[Mike Seddon]

This makes my blood boil every year.

I sit down to book our holiday.

Like most people who are self employed we sort of know roughly when we can get away and probably have a few places in mind.

So I would really love to log onto to one of the holiday sites and be able to ask, what have you got in September flying from these two or three airports to this list of destinations for this duration of holiday.

Can I ask that. Can I &^%$

I have to type in every single search one at a time.

I have to try every flight from one airport to one destination to see if they have anything available. I have to do this for every airport and every destination.

Can you imagine Amazon saying if you want to see all the books by so and so author you have to type in each book title one at a time!!!

I have yet to find one holiday company that offers anything close to a good internet user experience.

Drives me nuts......

[Inzvestor]

Mike, sounds like you would benefit with an insiders guide to these services

I used to work for one of the major online companies and could perform that with a single search entry.

PM me if you are stuck but as a hint look for the +/- days either side tab in the search.
If you use city codes with a radius search you will also achieve these results

Airport codes (the most common option may not allow the right results to be displayed.

[Mike Seddon]

Glenn,

As always a top answer!

I do actually do use the +/- 7 days but I don;t see the city codes option you mentioned.

I actually phone one company in frustration and asked them to do the search I mention however all the poor girl I talked to had was the same useless screen I had!

Grrr....

I know it's a simple database query it just amazes me that one of the travel companies hasn't jumped on the idea of making their internet front end more customer orientated.

[Inzvestor]

Many travel companies use screen-scraping technology and cannot replicate raw entries required to perform the correct search.

Main 'city' codes in the UK are
LON (covering 5 airports - LGW,LHR,LCY,STN.LTN)
MAN
LBA
BHX
EDI
GLA
NCL
BRS

The use of the radius feature (when possible) will open up a great number of possibilities and will display charters and lowcost airlines

eg
BRS with a radius of 50 miles will open up CWL (Cardiff) and EXT (Exeter)
BHX with a radius of 50 miles will open up Coventry (CVT) and Nottingham East Midlands (EMA)
LBA (50 miles) will open up Manchester, Doncaster Sheffield (DSA)
MAN (50 miles) will open up Liverpool (LPL) and Blackpool

You get the idea.... (I could be here for hours )

[Mike Seddon]

I understand the airport codes Glenn (I used to work for TNT International years ago).

You just can't put those radius codes into the forms that the holiday companies are offering.

If I had access to their data I'm sure I could write a query to get me what I want.

It's the unfriendly nature of their screens that I'm banging on about.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer me.