Interpreting Search Results

Once you've filled out the trip request form and pressed the "Go!" button, the ITA search engine takes over. In addition to finding the cheapest options, ITA's engine works hard to find a diverse set of travel options which meet your needs and desires.

When the search is finished, ITA offers three different selection methods to sift through the candidate trips returned, so that you can find the one that's right for you:

• Choosing whole trips. When the search results initially come up, this is the method which is selected by default. Here, you look at the details of whole trips at once, providing a quick and easy way to select the trip that you want.
  
• Choosing flight-by-flight, using a text-based interface. Selecting "Choose flights (text)" at the top of the page enables you to choose particular flights, one at a time, for each portion of your trip (whether it be a one-way, round trip, or a multi-segment trip), in any order you like.
  
• Choosing flight-by-flight, using a graphical interface. This is a graphical version of the text-based choose-flight interface. Flights (and the layovers between them) are represented using colored bars in a timeline format, making it easy to compare flights visually for things like flight duration, layover length, number of stops, schedule diversity, time-of-day availability, and undesirable features the flight may have that you should know about.