Why does Orbitz continually show flights that don't exist?

score:12

Accepted answer

Here is why:

  1. Orbitz fetch and cache flights data, this data is from various major GDSs.
  2. You search and Orbitz show the low price ticket.
  3. When you try to book it, Orbitz tries to confirm the seat with the airline, but the airline refuses it because it is already booked but the cache in Orbitz is not updated.
  4. Orbitz delete this single flight from the cache, to avoid the sold out price from showing.
  5. Orbitz, at certain interval, updates their cache from the GDSs. But guess what! one of the GDSs itself is not updated yet. So the flight shows again in orbitz.
  6. Go to 1

Upvote:-1

Adding on to HaLaBi's comments. I see that as the only possible reason. A parallel to this scenario would be booking movie tickets. Imagine only 5 tickets are available/left for a show and say 20 people are at that moment online trying to book a ticket each. Now the system has to be able to sell to at least 5 of those customers, the other 15 will be shown a sorry message. But which 5 of these 20 customers will be sold a ticket ? It all depends on which level the website decides to apply the lock on. Some websites will give you one minute to complete the transaction (mostly when you are selecting a seat as a part of the booking process), others may wait for ever and lock the transaction only when you are at the payment page. Some websites wont bother as they are just acting as an interface between the customer and the theater's website/API and it is the theaters website which will ensure a valid ticket is sold.

Travel websites inherently have to give you a longer window (time required to enter passenger details/use a profile) before you hit the 'pay money' button.I don't work with Orbitz, so I dont know at which level this lock is applied. As you can see there are only 5 tickets left from the flight you want to select. The only reason I see is multiple people trying to go for those seats. A few things I suggest : Try using the innuendo mode of your browser and see what happens. If not, how about making an itinerary at Qatar's website ? HTH.

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