Pricing and booking mixed-class fares, with economy & premium economy combined?
- By
- Aparna Patel
- |
- 22 Jul, 2023
- |
I was trying to figure this out today and happened to stumble across a solution that is almost certainly a bug, but gets me what I want and what you want, and hopefully continues working for some time.
The trick is as follows:
- In ITA Matrix, set the cabin class popup to Premium Economy
- Add the following to the extension codes text box:
+cabin premium-coach 3
What I presume ends up happening is that the manual override of adding the 3 cabin (which corresponds to regular economy) allows the search algorithm to preserve the economy flights, while the choice of Premium Economy as the desired cabin seems to make it prefer premium economy cabin over regular economy when both are available.
The ability to book by fare class is one of the woefully missing aspects on online booking. In the early days of booking on the internet, some airlines offered the ability to book each leg by fare class, but that level of complexity was not utilized by travelers (except highly experienced flyers) and they all dropped it in favor of booking algorithms that satisfied the majority of travelers.
While perhaps the option could be added back in someday, I think the number of folks who have enough knowledge to benefit from it or that would be willing to spend the time to do it, is but a small fraction of the traveling public. Hence not really a good ROI.
Travel agents still have the ability to look at each leg of a trip and see how many seats are available in each fare bucket, and put together the perfect combo.
With each iteration, the booking algorithms get a bit better (most of the time ;-), but they will always be geared to satisfy the majority of travelers and hence never quite perfect for everyone.
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The closest I have seen to what you are looking for is through Kayak. Based on certain criteria that it determines, tickets with multiple legs can have different booking classes.
For instance, the below Delta flight YOW-LHR-YOW has a total of 4 legs each of which can be booked in either Economy or Business.
The Details tab
You then move to the Fares tab to see the price
It doesn’t work with all flights – presumably because not all airlines allow it. On British Airways and Turkish Airlines flights, I’ve seen it allow choices of Economy, Prem Economy and Business.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
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