Comment by crystal_revenge

Comment by crystal_revenge 6 hours ago

Happy to see ITA software mentioned in the comments: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/search

I still have fond memories of their legendary (pre-leetcode) coding challenges [0] posted on the T (they also hosted the Boston Lisp users group in the early 2000s which was filled with mind-blowingly incredibly brilliant people, everyone there seemed to be an expert in software and had a PhD in some other, non-related field)

Having worked a bit in the travel industry, I highly recommend that you never book through a third party (by all means use their search). Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline and typically have abysmal customer service, and I can assure you any "add-ons" offered by a third party are ultimately a scam.

0. https://github.com/mattbraz/ita-puzzles

lxgr 5 hours ago

> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline

How come I regularly see third-party OTAs offer the same itineraries cheaper than the airline then?

Sometimes there's a mystery fee added just before payment, but not nearly always – and I've flown such itineraries once or twice myself (if the difference was significant and I was absolutely certain I wouldn't need any change or extra service).

I was under the impression that these effectively share part of their agent fee with the traveler as a form of kickback (to appear as the cheapest option in search, which in the end might end up a win-win for both).

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t0mas88 13 minutes ago

One trick they use is to book via a different country. Flight from A to B when booked on the main English website in dollars can be a higher price than the same leg being booked on the Russian website in rubles.
Two reasons for that, one can be because the airline is less known in that market and whats to price more aggressively, and the other is that the ticket conditions are slightly different. For example your right to get compensation in case of a delay (and how much) may be different between those tickets.

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EnigmaFlare 5 hours ago

One way I've heard is they don't book your ticket immediately but predict when the airline's price will go down and book in then. I imagine they have far better data to enable price prediction than the general public, and can spread the cost of getting it wrong over their other customers.

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- lxgr 4 hours ago
  
  At least the ones I’ve used have always sent me a ticket number within at most a few hours, and usually instantly. I’d be surprised if that really was a factor these days.
  
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  anon9u7255 2 hours ago
  
  From what I remember from working in the industry many years ago, the process is actually split into (at least) 3 parts.
  1. Reservation
  2. Booking
  3. Ticketing
  Each step has its own expiration dates set by the airline, which can range from "instant" to several days/weeks. They may also set different cancelation fees for each step. A smart travel agent could in theory use this to cancel an old booking and book again if the price is reduced, but I think some airlines have changed their practice to avoid this.
  Keep in mind that I mostly worked for the European market. I know US airlines operate a bit differently from the rest of the world. They usually have more flexible rules around flights and exchanging of tickets.
  
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tomhoward 5 hours ago

> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline

Technically true in that they can't undercut the airline on the same fare class.

But there are many different fare classes and some of them are only offered via 3rd parties, so you can often get much better deals via e.g., Expedia than you can by going direct to the airline.

Just this year my family flew Melbourne-Madrid then Milan-Melbourne, both legs on Cathay, but this route was only available on Expedia (and maybe other OTAs too, I don't remember) - all I know was that it was impossible to even search for this route on Cathay's own website. We didn't have any issues, but if we did I don't know if I'd worry about Expedia's customer service being much worse than an airline's own service.

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maccard 2 hours ago

> We didn't have any issues, but if we did I don't know if I'd worry about Expedia's customer service being much worse than an airline's own service.
The problem (speaking as someone who has to deal with Travel Agents many, many times) is that Expedia will say it's Cathay's problem, and Cathay will refuse to speak to you and tell you it's Expedia's problem.

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throwaway290 5 hours ago

Airlines own systems are often awful UI and in case of some asian low costers your data is immediately sold to spammers (and they collect as much your data as they can too).

Depends on exact case but if traveling on a budget going with low costers and connections a good third party can be better than an unknown shitty airline's system.

I used Expedia a few years back, got a lower price and could cancel for full refund within a day but they probably don't do that anymore. Kiwi seemed okay. Ctrip now owned by China.

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anonzzzies an hour ago

I have bad experiences with Kiwi and ctrip and a bunch of other ones. The support is indeed terrible and if anything goes wrong, the airline will tell you to contact the 3rd party agent... which has horrible support so there you are, stuck somewhere in asia. I had multiple occasions in which I just booked another ticket because of their incompetence, losing a few $100 as I could not take the risk of being late. Now I only book directly at the airline: at that time the company was booking and they just took what google flights gave them, which is often not directly at the airline.

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lxgr 5 hours ago

I'd be very careful with Kiwi. They don't have official OTA agreements with all the airlines they resell; at least Ryanair at one point was actively hostile towards them, and Kiwi was working with personal Ryanair accounts to get around their roadblocks. This in turn meant I couldn't access Ryanair's mobile boarding passes and had to find a printer on short notice at the airport.
While airlines can apparently not legally completely prevent such "uncooperative" third-party resellers, and I do have some sympathy for the business model, it's not great to be stuck between travel agent and airline when things go wrong.
Other OTAs like Experian actually take the role of a good old travel agent (the entity historically doing much of the ticketing work the airlines are now doing directly) and will usually only sell you itineraries of interlining (i.e. cooperating) airlines, and also only of airlines that accept travel agents as business partners in the first place.

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muststopmyths 5 hours ago

Expedia still offers refunds within 24 hours. At least for every flight I've booked originating from the US in the last few years.
I thought it was because of the DoT rule, but apparently they wouldn't be subject to that.

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