Rail Low Fare Shopping

The same request that is used to shop for airfares is also be used to shop for rail fares. Low Fare Shopping functionality combines availability and a fare quote request to return the lowest available fares for a specified itinerary, using origin/destination and date information. Similar to Rail Availability, at this time fares are only available for one-way and round-trip. Low Fare Shopping does not require a booked itinerary to return fare data.

Low Fare Shopping serves as a fare shopper tool for users who want to check prices for a general itinerary. It is best suited for fare-driven travelers.

Schema

Low Fare Search can includes both rail and air segments in the response. See the following transactions for Low Fare Shopping:

Request

Minimum Required Data

Minimum required data is the same data that is required for an Air Low Fare Shopping request. However, the customer must be provisioned to support RCS access. This transaction supports air and/or rail responses depending on the targeted providers in the request. To return Rail segments only, 'RCS' must be sent as the only preferred provider.

Note: The default format for the LowFareSearch and LowFareSearchAsynch responses is the PricePoint format; however, rail responses cannot use this format. To return both Air and Rail in the LowFareSearch response, PricingSolutions must be used by setting @SolutionResult="true".

Optional Data

Some suppliers can return over 2,000 commercial offers in a response. /AirSearchModifiers MaxSolutions is used to limit the number of solutions returned in the shop response.

Modifiers

Additional modifiers can be added to a Low Fare Shopping search request to narrow the search results. Because Low Fare Shopping combines both availability and faring, availability and/or pricing modifiers can be used to narrow the request parameters.

See Rail Shopping Modifiers for more details about search and pricing modifiers.

Note: Many of the Low Fare Shopping modifiers that are supported for Air segments are NOT supported for Rail segments. See Unsupported Modifiers for a list of modifiers not used by Rail.

Response

A Low Fare Search response is returned in LowFareSearchRsp, which is an extension of AirSearchRsp.

Rail responses return itineraries, fares, and commercial offers. One or more warnings may be returned if requested criteria were not passed to a supplier; typically any criteria (normally because the distributor does not support the criterion concerned).

Rail response data is returned in the following elements:

With Air.xsd, the following elements:

were modified to increase the length of /RouteList/Route/Leg @Origin and @Destination from 3 to 8 to support the 8-character T and U codes:

Provider-Specific Information