The ITA Software Matrix Displays

The ITA Matrix Displays are spreadsheet-like tables of prices that appear in various places throughout the ITA search engine website. These matrices gives you an overview of all of the travel options which we found for you; in addition, it enables you to focus on the travel options you're interested in.

There are actually two different flavors of the ITA Matrix Display on the website; the first, which appears in the "Choose whole trips" display mode, enables users to work with entire solutions; the second, which is used in both the text-based and graphical-based versions of the "Choose flights" display mode, enables users to work with flights, rather than entire trips. Regardless, whether we're manipulating entire trips or just flights, the concepts behind the matrix are exactly the same, and are explained below.

Types of Matrices

• Airline/Number of Stops matrix: This tells you what airlines can get you to your destinations, how many stops it will take each of them to do so, and how much it will cost.
• Flight Times matrix: This tells you, for the time ranges you specified, the cost trade-offs of leaving or arriving at a particular time of day; you may, for example, prefer to leave in the afternoon, but would be willing to leave in the morning if the flight was much cheaper at that time.

And, in cases where you specified that you were willing to leave from alternate airports:

• Airports matrix: This lets you see the cost trade-offs of flying into/out of various airports.

How to Use the Matrix Displays

Each matrix has a tab associated with it at the top; clicking the mouse on a tab will display that matrix.

In the upper left-hand corner of the matrix is the lowest price we could find for your query.

Clicking on this price will list the cheapest travel options we found, sorted by price.

In the row header cells (the leftmost column) and the column header cells (the topmost row) of a matrix, there are labels which describe that particular row or column of that matrix. If you click on these labels, you get all the travel options we found that correspond to that label. For example, in the Airline/Number of Stops matrix, clicking on the label "Nonstop" will display all of the travel options which have nonstop flights (both from Philadelphia to Minneapolis, and back from Minneapolis to Philadelphia), regardless of the airlines used. Likewise, clicking on the "Northwest Airlines" column label will display all of the travel options on Northwest Airlines, regardless of the number of stops.

Finally, clicking on the prices in the interior cells of the matrix gives you the travel options which are associated with both the cell's row and column labels.