Empty tiered seating of moulded shells rising away under a covered stand

what the fare button sends, taken apart character by character

One Parameter, Read Back in Full

Every trip in this catalog wears its headcount before its map, because the number of you decides the figure and this office prints that division instead of burying it. The same habit is turned on the fare box here: one parameter goes out, and this page reads every character of it back to you.

Why a seat sits apart from everything else here

Sixteen trips are listed on this site and each one leads with how many people are in it. That is not decoration. On a guided trip the vehicle, the guide and the boat are paid for once and divided by the heads inside, so two people pay the steepest day here and several hundred pay the shallowest, and the site prints the division rather than letting anybody discover it at the deposit.

A seat obeys none of that. Two of you or twenty, the fare per person is whatever the airline has decided that morning, and it does not soften because more of you turned up. Nor is there anything in it for an office to argue over: no minimum, no decision date, no clause about who else booked.

Something with no division to explain and no terms to read on your behalf does not want a desk in the middle of it. It wants a field, a button, and a straight account of who is on the other end.

The parameter, character by character

Two airports and an outbound date are all the button needs. What leaves is a single parameter.

Take `IND1509LIS2409c200`.

Eighteen characters there; thirteen for a one way seat in economy. There is nothing else in it because the parameter has nowhere else to put anything.

`IND`: The airport you leave from
`1509`: Out on the fifteenth of September
`LIS`: The airport you arrive at
`2409`: Back on the twenty fourth
`c`: The cabin: blank economy, `w` premium economy, `c` business, `f` first
`2`: Adults in seats
`0`: Children from two to eleven
`0`: Infants under two, carried rather than seated

Why the headcount is read back at you

Put more than one person in the boxes and a line appears underneath, spelling out the party and saying the one thing worth saying about it: a seat is the exception to this catalog's own rule, and its figure per person will not fall as the number climbs.

That is there because the rest of the site trains you to expect the opposite. Somebody who has just learned that twelve people pay a third of what two pay will reasonably assume the same applies here. It does not, and finding out at the airline's page rather than at ours would be this office's failure of manners.

That counting happens in your browser, is shown to you alone, and never becomes part of the parameter.

Who is on the other end of it

A company that is not this one, and the list below is unanimous about that.

Returning the fares: A booking company, live, out of its own systems
Holding the seat: That company
Handling the card: That company, on its own pages, which is the only place it could happen: no page in this catalog carries a field that would take one
Writing the ticket conditions: That company. Those govern; this page does not
Changing a booking afterwards: Outside what this office can do, and it will not imply otherwise
What reaches this office: Part of a margin that company had already set, and only where a sale follows
The effect on your figure: None. It was fixed before anybody knew which website you came through

What never leaves this machine

The airport codes arrive once, as one file, when the page loads. Everything after that happens on your own machine: matching what you type, ordering the offers, counting the party, and assembling the parameter.

A city half typed and abandoned reaches no machine but the one in front of you.

A name: Not asked for by this box, so not in the parameter
An address to reply to: Not asked for
A telephone number: Not asked for
Anything written into the quote form on another page: Belongs to that form alone. The two are separate errands that happen to be housed together
The moment anything at all goes out: When the button is pressed, and not one keystroke earlier

Where the box says no

Nothing works before the script arrives, and the button shows that by staying dull rather than pretending. A parameter the far end cannot read does not fail loudly; it returns a blank page, which wastes more of an afternoon than an error would.

There are seven things it declines, and each one is said against the field responsible instead of being piled beneath the button.

A place name that was typed but never lifted out of the offers is one, since a genuine code is the only thing allowed through. Naming one airport twice is another. So is a departure whose day has gone, and so is a return set earlier than the departure, which additionally empties its own field when the departure is dragged past it. Seats above nine go nowhere, that being the limit of a single parameter. A carried infant with no adult in a seat beside it goes nowhere either. And nor does any date more than eleven months ahead.

Eleven months, and the reason it is not twelve

Count the digits in a date up there. Four of them, carrying a day and a month, with the year left out of it entirely.

The receiving end wants that shape and works perfectly with it until a question runs past a year. Sixteen months ahead, four digits have no way of recording which September was intended; the near one gets assumed, genuine fares arrive for a week nobody named, and nothing announces the substitution. Eleven months is the point at which those four digits stop having one meaning, so it is the point at which this box stops.

Two jobs it does not do

It does not quote. The flight figures printed beside trips in this catalog are a year of watching what a route asks, noted down so that a whole trip can be costed in one sitting; they hold nobody to anything. Whatever their page returns when you ask is the real figure, and it is the same figure whether one of you asks or nine.

It is also no way into a trip that somebody runs. The moment a departure depends on a minimum headcount, or on a date after which it is on or off, a search field has nothing to say and this desk has everything to say.