I’m a creature of habit and when I find a tried and true method to book multi-segment mileage runs, I stick with it. Too much so that when it doesn’t work, I fluster around with it far longer than I need to.

Having recently moved from Los Angeles and accepted my fate that I’ll no longer see mileage runs in the ultra low cents-per-mile range below 4.0, I’ve only casually been on the hunt lately. But yesterday I found one sole run with one departure date available at 3.64 CPM from my new home airport, Reno.

It’s on United and I found the fare on ExpertFlyer using ITA Matrix’s Airfare Search Tool to find the sole itinerary with availability. [Here’s my updated guide on how to find mileage runs these days in the post-FareCompare tool world.]

After finding a valid itinerary on ITA, I’ve always had success in piecing it together directly on United.com using the multiple destination feature. And given this run was too good to pass up, I was determined to book it.

Try as I might, United.com would simply not display the 5^th of six flights I needed to get the fare. I knew it had availability and it wasn’t a married-segments issue, so I tried everything – modifying the time, adjusting the city codes and more. I almost think United was deliberately not showing me the flight, forcing my hand at purchasing a higher fare. That’s a subject for another post.

But then I remembered a post from Seth at Wandering Aramean about how Hipmunk uses ITA’s advanced syntax and with a simple click, it’ll dump you right into the airline’s booking engine ready to take your credit card. Definitely read through his post as it contains more specific details than my summary below.

Using Hipmunk for Faster Booking of Multi-Segment Mileage Runs

It’s really quite simple if you know ITA’s advanced routing language. You plug in the exact same search parameters in the from and to fields, followed by the exact departure and return dates you found on ITA.

Hipmunk Booking Engine

Then you’re presented with a time graph showing outbound flight itineraries and their respective prices. My particular itinerary/price combo immediately showed up at the top (the one below isn’t what I booked… that itinerary and fare is no longer available).

Hipmunk Search Results

You simply click the appropriate bar with your desired itinerary, then click the “select this leg” button and Hipmunk will show you the return options.

Hipmunk Search Results

Again select the appropriate bar with your desired itinerary and Hipmunk will then display a pop-up with a button reading, “Buy on United.”

Hipmunk Book Now

Clicking that button dumps you directly into United.com, ready for you to enter traveler information and proceed to purchase.

United.com Booking Page

It worked brilliantly for my itinerary – such a time saver. I haven’t experimented with other airlines yet.

Thanks, Seth, for your original post… I’m glad I remembered it. And yes, while I’m sure I could have called United to make the reservation, I generally prefer to abstain from booking these on the phone simply out of desire to avoid the mileage run conversation with the agent that usually ensues.

Related posts:

How to Find Mileage Runs – 2013 Edition

Finding Mileage Runs Without the FareCompare Tool

I’m Off on a Weeklong Mileage Run… In Style

As a blogger I bookmark and follow a huge amount of travel-related websites that feature news and reviews in the airline and travel industry. One of them is Tnooz.com whose tagline is “Talking Travel Tech.” It really is a fantastic site and they frequently cover global distribution system (GDS) issues and stories for which I enjoy and geek out on given my previous work history in the industry.

One article last week entitled “Six myths of air travel search on the web” caught my attention and I clicked in thinking I’d once again agree with their normally accurate reporting. Some of the conclusions in that article completely took me by surprise and I have to share my disagreements here.

Myth 1 – Air search is simple and easy. They claim, “Invariably, it is difficult to find prices and routes, and there is a bewildering array of options.” What? Go to any Online Travel Agency (OTA) or airline website, plug in your dates and to & from cities, and you quickly get a selection of routes and fares. I just don’t understand why they think it’s so hard to find this information.

They continue, “Users can spend hours looking at different possible options… (often finding a) bewildering array of options.” Yes, when you search for a ticket many pairings of flights appear, but they’re generally sorted by time-of-day and price. Is it really that difficult to comprehend the search results?

Myth 2 – It doesn’t matter where a user searches (the results are the same). In my experience, yes, I’ve occasionally found different hotel prices on different sites. It’s not very often and it’s normally due to the fact that the OTAs aren’t quick enough to pull down availability when a hotel reports expired rates. On the airline front, however, OTAs generally pull real-time availability and this article claims, “The results, regardless of search site, are inconsistent and generate little trust for the user.” When you actually click through to book a flight at a quoted fare, the OTA immediately confirms real-time pricing and will display a “We’re sorry, this fare no longer exists” message when warranted. Okay, maybe I’ll give them a little leeway in the “trust” issue, but they shouldn’t claim inconsistent results when OTAs do in fact pull actual pricing.

