the box on the front page
What the Flight Box Does
This page follows one press of the button from end to end: what the box shows before you touch it, what stays on your machine while you type, what the button assembles, what it refuses to assemble, and whose hands you are in afterwards.
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Why there is a box here at all
Every trip in this catalogue is filed by who is coming with you, because that is the thing that reshapes an arrangement. Two adults and the same two adults with a five year old are different bookings: different rooms, different transfers, different rules from the supplier, different small print.
A seat ignores all of that. The party is a number, the price follows the number, and no amount of careful reading changes it. That makes a seat the one item on this counter worth handing straight to you, and the rest of this page is what happens when you take it.
Before you touch it
The field is not blank. Rest a cursor in it and it lists the busiest airport of every country this catalogue covers, because somebody who does not carry three letter codes in their head should be shown what the box wants rather than made to guess at an empty rectangle.
Those names come from a file this domain serves. Opening the box asks nothing of anybody else.
While you type
Your own machine does the matching. It has the file already, so a partly spelled city is compared against it on your desk and nowhere else, which is why names appear as fast as you can type and why nobody ever sees a half finished word.
- Requests made while typing
- None
- Where the matching happens
- On your machine, against a file it already holds
- What a supplier learns from your typing
- Nothing, because nothing is sent
- What this office learns
- The same
What the button assembles
One line, built out of eight boxes. Both airport codes go in, then the outbound as a day and a month, then the same pair for the return where you gave one, then a single letter standing for the cabin, then three digits counting the party.
- Your name
- Not in it, because the box never asked
- Somewhere to write back
- Not in it
- A telephone
- Not in it
- Anything from the booking request
- Not in it. That form and this box share a page and nothing else
What the button refuses to assemble
Some of these are impossible and some are merely wrong, and the box treats them alike: it declines and says which field it means.
- A city typed but never chosen from the list
- Only a genuine code travels, so a name nobody picked is not one
- The same airport at both ends
- There is no journey to price
- A day already behind us
- Nothing is looked up backwards
- A way home before the way out
- The box clears that field itself when the outbound passes it
- Ten or more seats
- One line carries nine
- An infant held with no adult seated
- Somebody has to be holding them
- Anything past eleven months
- The next section
Nothing is collected into a warning at the foot of the form. Each refusal appears in the field it belongs to, because a list at the bottom sends a reader back up the page working out which box it means.
Why eleven months and not twelve
Dates travel as four digits, day then month, with nothing standing for the year. The receiving end expects exactly that shape and no other. Push much past a year and it is read as the coming one, silently, and results arrive for dates nobody had in mind.
Refusing beats guessing when the format cannot carry the meaning. Eleven months is where the guessing would start, so that is where the box stops.
Whose hands you are in afterwards
A booking company's, and not this office's. They answer on a subdomain of this address, and everything from the press of the button onward is theirs.
- Who shows the prices
- They do, from their systems
- Who holds the seat
- They do
- Who is paid
- They are. No page here has a field for a card
- Whose conditions bind the ticket
- Theirs, and worth reading before paying
- This counter's part in that sale
- None. Not a party to it and unable to alter it afterwards
- What may reach this counter
- A share of what that company already earned, if you buy
- What that does to the figure
- Nothing. It was set before anyone knew where you came from
What it is not
Not a price list. Airline figures appear nowhere in these pages, and that is deliberate: they change hourly at the far end, so anything printed here would be stale before it was read.
Not a route into a package either. The box finds a seat and stops there. Where there is a supplier, a set of conditions, and a party whose shape decides the whole arrangement, asking this office is what the counter is staffed for.
- Kept about you, and until when
- set out item by item on privacy
- This office's obligations, and the limits of them
- on terms
- How a figure divides between the companies paid
- on prices
- The six steps of a booking
- on how it works