business / first class fares.

More specifically, choose a cheap outbound date for WAS-MNL with a Jan. 3 or 4 return TPE-WAS fare. ITA says the lowest fare is $2821 even when you restrict your search to Delta alone (currently drops to $2817 for Delta flights when you search for all airlines), Delta easily books to a $2134 fare, slightly lower was possible with further tweaking. There are many, many more cases where I have seen the same kind of inaccuracies for ITAsoftware. Anyone else experiencing such difficulties with matrix.itasoftware.com?

Desdinova

Not infrequently I see wide variations in prices between ITA and OTAs or airlines' sites.
I had figured it was to do with the timing of fare filings and availabilities. That is, ITA was finding fares the booking sites either no longer had or had not yet received.
Thus, when keen on a specific fare or destination, I'd search at different times throughout the day in the event the second assumed possibility were true.
Clearly, just my $.02

GrizShel

I've seen the same thing so this is part of the issue at least. But I am seeing a lot of these discrepencies. My perception is that matrix searches are running out of gas more quickly than they use to - i.e., the failure rate at retreiving the lowest fares goes up more quickly as one increases the scope of a fare search.

javabytes

Did you confirm DL will actually let you book at that fare, or do you get one of those infamous "This fare has just sold out" error messages after you hit Purchase?

rawilliam

Limiting search scope sometimes works for me to pull out some of those unusually low fares.

Boogie711

I'm getting odd results for simple domestic fares too. Some flights simply aren't showing up on ITA, even thought they're bookable on United.com. And Kayak is showing me a multi-city itinerary for $100 cheaper than anything I can book on ITA.

GrizShel

Actually, prior to posting this I went through and purchased 4 of these roundtrips (at different times) without problems on delta.com even though I usually couldn't get the lowest available fare to show on Matrix. Delta.com sometimes readily showed the lowest fare, but at other times it was necessary to put in connections by multi-city or to use other tricks to get it to show on Delta.com. I had to use experflyer.com and a few other websites to confirm the lowest fare available for my travel dates. I played around with this for a few hours, that's why I'm confident that something is going wrong with the usually reliable ITAsoftware Matrix engine. I had to use multiple avenues to ensure I was getting the lowest fare because I wasn't getting reliable results from Matrix2 even when greatly narrowing my search parameters.

ITA Hacker

If you haven't done so already, we would love to hear about these issues through the comments link on the site. Please provide specific examples, somebody will look into them.

michael9

The low cost carriers in Europe are not included in the software. I use European comparison sites instead.