one parameter, three digits, and every one of them a person
What the Seat Box Sends, and Who It Counts
Every trip on this site opens with how much of the week the dog is actually in, because that is the answer nobody else prints. The seat box is the one place where the dog is not counted at all, and this page says so before it says anything else.
Nothing on this page can be bought, and no figure on it is a quotation.
Nothing here counts you and nothing follows you off the page. One word can be stored, and only the word yes, so this slip stops coming back. The whole of what that means.
The one box on this site that does not count the dog
Eleven weeks sit in this catalog and each is labeled by the same question: how much of it is the dog actually in. All of it, almost all of it, or part of it, printed at the top of the page rather than buried in a paragraph about pet policies.
The seat box is where that stops. It counts adults, children and infants in arms, and its parameter has exactly three digits for the three of them. There is no fourth digit and no room to invent one.
That is not squeamishness. What an airline will carry in a cabin, and what it insists goes below, moves with the carrier, the route, the season, the weight of the animal and the paperwork of the country at the far end. None of that fits in a search field, and a field that pretended it did would be lying by omission to precisely the readers this site exists for. So the arrangement is made with the airline directly, and this box stays out of it.
Eighteen characters, taken apart one at a time
Give it two airports and a departure date and it has everything it needs. What travels is a single parameter.
Take `MSP1509LIS2409c200`.
Eighteen characters in that one, thirteen for a one way seat in economy. Nothing else rides along, and the counters under the fields say in words who those last three digits stand for, every time you change one.
- `MSP`
- Where the party starts
- `1509`
- The fifteenth of the ninth, going
- `LIS`
- Where it lands
- `2409`
- The twenty fourth of the ninth, returning
- `c`
- The cabin. Blank is economy, `w` premium economy, `c` business, `f` first
- `2`
- Grown ups occupying a seat each
- `0`
- Aged two to eleven
- `0`
- Under two and not occupying one
Who is at the other end
Not this office, and the list runs one way from top to bottom.
- Producing a price
- A booking company, live, from its own systems
- Keeping the seat
- That company
- Taking the payment
- That company, on its own pages, because there is nowhere else for it to happen: not one page here has a box that would accept a card
- Setting the ticket conditions
- That company. Those bind; nothing written here does
- Amending the booking later
- Not in this office's power, and it will not suggest it is
- What this office earns
- A slice of margin that company had priced in long before, and only where a booking actually results
- What that does to your figure
- Nothing at all. It was fixed before anyone knew where you came from
What stays on your own machine
The airport codes arrive once, in a single file, as the page loads. Everything after that is local: matching what you type, ordering the offers, spelling out the headcount, and building the parameter.
A town you began typing and then thought better of is seen by no machine except the one in front of you.
- Who you are
- The box has no field for it, so the parameter has nothing to carry
- An address for a reply
- No field, same reason
- A number to ring you on
- No field, same reason again
- Anything you put in the quote form on some other page
- Belongs to that form. Two errands under one roof, with no corridor between them
- When the first byte goes out
- On the press, and not one keystroke before it
Where it says no
Before the script has arrived the button will not work, and it looks inert rather than pretending. A parameter the receiving end cannot read comes back as an empty page, which costs more time than a refusal.
Seven things are turned away, and each is said against the field that caused it rather than heaped under the button. A place typed but never taken from the offers, since only a genuine code is allowed through. One airport named at both ends. A departure whose day has passed. A return set before its own departure, which also empties that field if the departure is pushed past it. More than nine in seats. An infant in arms with no adult seated beside them. And any date further out than eleven months.
Why eleven months
Count what a date carries up there: four digits, a day and a month, and no year in either of them.
That shape suits the receiving end perfectly until a question runs past twelve months. Ask for sixteen and four digits have nowhere to record which September you had in mind. The near one gets assumed, real fares come back for a week you never named, and nothing anywhere mentions the swap. Eleven months is simply where four digits stop having one meaning.
Two jobs it will not take on
Not a quotation. Where a flight figure appears against a trip here it is a band, drawn from what that route has been asking across a year and set down so a week can be added up in one go. It commits nobody. The figure that decides anything is the live one, and it turns up on their page rather than this one.
Not a way to book the dog either. That happens with the airline, in writing, and if you ask here first this office will tell you which questions to put to them instead of leaving you to guess.