3 ms·

It is my understanding that they contact various providers in real-time, so they give them a time window to come back with their data.

dheera 12y ago
Yeah, this is terrible engineering design IMHO. The providers should just provide some kind of firehose of updates to the booking websites which can then cache the data appropriately. Also they should fix their cache implementations. I've had countless times on the AA website where it says a ticket is available; then when I try to book it it says it's not available; then when I go back to the home page and search again the same fare shows up again. Seriously, where do their programmers come from ...
- Nicholas_C 12y ago
  I've had the same exact issue on AA.com as well. I gave up and booked it on Expedia.
- makmanalp 12y ago
  Yeah, well, if you can get providers to agree to do anything at all, let alone have the capability to not be in the engineering dark ages, you'll be rich. Until then, companies will continue to fill the gap with imperfect solutions.
- Marazan 12y ago
  A firehose of updates? Updates to what? There are basically an unlimited number of world wide routes - a mind blowingly dizzying number of permutations to get from A to B. Before you try to say "well travellers won't want routes with feature X" to cut down on the volume of data travellers want all sorts of contradictory things. Some a vastly price sensitive, some hate a particular airline, some love that same airline, some are time sensitive, some change those preferences depending on whether they are flying domestic or international, with or without kids.
  - deathanatos 12y ago
    > a mind blowingly dizzying number of permutations to get from A to B. Yes, but I don't think that's what most people desire to enumerate (or what the parent of your post had in mind). A simple enumeration of the flights available and their one-way prices would be a start. My understanding (from a link in another post) is that this would be ~(1 flight) * (average number of changes to a flight's data between birth and flight) updates per second, which I think is within reason. My understanding is that airlines frustrate this by not pricing just individual flights, but giving odd discounts on round-trips and other odd combinations (such as A→B C→A) of flights, meaning you need more than just one-way prices. (There's also the fact that some airlines have like 5 or 6 different prices for a seat all on the same flight, depending on where in the plane the seat is.)
    - Marazan 12y ago
      There's all kinds of reasons that this isn't sufficient, return based pricing, multiple seat pricing bands for a single flight (for some airlines this is dynamically calculated on a moment-by-moment basis), airline and airports rules covering transfers for whether a given pair of flights connect or not, etc... the list is basically unlimited.

dheera 12y ago

Yeah, this is terrible engineering design IMHO. The providers should just provide some kind of firehose of updates to the booking websites which can then cache the data appropriately. Also they should fix their cache implementations. I've had countless times on the AA website where it says a ticket is available; then when I try to book it it says it's not available; then when I go back to the home page and search again the same fare shows up again. Seriously, where do their programmers come from ...

Nicholas_C 12y ago
I've had the same exact issue on AA.com as well. I gave up and booked it on Expedia.
makmanalp 12y ago
Yeah, well, if you can get providers to agree to do anything at all, let alone have the capability to not be in the engineering dark ages, you'll be rich. Until then, companies will continue to fill the gap with imperfect solutions.
Marazan 12y ago
A firehose of updates? Updates to what? There are basically an unlimited number of world wide routes - a mind blowingly dizzying number of permutations to get from A to B. Before you try to say "well travellers won't want routes with feature X" to cut down on the volume of data travellers want all sorts of contradictory things. Some a vastly price sensitive, some hate a particular airline, some love that same airline, some are time sensitive, some change those preferences depending on whether they are flying domestic or international, with or without kids.
- deathanatos 12y ago
  > a mind blowingly dizzying number of permutations to get from A to B. Yes, but I don't think that's what most people desire to enumerate (or what the parent of your post had in mind). A simple enumeration of the flights available and their one-way prices would be a start. My understanding (from a link in another post) is that this would be ~(1 flight) * (average number of changes to a flight's data between birth and flight) updates per second, which I think is within reason. My understanding is that airlines frustrate this by not pricing just individual flights, but giving odd discounts on round-trips and other odd combinations (such as A→B C→A) of flights, meaning you need more than just one-way prices. (There's also the fact that some airlines have like 5 or 6 different prices for a seat all on the same flight, depending on where in the plane the seat is.)
  - Marazan 12y ago
    There's all kinds of reasons that this isn't sufficient, return based pricing, multiple seat pricing bands for a single flight (for some airlines this is dynamically calculated on a moment-by-moment basis), airline and airports rules covering transfers for whether a given pair of flights connect or not, etc... the list is basically unlimited.