Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello! I want to fly on holiday somewhere next year, then fly somewhere else, then fly home, booking hotels in both-sites inbetween. Are there any travel agents online that can handle pricing enquiries for that seemingly mind-bogglingly complicated itinerary?

Ta!

Yes. My friend went all around the world like that.

http://www.google.com.

You'd almost think I might have tried that already. And then thought about asking on an internet forum containing several groups of people currently on split-site holidays as well as people who work with holiday firm online booking and advertising. Almost.

No. Go to a real life travel agent. They'll find you much better deal. If you don't trust them, get a quote and feed the itinerary to me and I'll fact-check their choices.

If the person asking had upwards of the intelligence of a coke-addled chimp, yes, I might have thought that. Almost.

Hrmm. I just want speculative prices, really. Is there no-one that can do it? That really sucks.

Can't expedia do something like that?

Well, for speculative prices, you could get them quoted as separate holidays.

Yeah but they all suck ass for this sort of thing because it's hard and people who write IT for travel firms (HELLO!) are really lazy. Honestly, a non-commital quote from a real breathing agent will be much quicker. Most of my colleagues use agents.

FFS. Stop fucking about with Google Wave and fix this, doc.



No. Feckless eejits.

It's not like it can be challenging, can it? Why can't they just submit it as separate requests?

It's about as easy as making 35,000 staff agree on using the same piece of financial forecasting software.

Really? The only issue is one-way flights though, right? Surely it's just a question of building the front end right to fire off multiple requests and then aggregating the results?

(BETEO thinks this message is Spam)

Dial-a-Flight boasts it'll help you sort this out, AND answer your calls within 5 seconds!

What sites are you actually thinking of?

This needs to be explained verbally and with alcohol, rather than via PHPBB with tea.

Chicago and Vegas.

And dial-a-flight can't do it, on their website at least.

DAMNIT, GAYWOOD! Don't tell me why you can't do it, tell me when you can! What am I paying you for, man?!

Go to Vegas first, Win Big, then buy a Cadillac and drive to Chicago. Why are you talking about websites?

I was going to say something like "if it's in the USA then renting a car or getting a train might be super awesome". That distance is quite large though, so it would be something of a 3rd leg to the holiday in itself. I can't help thinking a long train ride through the midwest might be pretty nice though.

You could imagine you're travelling through the poor, dustbowl southern states at the height of the Depression in the early part of the century.

Oh, right.

Just for that, I'm going to taunt you:

Will this be a site-seeing holiday?

Well that's rather my point. You can do it, so why can't your clients?

How about something less ambitious? Prestatyn AND Rhyl?

There's no call for it. I keep telling people this, you're the tenth person today. No-one wants to do it.

Edit -- if we've finished taunting each other, PM me your suggested dates.

To do it in any way that wouldn't be shit (so avoiding the Interstate, and going down through Kansas and Colorado), would be 55 hours of solid driving. That's a big chunk of holiday.

As if

PM DELETED.

A webpage would have done it by now. *drums fingers*

Heh, I used ebookers for a multi-itinery holiday, but there are other sites too, that was the cheapest for us at the time (last year) though.

What the fuck is so hard, Cras?
Get a quote for flight out and a hotel. Write quote down. CANCEL!
Get a quote for flight from the first place to the second place, and a hotel. Write quote down. CANCEL!
Get a quote for flight from second place to here. Write quote down. CANCEL!
Add up all your quotes with MATHS.

I haven't found a single site that quotes on one-way flights.

http://www.kayak.co.uk can do multi-city routes. I used it myself to get to on holiday and back this year.

We only want it to get Craster on holiday, we can live without the "and back" bit.

If next time's anything like the last, we'll hardly know he's gone anyway, the fucking nerd.

Hey, did I post from my honeymoon? No, I do believe that was someone else.











Would I have, if the forum was here? Probably.

But neither of them have done it very often, and everything they have posted relates to how great their honeymoon is. Which is very different from what you gone done, DUCY?

Or, y'know, the Xfactor.

I HAVE THE HIGH GROUND HERE.

You did spurn the orangutans in favour of this place though, mate. And orangutans don't take spurning well.

http://www.expedia.co.uk/pub/agent.dll?qscr=fexp&flag=q&city1=london&citd1=jfk&date1=15/12/2009&time1=362&cAdu=2&cSen=0&cChi=0&cInf=&infs=2&tktt=3&trpt=1&ecrc=&eccn=&qryt=1&load=1&rdct=1&rfrr=-57174
I could try more than one website, but, you know, lazy.

Huzzah! Expedia can indeed do it. Watch and learn, other online travel agents.

Multi-centres is the search term you need. All decent Travel agents should be able to sort you out with ideas or suggestions on how to put your own together.

I suggest Bangkok, Tokyo, Bangkok, Koh Samui.

With me.

I'm there.

Unfortunately 95% of the sites offering multi-centre trips only have specific scheduled ones, not the ability to create your own.

Expedia have proven that it's possible to do it, I shall now utterly ignore everything DocG said and assume that the fact that everyone else doesn't is sheer incompetence and lazyness.

All the sites I work with can do one-way flights, you utter berk. What I said was that few sites do a decent job of browsing multi-leg trips as a single ticket. And you want to fly on a single ticket, because it's cheaper, and stuff like missed connections will be covered.

http://www.flexibletrips.com/flight_only/search.jsp
http://netflights.com/
http://ww5.thomascook.com/featureddeals ... ights.html
http://www.monarch.co.uk/flights
http://flights.firstchoice.co.uk/firstc ... dardsearch

Edit -- I really like how Expedia puts the search params in the GET request so you can bookmark searches. I've lobbied for that internally, and the site I'm working on now has it.