Myth 3 – Air search works. They claim, “Frankly, it doesn’t. For something that looks like a commodity product, an airline seat is complicated.” I’ll give them credit there as ancillary fees create a lot of confusion and inconsistency when searching across all carriers, but they continue on saying, “(some websites) often powered by ITA generate a result, but this is no longer dynamic. Meanwhile, the internal price from the call centre agent is dynamic and can be different.” Nope. ITA is by far the most powerful and accurate airfare search tool I’ve ever come across. If anyone has real-time availability and fares down, it’s ITA.

The remaining myths discussed do have their merit and I’d encourage you to read the full article. Maybe I’m being too critical because of my “expert” travel experience and abilities, but I do feel this writer misinterprets the ease we have in searching and booking air tickets today. Google Flight Search needs a huge amount of improvement to become a leading tool for flight bookings, as he acknowledges. He also notes the inability to book flights after having found an ideal itinerary on Kayak. His claim, though, that finding flights “should be a heck of a lot better than it is,” seems ridiculous in my mind. Don’t you find booking flights pretty convenient today?

I recently posted some videos put out by UK-based Everbread showing a humorous yet accurate description of how Global Distribution Systems came into being and their evolution to present form. Those videos were admittedly a selfless plug for the company’s Haystack airfare search engine, whose underlying technology is marketed as a business-to-business solution with greater efficiencies and processes than that of traditional GDSs. Sounding very reminiscent of ITA Software’s Matrix Airfare Search Tool, I was even more intrigued because it claims to also search off-GDS low cost carrier fares and schedules, something ITA lacks. I signed up for an account and took it for a test drive last night.

I decided to search for a basic roundtrip ticket in a market I knew Southwest Airlines flew along with traditional carriers, so I plugged in Los Angeles to Denver leaving September 16^th, returning September 20, 2011:

The expandable options below the basic search fields open up to allow customization for preferred carriers, number of stops, class of service and other “standard” parameters. It also has other selections available for more advanced fine tuning, including the ability to select interline specificity and types of fares (refundable, upgradable, changeable). Wanting to keep it simple, I selected the option to show fare information with the results leaving the other defaults in place, and hit search:

Hmm, where’s Southwest? Anyway, it’s sort of a similar response to what ITA would give and very curious to compare their pricing against ITA’s, I popped over there to get nearly identical results:

The listings returned are in ascending order based on fare and for sake of space, I’m showing the top four below:

You have the ability to further sort and modify the results with a toolbar appearing at left. Included here is the option to filter by alliance (Star, oneworld, etc), airline, virtual interline, stops, flight time and more. First I decided to deselect Frontier Airines and it returned the following result:

Hmm, Frontier remained. It appears that if you keep “multiple airlines” checked, deselecting specific airlines will only chop off itineraries from the results wholly comprised of the deselected carrier. I played around with it for a while, then decided just to leave United checked as the carrier with nonstop flights only. Here were the top three results:

Ugh. Burbank got in there, so it seems they’ve set the logic to include nearby airports (city code logic vs. simply airport code). That definitely could be useful, but I wasn’t expecting it. Deselecting the “airport changes” option didn’t make it go away either. What was more surprising, though, is how few options in total appeared: 24 total combinations and since there are eight nonstops daily in each direction LAX-DEN, it should have returned 64 possible combos. The default search option returns 500 results (max seems to be 1,000), so when I later searched for just United flights on that route, it seemed to pull in the full schedule (plus Burbank).

For now, I decided to move on, make a selection, and was able to reveal class of service and a partial fare breakdown, but no fare basis codes or fare construction detail:

As Haystack isn’t a booking site like ITA, you can only “share” the itinerary you’ve selected by sending it to an email address or to your Google or Outlook calendar. I chose the email route:

Notice the email left off fare details (fare buckets & price breakout)? It does provide a link for the results, but had I forwarded this to my travel agent, for example, the link requires a sign-in back to Haystack. If I provided my login credentials to my travel agent, they would be redirected to the entire screen of results wherein this selection was made. A bit cumbersome, in my opinion.

Let me make it clear that I acknowledge this is a demo version and isn’t intended to be a consumer search engine, but at the same time I was expecting advanced ITA-type functionality and detail. Having the ability to only search for specific dates without being offered “flexible dates,” month-long or “+/- 3 days” for a better fare seems so 1999. Perhaps that’s what they’re developing now and will be part of Haystack 2.0. It didn’t seem to return results quite as fast as ITA, but maybe only by three or four more seconds. Also, I have to throw them a bone and while Southwest Airlines flights & fares didn’t appear, I didn’t try routes with European low cost carriers, their specialty (likely).

I’ll be following their progress with interest and in the meantime, it might not be a bad tool to bookmark and revisit once in a while. Learn more about Everbread and Haystack here, including signing up for a free account.

[Updated to add: Please be sure to click-through to my follow-up post here. After posting the above review, the company's Deputy COO contacted me directly to give a preview of current functionality not included with the demo version out there live at the moment. VERY impressive stuff!]