Why this leg needs no desk
Twenty trips sit in this catalog and every one is filed by its ending: what the last hundred yards consist of once the road runs out. Walked, paddled, waited out. That is the part people misjudge, so it is printed first rather than left to be discovered.
A scheduled flight has no such ending to describe. It finishes in a corridor with a number over it, the same corridor for everyone who was on the aircraft, arranged months ago by people none of us will meet. Nothing about it wants a desk in the middle, and nothing about it can be improved by asking us.
So it gets a field and a button, and an honest account of who is on the other end.
A sentence, not a code
Fill in two ends and a departure and a line appears under the fields. Not the parameter, which is opaque, but the same question written out:
Tulsa, United States to Lisbon, Portugal, out on 15 September, back on 24 September, business class, two adults.
That is deliberate. The parameter reads TUL1509LIS2409c200, and a wrong month inside it looks exactly like a right one. In a sentence a wrong month is simply wrong, and you catch it before you press anything.
The sentence is assembled in your browser, shown to nobody else, and forms no part of what travels.
What does travel, character by character
The parameter itself, for the sentence above:
TUL- Where the flight begins
1509- The fifteenth day of the ninth month, going out
LIS- Where it ends
2409- The twenty fourth of the ninth, coming back
c- One letter for the cabin, and the four are set out below
2- Adults with a seat each
0- Children of two up to eleven
0- Infants under two, held rather than seated
The letter in the middle is the only part that is not a place or a date, so here are all four of it:
- nothing at all
- Economy, and it is what you get by saying nothing
w- Premium economy
c- Business class
f- First class
Eighteen characters there, thirteen for a single leg in economy. There is nothing else in it, because a parameter of that shape has nowhere to put anything else.
Who is at the far end
Not this office. Read the list downward; it never changes sides.
- Where a price comes from
- A booking company's own systems, live
- Who holds the seat
- That company
- Who deals with the card
- That company, on its pages, because nowhere on this site is there a box that would take one
- Whose conditions the ticket carries
- That company's. Those bind; nothing written here does
- Who can change a booking afterwards
- That company, and not this office, which will not claim otherwise
- What reaches this office
- A share of a margin already set by them, and only where a booking follows
- What that does to your figure
- None. It was settled before anyone could know which door you walked in by
What stays where you are sitting
Airport codes come down once, as a single file, when the page loads. After that everything is local: the matching, the ordering, the sentence, and the parameter.
- Your name
- The box has no field for it
- Somewhere to answer you
- No field
- A number to ring
- No field
- Whatever you put in the enquiry form on another page
- Stays with that form. Two errands under one roof and no door between them
- When the first thing leaves
- The press of the button, and nothing before it
A place you started typing and thought better of never leaves the machine you typed it on.
Where it declines
Before the script has arrived the button does not work, and it looks as though it does not rather than pretending. Hand the far end a parameter it cannot make sense of and what returns is a blank screen, which tells a reader less than being turned away would.
Seven refusals, each printed against the field that earned it. A place typed but never chosen from the offers, since only a genuine code may go. One airport at both ends. A day that has already passed. A return dated before the departure, and that field empties itself when the departure moves past it. More than nine with seats. An infant held with nobody seated next to them. And anything past eleven months.
Why eleven and not twelve
Look at what a date is given to work with there: four characters, two for the day and two for the month, and none at all for the year.
That suits the far end until a question runs past a year. Ask sixteen months ahead and four digits cannot record which September was meant; the near one is assumed, real prices arrive for a week nobody asked about, and nothing says so. Eleven months is where four digits stop meaning one thing.
Two things it will not do
It will not quote. Flight figures printed beside trips here are bands, gathered from a year of watching what a route asks and written down so a whole trip can be added up at once. They bind nobody, and the number that decides anything is the live one on their page.
It will not get you onto a trip that somebody runs, either. Once a departure hangs on a minimum number, or on a cut-off after which it either runs or does not, a field has run out of things it can usefully say, and the desk has barely started.