LifeinAsia - 10:06 pm on Jan 4, 2010 (gmt 0)

What, you think airfares are stored in a static DB table on the site's servers' hard drives?!? Oh, heh heh, that's a good one!

Airfares (and availability) change constantly and I don't know of any sites that store the data on their servers. Most likely, when you go to a travel site and request an airfare, the site has to make a call through their taps into the airline reservations systems mainframes (or go through a 3rd party interface).

Also, you have to realize that the DB structure is not simple. If you do a search for flights from L.A. to New York, your query is going to return non-stop L.A.-New York flights; 1-stop flights that could go through Las Vegas, Denver, Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago, etc...; 2-stop flights; plane changes, etc. And that's if you specify which airport to use at each end. What if you specified the flexibility of using Long Beach or John Wayne Airport instead of LAX and Newark or JFK instead of La Guardia?

So after all the possible routes have been determined, the system has to check availability and pricing for each leg along the way.