Rank Air Segments

Universal Policy’s first processing step is to loop through all price points, find all flight options associated with each price point, and find all the options within each flight option. Each option has booking info that points back to an air segment in the request, and connection data for segments that form a connection.

As a result of this loop, Universal Policy creates a list of air segments that are being used in the price points for evaluation. This list is subsequently used to rank the segments based on the policy configuration.

Using the connection information, a list of air travel options is created from the air segments. Each air travel option is then evaluated against the configured policy. If any of the segments within the air travel option is excluded from policy, the entire air travel option is marked for exclusion. Note that no price points are removed during the ranking process.

Example and Overview

After creating this list, Universal Policy applies policy as detailed in the topics in the Evaluate Policy section. An example and overview of some of the settings follows next. Most of the settings in this discussion are made on the Add/Edit Excluded, Display-only, and/or Preferred Airline screens as appropriate.

For example, based on the configuration shown next, if searching BNE-SYD and a price point has flights from BNE-LST on JQ, LST-MEL on QF and MEL-SYD on QF, the price point will be excluded due to the presence of the JQ leg from BNE-LST. 

If any segment within the air travel option is display-only it will be marked as such, as shown below for the setting on the Display-Only Airline screen.

Any segment matching a display-only configuration that has the non-preferred airline setting checked will not be flagged as preferred. This option is also set on the Display-Only Airline screen.

If any segment within the air travel option is preferred, it will be marked as preferred along with any display-only segments not flagged as non-preferred. For a price point to be considered preferred, all of the segments within the price point must be preferred.

When configuring preferred, excluded, and display-only airlines, a checkbox supports marking only connecting flights as preferred, excluded, or display-only, as shown next from the Add/Edit Preferred Airline screen. If this checkbox is selected, the configuration applies only to flights connecting through the configured departure/arrival geographies. By default, this checkbox is not selected, and direct, non-stop, and connecting flights through the configured departure/arrival geographies are included in the configuration.

When configuring preferred, excluded, and display-only airlines, Universal Policy provides an option to specify a flight range when ranking the segments. Flight numbers must fall in this flight range for the ranking to be applied.

In addition, when configuring preferred airlines, a checkbox supports designating a carrier as “super preferred,” which results in the lowest fare / price point being marked in-policy regardless of any other policy settings.

 

When ranking segments based on the configured preferred, excluded, and display-only airlines, the segments must match the configured geography for the ranking to be applied.

The segments also must fall within the configured booking and travel dates.

The ranking processing uses data from the request about the carrier, departure time, flight number, origin, destination, and connection data to determine the ranking of each segment.

Continue in Evaluate Policy