The one commercial thing
The Fare Search
Everything about the search, away from the form itself, because a disclosure that appears in exactly one place is a disclosure somebody can miss.
Where is it?
On the front page, in one block, under the five steps. Not inside an entry, not repeated across the site, and not in front of anything a reader came for.
Who runs it?
An outside booking service. Not this paper.
Stringcourse LLC sells no flights, holds no booking, takes no payment and is not a travel agency. Everything past the search button belongs to that service and to the airline a reader ends up with.
Who gets paid, and by whom?
| Party | What they get | Out of whose money |
|---|---|---|
| The reader | A fare, quoted by the booking service | Theirs |
| The airline | The fare, less the service's cut | The reader's |
| The booking service | Its own margin | The airline's |
| This paper | Possibly a commission, where a booking follows a search begun here | The service's margin, never the reader's |
The row that matters is the last one. The fare quoted to a reader is the same whether or not this paper is ever paid, and it could not be otherwise: we do not produce the number.
Why does a paper about buildings carry one at all?
Because funding has to come from somewhere and this is the version we are willing to print.
Weigh it against the others. Advertising beside the entries puts an interested party in the room. Money from anybody who owns a building described here finishes the paper's usefulness in one sentence. A paywall converts readers into customers and the writing into stock. Of four imperfect answers, one labeled block on one page, sitting below the subject, was the one we could defend.
What leaves the page when I press the button?
Two places, two dates, a cabin, and how many people are traveling. Nothing else: no name, no address, no record of what was read here first.
It goes to the service operating the search on our own subdomain, and from that moment their notice governs it. The privacy notice has the row.
Why does the button not work with the script off?
Because the service reads one packed parameter rather than a set of separate fields, and packing it needs the same script that turns a typed city name into an airport code.
A button that looked usable without the script would hand the service a query it cannot read, and the reader would arrive at an error with no idea why. So the button ships switched off, the script switches it on, and a note inside the form says exactly that. Every other page of this site works with no script at all.
Does the page load anything from the booking service?
No. The form is our own markup rather than a ready made widget, and that is a deliberate choice.
A ready made widget arrives as somebody else's script, which means somebody else's code runs in a reader's browser on our pages and can see what happens there. Nothing of the kind loads here. No script on this site comes from anywhere but this domain, the form is plain HTML, and pressing the button is what takes a reader across, by their own click, to a subdomain of this same address.
Will you tell me the best fare?
No, and no page here says anything about price at all. We publish no figures of our own anywhere on this site, name no airline, and make no claim that anything found through the search is low, competitive or a saving.
Something went wrong with my booking
There is nothing we can do, and better to learn that here than at an airport.
No reservation is visible to this paper. We cannot retrieve one, amend one, cancel one or return any money. Only the company that accepted it has any of those powers, and its details are on its own site and in its confirmation.