Querying Best-Price Flight Connections

Use

Instead of the general availability query you can also display the best-price flight connections for the whole trip. To do this, use the Best Price function. You can use the best-price query for single flights or when requesting several flights for a trip (this is where you see the advantage of the best-price query). The advantages of this query come from the fact that flight prices are influenced by a number of factors - there is no single fixed price per leg of flight. Influencing parameters are, for example:

Outward and return flight
Stopovers or round trips
Days chosen for the trip
Duration of stay

The best-price query determines the optimum price for the all the flights in a travel plan taking any special booking conditions for the individual flights into consideration.

When you use the best-price query you do not have to start an availability query for each individual flight. You are also guaranteed to find flights for which there is a price in the system. The determination of a price is a prerequisite for issuing the ticket to complete the booking process. This is usually carried out centrally by the appropriate travel center or travel agency.

Prerequisites

You have activated the Best-Price Flight function in the Customizing of Travel Planning and determined which of the following strategies is to be considered for the best-price flight query:

Flights must not agree with the travel profile
Only flights that agree with the travel profile are displayed
The best-price flight query can be made taking individual rules into consideration. These rules describe, for example, constellations of the factors geographical area , airline and cabin class .

To make the settings, refer to Customizing under:

Dialog and Planning Control Travel Planning Control Define price and availability strategies
Trip Rules and Profiles Travel Profiles Specify settings for price-controlled availability query

Procedure

In the Planning Manager you have created a travel request .

Choose Flight - with quick info Add Flight Request
The Flight Request dialog box appears.
Enter the place of departure and destination. You can enter the name of a town or an IATA location abbreviation. The system only recognizes towns that are defined as, or associated to, IATA locations.
Enter the departure date. If you also want to choose the return flight now, enter the return flight date.
You can also enter a time for the outbound and return flight:

If you do not enter a time: The system determines the cheapest flight of the day.

If you enter a time: The system determines the cheapest flight for the time given, +/- 2 hours.

Choose Availability - with quick info Availability Query (Enter).
If you require more flights for your trip, repeat steps 1 to 5.
Choose Best-Price Flight - with quick info Find Best Price Flight (F5) .
The system displays the Flight Recommendation dialog box.
Select the required combination and chose Continue .

You can now, as for the standard query, select a seat .