New Tool Helps You Book Flight Options Found on ITA Matrix
Google Flights is great for general airfare searches, but sometimes you need a more powerful flight search engine. Maybe you want to route through a particular city, fly on a particular aircraft or extend a layover to spend it in a particular lounge. In these cases, many of us turn to ITA Matrixto find the perfect itinerary.
The problem with ITA Matrix is that — once you find that perfect itinerary — you can't book it on the site! You have to try to creatively trick Google Flights or an airline's flight search tool into giving you the same flight results. Even then, sometimes you still can't find a way to book the itinerary you want.
This is such a prevalent problem that flyers have banded together on FlyerTalk to build a script to try solve this problem. However, despite a helpful instruction guide on FlyerTalk, installing this script requires extensive technical knowledge and a couple of hours to figure out and install.
Now there's a much easier way.
We were thrilled to recently find out about a new tool called BookWithMatrix that solves this problem. In just seconds, you can go from an ITA Matrix itinerary page to a flight-booking page.
Although we found some bugs when we initially tested the website, the creators have worked quickly to effectively solve the bugs we found. The tool's now in great shape, and I've already begun using it extensively.
How to Use the Tool
1. Find your flights in ITA Matrix
2. Use Ctrl-A or ⌘-A to highlight the entire itinerary detail page, then Ctrl-C or ⌘-C to copy the page.
3. Use Ctrl-V or ⌘-V to paste the itinerary into BookWithMatrix. The website will automatically load a page confirming your itinerary.
4. Select an Online Travel Agency (OTA) or American Airlines link at the bottom to complete your flight booking.
And that's it! It's a very simple but incredibly useful tool that will hopefully help a lot of travelers book the flights they want.
Limitations
While the creators have fixed the bugs that we discovered, there are some limitations to the tool to be mindful of:
- Not all OTA links will work for all flights. This is especially true on stopover (24+ hour layover) and open-jaw flights. That said, all of the itineraries we have tested so far will work on at least one of the OTA links.
- The link to American Airlines is still a little buggy. You'll get a "The fare for this itinerary has changed since you selected your flight(s)" error on AA.com, but the flights have still been bookable at the same price.
- Since Southwest Airlines flight results don't appear in ITA Matrix, you won't be able to use BookWithMatrix to book Southwest flights.
Have you tested out this tool? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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