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The Briar Review(704) 362-5187
two columns of responsibility, and the eighteen characters that cross between them

two columns of responsibility, and the eighteen characters that cross between them

The flight half, set beside the half we do

This site exists to put two things next to each other and name the difference. The fare box deserves the same treatment, so here is what it does set against what this desk does, in the same two columns everything else here uses.

No figure appears on this page and nothing on it can be bought.

Why there are two columns at all

Sixteen comparisons on this site all work the same way: two candidates, one table, and the differences named rather than implied. Applying that to the fare box is not a gimmick. It is the clearest way to say something that gets muddled everywhere else on the internet, which is who exactly you are dealing with at which moment.

Choosing between two places
This desk
Reading an operator's conditions to you
This desk
Putting a request in writing
This desk
Quoting a seat on an aircraft
The booking company
Holding that seat
The booking company
Taking payment for it
The booking company
Issuing the ticket
The booking company
Changing or cancelling it afterwards
The booking company

Read the right column again. Not one line of it says this desk. That is the whole content of the disclosure under the box, set out so it cannot be skimmed past.

What crosses the line

One string, and it is short enough to read aloud. Charlotte to Dublin, out on the twelfth of March, home on the twenty second, in economy, two travelers:

CLT1203DUB2203200

Seventeen characters there. It is read by position rather than by punctuation, and it holds only these things:

Two airport codes
Where it starts and where it ends, three letters each
Two dates
Each written as day then month
One cabin letter
Blank for economy, w for premium economy, c for business class, f for first class
Three digits
Adults with a seat, children of two to eleven, infants on a lap

A one way question drops the second date and runs to thirteen. Add the cabin letter and it is eighteen at its longest. There is no room in a string of that shape for anything about you, which is the reassuring thing about strings of that shape.

What does not cross

Your name
The box has no field for one
Anywhere to reply to you
None
A telephone number
None
What you typed into the request form on another page
Goes only to this desk, and the box cannot read it
A card
There is no field on this site anywhere that would accept the digits

The airport names are fetched a single time as the page opens, and from then on nothing is asked of the network until you press the button. Typing, matching, ranking, the comparison below the fields: all of it happens on the machine you are sitting at.

The one thing the box remembers

Ask it something and it keeps that question, on your machine, in one browser entry. Ask a second question and it tells you what changed: a different airport, four more nights, a different cabin, one more traveler.

It compares questions and never answers. No fare is stored, because no fare is ever received here. The figures live on the other company's pages and are only ever seen by you.

Clearing your browsing data clears it. Nobody else can read it, this desk included.

The seven times it says no

Before its script has loaded the button sits disabled, and it looks disabled instead of pretending otherwise. A string the far end cannot parse comes back as an empty page, which tells a reader less than a refusal would.

Seven refusals, each printed against the field that earned it rather than collected by the button. An airport spelled out but never lifted from the list, because those three slots hold a genuine code or nothing whatever. Both ends set to one airport. A date that has already gone by. A homeward date earlier than the outbound one, which the field settles by clearing itself the moment the outbound passes it. Ten or more in seats. A lap infant with no adult seated to hold them. And anything further out than eleven months.

Why eleven months and not a year

Look again at what a date is given: two digits for the day, two for the month, and nothing at all for the year.

Within twelve months that is unambiguous, because only one March can be meant. Past that it stops being wrong and starts being silently misread: ask about a date fifteen months out and the near March is assumed, real figures come back for it, and no part of the screen mentions that a year was picked for you. Eleven months is the last point where those digits have one reading.

Two things it is not

It is not a quotation. Nothing this box returns has been seen, checked or agreed by this desk, and no figure printed anywhere on this site includes a seat on an aircraft.

And it is not a way of booking a trip. The trips here are chosen by comparing two of them and reading what the operating company will actually hold, which is a conversation and not a field. That starts at the request form, and this box has nothing to do with it.