Searching for the lowest priced airfares with ITA software, Part II

Posted by admin on April 21st, 2010 filed in General

As promised, I am back with Part II of my original post “Searching for the lowest priced airfares with ITA software“. Part I covered the basics for domestic flight search, such as getting the lowest price for flights when you have a desired destination. We considered flying from a different local airport, using lesser known carriers, travelling on a different weekend, and adding stopovers to keep prices low.

Part II of this posting takes things a step further, and uses “route language” to enhance your searching capabilities. This is otherwise known as custom searching, and you can find details in the help section of ITA’s website. Today I will walk you through how to select a preferred carrier such as United or American Airlines from your search query, and also how to leverage stopovers to get the most out of your itinerary.

For those familiar with programming or math logic, the basics of route language should be easy to pick up. For the rest of us, it may take some getting used to. However, even if you can only remember how to use one or two of these, it can pay major dividends down the road in your travels.

So let’s get started by logging in to the search tool at http://matrix.itasoftware.com.

You can find the following table in the help section which should help you with these variables

Before we get into how to use these variables and operators, I know what you are thinking: “This looks really complicated. Why not cast as wide a net as possible, then sort and filter in order to find the best flight?” The answer is that while casting a wide net may work for “good” results, in order to discover the gems we need to limit the amount of flights the search engine is looking for. The truth is that there are so many flights, a few will get missed if you don’t search for them specifically. Basically, picture us casting a really wide fishing net and a few fish escaping through the holes. What we need is a smaller net, with smaller holes so we catch everything we are looking for.

Let’s continue last week’s example of flying from Washington, DC to San Francisco, CA. Except this time we will add two variables: specifying which airports we can leave from (Reagan and Dulles are fine, but Baltimore-Washington is not) and which airline we want to use (United Airlines, because we are trying to accrue mileage). We’ll also wrap up by touching on how to find stopovers.

To specify our desired departure airport, we will enter in the ‘From’ box:  “IAD;DCA”, which means search flights only leaving from Dulles and Reagan. And to only return United flights we will add “:: UA+”, where UA is the IATA code for United Airlines and + is one or more flights (for a full list of IATA carrier codes you can find them listed alphabetically at wikipedia). It should look like this:

Go ahead and click ‘Go!’ and you will see the matrix returned is much smaller than what we got in Part I:

The slightly cheaper flights listed under multiple airlines will include at least one segment by United, and a different carrier such as Frontier or Continental for the other segment(s). Think of these as “mixed” flights, and if you are in need of saving a few bucks this could be a way to do it. But if you’re looking for 100% miles to count towards your program, it’s probably worth it to pay slightly more for the “pure” United itinerary.

Now, let’s take this a step further and suppose we have an old friend in Milwaukee we’d like to stop and visit on this trip. We can do this by searching for flights with at least one stop. By checking the booking details of the United flights, I can see that it is quite expensive (greater than $600) to stop for a day in Milwaukee. So instead, we will also open this up to multiple airlines to see if we can find a price substantially lower than United that includes a stop.

I noticed Frontier Airlines was showing some low prices, and even though I’ve never used them, I will give them a try. Sure enough they have several stopovers at no additional charge in excess of 24 hours (up to 48 hours in some instances).

Check the results for long layovers:

We have multiple options that will give us more than 1 full day in Milwaukee, so let’s pick the first one and see if the times are agreeable.

This looks pretty good. I can arrive at 6:35PM, have a night on the town in Milwaukee, then wake up and have a decent day of sight seeing, then show up at the airport exactly one day later and continue on my journey. All for about $15 less than the United flight that did NOT include a stopover!

So there you have it. We learned how to cast a smaller, more refined net by excluding certain carriers and airports. We also learned how to tell the search engine exactly what cities we were willing to stop in. Combining these tools with the tips learned in Part I will give you an excellent travel resource to leverage for incredible bargains.

If you’re excited and ready to learn more, check back for Part III tomorrow on how to take these tools to an international level and find ridiculously low fares anywhere on earth.  If this blog was a little over your head, I have good news for you as well. In Part III we will discuss using Matrix2’s multi-city option, which is an automated way to string together stops in as many cities as you’d like for one low price.

Send any questions you may have to webmaster@travelexploit.com or post a comment to this article. You can also follow us on Twitter.

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