The lookup on the front page
What the Fare Lookup Does
There is a fare lookup on the front page of this site and this office does not run it. This page sets out who does, what leaves your browser when you press the button, what is refused before anything leaves at all, and why it will not look eleven months ahead.
Who runs it
Not this office. The lookup on the front page hands you to a booking service that is a separate company, answering on a subdomain of this address. Press the button and you are with them.
- Who returns the fares
- that company, from its own systems
- Who takes the booking
- that company
- Who takes the payment
- that company. No card field exists on any page of this site
- Whose conditions bind the ticket
- theirs, and they are the ones to read before you pay
- What this office does in that transaction
- nothing. It is not a party to it and cannot alter it afterwards
- What this office may receive
- a slice of the margin that company already keeps, if a booking follows
- What that does to what you are quoted
- nothing. The figure is theirs and it reads the same however you arrive at it
On the count this whole sheet is sorted by, using the lookup is one company, dealt with directly. That is the tier where this site tells you plainly that you can usually do it yourself, and the lookup is there because sometimes that is the right answer.
What leaves your browser
One line, and this is the whole of it: the two airport codes you picked, the date out, the date back if you gave one, the cabin, and the head count split into adults in a seat, children in a seat and infants on a lap.
- Your name
- never sent, because this lookup never asks for it
- Where to reply
- never sent
- Your telephone
- never sent
- Anything from the enquiry form
- never sent. The two are separate and share nothing
- What the codes are read from
- a file on this domain, read by your own browser
- When the first request leaves
- when you press the button, and not one keystroke earlier
The list of places is a file served from this address. While you type, your browser reads it and nobody else is told anything. That is why the offers appear instantly and why nothing about a half typed city ever reaches a third party.
What is refused before anything leaves
The button is dark until the script is running, because without it there is no way to fold eight fields into the one line the service reads, and a live button would hand it something meaningless.
- A city typed but not taken from the offers
- refused. Only a real code from the sheet travels
- Both ends the same airport
- refused
- A date already past
- refused
- A return dated before the outbound
- refused, and the field clears itself when you move the outbound past it
- More than nine seated travellers
- refused. One lookup carries nine
- An infant on a lap with no adult beside it
- refused
- Anything past eleven months
- refused, and the reason is below
Every refusal prints beside the field it is about, not at the bottom of the form, so you are not hunting for it on a telephone.
The eleven months, and why
The line that travels carries a day and a month and no year at all. That is the format the service reads. Push a date past about a year and it comes back as the wrong one, silently, in a year you did not mean, and nothing on either side says so.
Refusing the date is the honest answer to that. Eleven months is the point where the ambiguity begins, so that is where the lookup stops.
What this page is not
It is not a fare table. No figure from any airline is printed anywhere on this site, on this page or any other, because those numbers come back live from the booking service and move without telling anybody here. Anything printed would be out of date by the time you read it.
It is also not the only way to reach one of these trips. If the itinerary needs more than one company to agree, the lookup will not help you, and asking this office is the whole reason it exists.