The search on the front page

How the Fare Search Works

A scheduled flight is the only thing on this board that departs whatever anybody else does, which is why it is also the only thing you can settle here without speaking to us. This page covers who runs that search, what your browser sends, what it declines to send, and where the eleven month wall comes from.

Why a flight sits on this page at all

Every trip on this board is filed by one question: does the departure happen whatever anybody else does, or does it wait for enough people to book. A scheduled airline flight is the extreme end of that scale. It leaves on its timetable, it has never needed a minimum, and no one has to agree to anything for it to run.

That is precisely why it needs no desk between you and it. Where a trip has an operator, a decision date and a set of conditions behind it, an agency earns its keep. Where it does not, the honest thing is a search box and an explanation of who is behind it.

The company behind it

Not this one. Press the button and an outside booking company takes over, answering on a subdomain of this address.

Returning the prices: them, out of their own systems
Holding the reservation: them
Charging the card: them. This site has no card box on any page and never has
Fare conditions that bind the ticket: theirs. Read those before paying, not ours
This desk's part in the sale: none whatever. It cannot alter the booking afterwards and does not pretend it can
What may come back here: a share of what that company already earns, in the event you buy
Effect of that on your price: none. Their price is set before anyone knows where you came from

What your browser sends

A single instruction, and this is the whole of it: departure code, arrival code, a day and a month for the way out, the same again for the way back where you set one, a letter for the cabin, and three digits for the party.

Your name: not asked for, therefore not sent
An address to reply to: not asked for
A telephone: not asked for
Whatever is typed in the enquiry form: stays there. The two are separate things that happen to share a page
The moment of the first request: the press of the button. Typing sends nothing

Airport codes come out of a file this domain serves. Your browser opens it and matches against it locally, which is why the offers appear the instant you type and why a half finished city name is seen by nobody at all.

What it declines to send

Until the script loads the button is inert, because there is no way to build the instruction without it, and forwarding a malformed one would return an empty page and waste your time.

A city typed but never taken from the offers: declined. Only a genuine code out of the file goes
The same airport at both ends: declined
A day already behind us: declined
A return earlier than the outbound: declined, and the box empties itself when the outbound moves past it
Ten or more in seats: declined. Nine is what one instruction carries
An infant held with no adult seated beside it: declined
Any date past eleven months: declined, for the reason below

Each refusal prints in the box it belongs to. Putting them all at the foot of a form is how people end up scrolling to find out what went wrong.

Where the eleven months come from

Inside the instruction each date is two numbers, the day and the month, with the year left out entirely. That is the shape the receiving end expects. Send a date much beyond a year and it is read as the coming one instead, quietly, and a search comes back for dates nobody asked about with nothing anywhere saying so.

Declining is the only honest response to a format that cannot express what you meant. Eleven months is where the ambiguity starts and so it is where the search stops.

What this page is not

Not a price list. No airline figure appears in these pages, here or anywhere else, because the numbers arrive live and change on their own schedule; anything printed would be wrong before you read it.

Not a route in, either, for a trip with an operator behind it. The search finds a flight and stops there. When a departure depends on other people booking, when there is a decision date and a set of conditions attached, asking this desk is the whole point of the desk.

The rest of it, in writing

Held about you, and until when: privacy, one line per item
Owed to you, and not owed: terms
Inside a figure: prices, broken out by who receives what
Departures that can fail to run: the condition