Overview

When planning individual trips (i.e. without an itinerary template as the trip backbone) that depend on flights for transportation, the availability of flights and their arrival times can significantly shape the overall itinerary. If flights are chosen after selecting other components like accommodations or car rentals, it can disrupt the planning process due to necessary adjustments.

To avoid this, it's best to start planning your itinerary by selecting your flights first. Once a flight is chosen, you can proceed with planning the rest of your trip using the Planner, and you will still have the option to change your initial flight selection if needed.

 

Flight Selection in the Booking Flow

Starting your itinerary with a flight selection offers an alternative method to the standard approach of setting travel dates, destinations, and number of passengers (with room distribution) as described in the article Create an Individual Trip with Route Builder.

 

Creating an Individual Trip Without Selecting a Flight First

If you choose this approach, you will start at the first step of the booking flow without pre-selected flights. You can move to the “Transports” step later in the process.

 

Creating an Individual Trip by Selecting a Flight First

This article focuses on this case, where you will begin at the first step of the booking flow with a pre-selected flight. The “Transports” step will be marked as complete, and the selected flight will be part of your itinerary. However, you can still navigate to the “Transports” tab to change your flight selection.

 

How to Start an Itinerary with a Flight Selection?

Configuration in TripBuilder Settings

To enable this feature, follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings

2. Click on Distribution Channels

3. Select your TripBuilder ID

4. Click on the Discovery tab

5. Scroll down to the Discovery Overview / Trip Search section

 

6. In the Create Itinerary from flights setting, choose one of the visibility options:

• Enabled for all users
• Enabled for travel agents and employees
• Enabled for employees only
• Disabled

7. Click Save

 

TripBuilder Dashboard

In the TripBuilder dashboard, under the Trips section (for Agents), clicking on any available links such as Suggested Tours, Branded Tours, or Create Own Tour will take you to the Discovery Overview page.

 

Discovery Overview

Based on the link selected, the relevant tab on the Discovery Overview page will be displayed. This article focuses on the Create Own Tour tab, which is set by default when you select the corresponding link.

Know more: For a comparison of user flows when a flight is not selected as the initial component, see the article Create an Individual Trip with Route Builder.

 

When selecting the Search Flights tab, you can create an itinerary by choosing a flight first. Alternatively, you can use the Design Route or the Import PNR flow under the other tab options.

Taking a roundtrip as an example, you will need to provide the following inputs:

• Departure: Airport or area where the flight will start

 

• Arrival: Airport or area where the flight will end
• Departure Date: The date when the departure flight will take place (may differ from the itinerary's first day due to overnight flights)
• Arrival Date: The date when the return flight will take place (may differ from the itinerary's last day due to overnight flights)

Four secondary inputs are presented already with default values:

• Flight Circuit: Either Roundtrip (default) or Multi-City. Depending on the selection, the UI will adapt accordingly (example below for a Multi-City selection)

• Travellers: Number of adults and children and their room distribution. This information is required for the itinerary instantiation as accommodation offers will be pre-selected as part of the process.

Please note: Depending on the configuration, when the user selects one or more children, they will be asked to provide each child's age or date of birth.

 

• Flight class: To pre-filter results, select one of the flight classes: Economy, Premium Economy, Business Class and First Class. It is also possible not to define any filter at this stage and apply the filtering later on the results.

Know more: TripBuilder allows you to configure any combination of the four available flight classes. Whether you choose to configure all or just some of these classes, they will always be displayed in the following order: Economy Premium Economy Business Class First Class This ordering is designed to reflect the sequence most commonly used in flight searches and bookings.

• Hold Baggage
• Non-stop Flights

Clicking the Search button initiates a search, displaying a loading message while TripBuilder retrieves results from GDS/inventory (depending on TripBuilder’s instance configuration).

 

Flights Overview

The Flights Overview page is displayed after the search results are generated.

 

Please note: Content rules may affect the results available to users. This filtering is fully transparent, and no notification is given to the user when applied. For more information, refer to the article How to set content rules.

 

At the top of the page, you'll see the same flight search input fields. This lets users initiate a new search without returning to the previous page.

 

The Select Journey section contains three main areas (in addition to the result count and the number of filtered results if filters are applied):

• Sorting: Options include Cheapest, Fastest and Least layovers
• Filters: Users can filter by Price, Trip duration, Layover time, Airlines, number of Stops and departure/arrival Timings. These filters can be combined.

 

• Results: Flight results are displayed as flight cards. The card layout varies depending on whether a Roundtrip or Multi-City option was selected. For a roundtrip, each flight result shows both the outbound and return legs.

 

Each flight card generally includes the following details:

• Total price per person, considering all flight legs.
• Detailed view of all legs and underlying segments in the flight card.

• Included luggage allowance (details appear on mouse-over)
• Flight fare
• Ticketing time limit

 

Each flight leg contains the following information:

• Airline carrier
• Local departure time
• IATA code for the departure airport
• Number of layovers
• Total duration of the flight
• Flight class
• Local arrival time
• IATA code for the arrival airport

 

Additional Filtering Capabilities by Flight Leg

Within each flight card, a checkbox is available beside each flight leg, allowing users to filter results based on the selected flight leg. In the case of a roundtrip, selecting a flight leg filters out all results that do not include that leg, regardless of airline, price, or duration.

For example, selecting a specific outbound leg from an initial 36 flights will narrow the options to just two flight results. As expected, the flights of the return leg are different. Different prices and airline carriers can be present in the results.

 

After identifying the most suitable flight, click the Select button to proceed to the Planner.

 

Planner

Once a flight is selected, the itinerary is instantiated with:

• Location inputs
• Date and time inputs
• Start and end locations, set based on the selected flight
• An additional area closest to the arriving airport. This new area - aside from the start and end airports areas - is created with a duration resulting from the day difference between outgoing and return flights.

 

All Planner features are accessible, including route modifications, adjusting calendar days, adding other product types, and changing the selected flight.