When searching for a flight, the search engine, also known as the “pricing engine” or “shopping engine,” combines schedules, fares, and availability to return search results. The search engine considers thousands of options and identifies a small number of relevant results.
When you select your result, you are choosing:
An itinerary – a series of flights that take you to your chosen destination, also known as “segments.”
A fare – the price of the flights with a set of rules that determine it.
Creating a Booking
When booking a flight, the first step is to create a booking in the airline’s system (a process also known as PNR, “passenger name record”). The booking is created whether you book directly with the airline or through a travel agent. If you book through a travel agent, a GDS or API is used to interact with the airline’s system.
The two key elements of the booking are:
- The passenger: name, surname, and title.
- The segments: the flights the traveler will take to complete the itinerary + the “booking class” that will be used for each of the flights.
No payment is made at this stage because you are just adding the service to your “cart” and asking the airline to hold your booking. Once the PNR is saved in the airline’s booking system, you have the booking. However, the booking may have different references: If the booking was made through a GDS like Amadeus or Sabre, there can be a booking reference and another reference for the airline’s booking system. If the flight involves multiple airlines, there can be different references for each carrier.
Checking that Passenger Segments are confirmed
When you create your booking, it’s like having a conversation with the airline’s system, asking the airline to reserve a space on the segment you want to fly. You must wait for the airline’s booking system to confirm the seat on the flight before you can proceed. Each segment has a status representing the traveler’s booking. At this point, you should see the status change to “confirmed,” indicating that the passenger’s seat on that flight is officially blocked. Sometimes the airline may respond with a “no,” for example, if seats for that flight class have run out between the search and booking, leaving the passenger without a booking and a “NO” status code.
Requesting Additional Services
It may happen that flight segments are not the only “service” you want in your booking. You might find many other services of interest when looking at the offers, from extra assistance for passengers with disabilities to the ability to bring animals in the cabin. All these requests can be found within the airline’s system using Special Service Requests (SSRs). An SSR consists of a four-letter code, plus some information describing the service. Just like segments, requesting an SSR initiates a conversation, and you must wait for the airline to respond.
Determining Booking Prices
The search results you choose form an itinerary and a fare, in other words, which flight you will take and how much you will pay for it. Once the booking is created, as a final check, the price is reevaluated. This is done to ensure that the available fares haven’t changed since you started your initial search and that the price remains the same once additional data is added to your account that wasn’t there before (such as the final number of passengers and the method of payment). This will establish the final price you will pay for the flight. The initial price is now stored within your booking, and your cart is ready for checkout.
Ticket Issuance
When you book a flight through a travel agent or the airline’s website, you typically go through a single checkout process, but behind the scenes, there are actually two steps: Booking, which records passenger information and temporarily blocks the seat on the flight. Ticket issuance, which is the payment process that grants the passenger the ability to travel. When you make a booking, the seat on the flight is blocked only for a certain period. The airline communicates a “time limit to book,” which tells you how long the seat is reserved. If payment is not made within that time, the airline releases the space for someone else to purchase. Before the passenger can have the “right to travel,” the seller must issue the ticket. Along with the ticket, there is another document called an Electronic Miscellaneous Document (EMD) used to handle penalty payments when you change or request a refund for the flight or when you pay for extras like seats or baggage.
Future Perspectives
Airlines are working to modernize the booking process. IATA is working to replace “bookings” and “tickets” with “orders” and “payments.” Each order will have a single standard ID instead of a different confusing booking numbers. These changes are not only about the customer experience; they are designed to simplify airline accounting, make collaboration between various airlines easier, and help offer products beyond the aviation ecosystem. To find flights, the search engine (also known as the “pricing engine” or “shopping engine”) must intelligently combine a series of data:
- Schedules
- Fares
- Availability
Let’s go through them one by one to understand how they work and interact with each other.
Schedules:
Schedules indicate when an airline plans to operate flights. Schedules are established with departure and arrival times and the days on which they are scheduled to operate. For example: Iberia decides to operate flights departing from Barcelona from August 1st to August 31st, 2021, and we’ll call this flight VY5636, which will use an Airbus A321 for travel. Airlines distribute their schedules through providers, making them available to other airlines, travel agents, or tech providers. Typically, these data are not fixed; airlines update their schedules at least once a day, resulting in more than 800 scheduled flights that providers have to work with.
Fares:
A fare refers to the price at which an airline intends to sell seats on a particular flight and the “rules” that determine that price. Fares dictate a series of conditions, such as who can travel (in terms of cost), which flights they can take, and some restrictions that determine how they can be sold or used.
For example:
- You can depart from this airport
- You can change flights but must pay a penalty of a certain amount
- You cannot have an overnight layover during the journey.
Fortunately, the rules governing fares can be explained as a method for the computer to understand and choose a fare that fits what you have searched for without manual intervention. As mentioned earlier, airlines file their fares in an industry directory managed by ATPCO, where other airlines, travel agents, or tech providers can subscribe. Each airline can change its prices by filing different fares multiple times a day. ATPCO processes more than 10 million fare updates per day. Additionally, airlines offer various fares for the same flight simultaneously, as travelers do not always want the cheapest or most restrictive fare.
Availability:
Airlines usually sell some seats at a lower price and some at a higher price because they know that certain categories of travelers are willing to pay more when they need a flight. A flight is divided into different “booking classes,” represented by letters of the alphabet, so a flight can be divided into 26 different buckets (sections): A, B, C, D, etc.
For example, a fare might be NVAKZNM3 (where the letter N indicates the booking class). Different booking classes have different availability. Let’s imagine that American Airlines uses N, V, and Y as booking classes to identify the economy class:
N – as the most restrictive economy fare V – as the more flexible economy fare Y – as the economy fare that falls between N and V
This means that if an economy fare is sold out, there may still be other economy fares available. However, airlines do not advertise their availability; to check it, you need to access the Passenger Service System (PSS). The most famous systems that include this service are Amadeus, Altéa, and Sabre.
How do these three elements work together?
To know the results of a search, the search engine must combine schedules, fares, and availability. In the market, there are not many search engines; most travel agents use searches that work through GDS. The first step is to identify the route. There are several options to consider if you combine different flights that can connect, in addition to the wide range of airlines you can choose from. You can take a direct flight or a flight with a layover in another city. Once schedules and fares are combined, you will have a series of “itinerary prices,” and you may notice that many of these are not available because one or more booking classes are full. The end result is the so-called “offers.”
In conclusion
When you search for a flight, the search engine must combine schedules, fares, and availability to generate your search results. To do this, it must consider thousands of options and transform them into a small number of relevant combinations, all in a matter of seconds!
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