First, start your search on the main Travelfusion home page.  Once you have entered your departure city, address or postal code, you will see a drop-down menu of airport options from this location.  At the bottom of the list you will notice the new option, “Try the map.”

Click on “Try the Map” to be taken directly to the map screen, as seen below:

Click on the map to move the “FlyGlass” icon to your preferred location.  When you’ve found your preferred departure location, click to select this location.  Repeat these steps to select your destination.  Remember, the map is highly interactive and can be zoomed in and out as much as you wish in searching for your destinations.

Once you have selected your departure and arrival cities on the map, you should see this type of screen on the Travelfusion main page, with the “leaving from” and “going to” fields filled in with your selections:

If you are happy with your selections, click on “search” to generate your unique list of flight options based upon your map selections.

Once your results page has loaded, you will see a list of available flight options sorted by price with the lowest first.

For even more detail, select a flight by clicking on it, and you can even click on the airport name or three letter code (for example, LTN or CDG) to see the airports on a map, or below these options you will also find a link to see your entire route on a map.  See below for screen shots of these features:

Finally, if there is an airport near you that you prefer, you can also filter your results on the map to select specific airports and exclude others.  On the side of the results list, you will find options to “Specify airports/airlines.”  Click on the airports tab to see a drop-down menu of all the possible airports for your search.  To see these airports on the map, click on “show on map.”  See below:

By clicking “show on map” you will be taken to the map view which shows your airports and their locations.  This can help you to find the airport closest to home or work and will help you make the choice of which one is most convenient for your journey.

We hope these features will make your flight searches even more interactive and informative in 2010.  Please let us know how you like them – we would love feedback from users!

Our customers often ask us for details of how exactly Origin and Destination locations should be specified to our system. As a result, we have created an initial definition of ideal usage. We realise this is far from the way many customers actually use our system so we would really appreciate your feedback to help us tune this specification.

Please could you have a look at the following link and read the first section ‘Launching Searches to Travelfusion.’  Let us know if you are not following any of the guidelines specified there and why not. We will then decide whether we need to expand the guidelines to include your type of usage or whether your usage is an exception to the rules. Important: this guide is a work-in-progress – the rules stated there are not going to be enforced on existing customers.

Please have a look and make your comments directly to the internal Travelfusion system as you would normally.  We will be checking there and look forward to your feedback.

Thanks for your time,

TF Operations

Basically an “open jaw ticket” is a return fare ticket in which a traveller returns from an airport different from his or her departure airport or arrives to an airport different from the one from which he or she departed.  The trip between these two cities is made over ground, or by a completely separate flight. Recently, I found a great fare on Travelfusion.com departing from London Gatwick to Barcelona (BCN) and then returning from Barcelona (BCN) but arriving back to London Luton, which is in fact an “open jaw” ticket.  By supporting these open jaw tickets, we are able to provide customers with cheaper fares.

Recently, we’ve adapted our system to support suppliers that accept certain airport codes for some cities and not others.  For example, “London – all airports” is supported by some companies but “Barcelona – all airports” is not.

In order to address this, and make sure we are launching an accurate number of searches, we now are able to support roundtrip flights that use different airports on each leg of the journey. Also, our route lists now support searches for all the airports in the vicinity of a city (LON, BCN for example).

For those of you who use our route lists – is your system handling these changes accurately?  Do your systems interpret overall city searches correctly?  And, how does your system handle results in which the departure airport differs from the return airport?