What the Flight Lookup Does

Why a seat is the one thing you can do standing up

Sorting by what a trip asks of you puts a seat at the bottom of the scale. It asks for nothing. It leaves when the timetable says it leaves, its conditions were written by the airline before anyone walked in here, and no amount of careful reading on our part will change what Tuesday costs.

A package is the opposite: somebody else's contract, a set of dates that have to line up, and a decision that expires. That is where a counter earns its living. For a seat, the useful thing is a box you can work yourself and a straight account of who is behind it.

Who is behind it

Not us. Press the button and a booking company picks you up, answering on a subdomain of this address.

The prices you see

Come out of their systems, not ours

The reservation

Sits with them

The money

Goes to them. Nowhere on this site is there a box for a card number

The conditions that bind the seat

Theirs, and those are the ones worth reading before paying

What this counter is in that sale

Not a party to it, and unable to alter it once it is done

What may find its way back here

A slice of what that company was already earning, if you buy

What that does to your figure

Nothing whatever. It was their figure before anyone knew where you came from

What your browser builds

A single string, and that is the entirety of it: a code at each end, a day and a month for the leg out, the same again for the leg back if you fill it in, one letter for the cabin, three digits for the party.

Your name

Never requested, therefore never sent

An address to answer

Never requested

A telephone

Never requested

Anything in the booking request

Stays in the booking request. The two share a page and nothing else

The first moment anything travels

The press of the button. Typing travels nowhere

Airport codes sit in a file this domain serves. Your own machine opens it and matches against it there, which is why offers appear as fast as you type and why a half spelled city is seen by nobody at all.

The cases it refuses outright

Until the script arrives the button will not work, because the string cannot be built without it, and a malformed one only comes back blank.

A city typed but never taken from the offers

Refused. Only a genuine code out of the file travels

One airport at both ends

Refused

A day that has already gone

Refused

A leg back dated before the leg out

Refused, and the box empties itself when the outbound passes it

Ten or more in seats

Refused. One string carries nine

An infant on a lap with nobody seated beside it

Refused

A date past eleven months

Refused, and the next section says why

Every refusal appears in the box that caused it. Gathered into one notice at the end instead, they send a reader back up the page hunting for which box they are about.

Why it stops at eleven months

In that string a date is two numbers, a day and a month, and the year is simply not in it. That is what the far end expects to receive. Send something a good way past a year and it is read as the coming one, without comment, and back come results for dates nobody had in mind.

A format that cannot carry what you meant deserves a refusal rather than a guess. Eleven months is the point where the guessing would start.

What this page is not

It is not a price list. No airline figure is printed anywhere on this site, on this page or on any trip. Those move hourly at the far end; printing one is only a way of being wrong in public.

It is not the way into a package either. This box finds a seat and stops there. Where there is an operator, a set of conditions and a date by which somebody must decide, a booking request is the whole reason this counter is staffed.

The rest of it, in writing

What is held about you, and for how long

On privacy, one line per item

What is owed to you and what is not

On terms

What a figure is made of

On prices, split by who receives which part

The six steps in full

On how it works