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Map Quiz Basic

Test your basic understanding of geography. Challenge your friends and family.

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Europe

Identify and plot countries in Europe. Challenge your friends and family. A useful exercise for all students of travel studies.

If you are a IATA foundation student or a travel agent who wants a refresher on your european geography then we are certain this quiz will help you.

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Africa

Identify and plot countries in continent of Africa. Challenge your friends and family. Useful exercise for all students of travel studies.

Hint – Easier way to learn a map is by creating code names for countries. For example, east Africa can be remembered by the word TBRUKESDE (Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti, and Ethiopia.)

Click here to start Map Quiz for Africa
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 How do I save on my flight tickets?

 

This is one question that everyone wants an answer for, How do I save on my ticket costs? To find an answer to this question we have dug deep and found out that there is no single or definite way to save on your flight costs. In reality, saving happens when we take certain measures to get cheap tickets. Below are some points that we have listed out that may help you to save on your flight tickets.

Steps to save on flight costs.

  • Purchase in Advance: – Like all products and services flight ticket prices also depend on a number of factors however one of the biggest factors which can allow you to get a ticket at cheap prices is by purchasing in advance. All major airline inventory system follow an ascending order for fare pricing the earlier you buy the cheaper the ticket prices will be, there are various advance purchase fares which offer varying discount. A ticket which is purchased 120 days in advance is a lot cheaper compared with a ticket which was purchased just two days before travel. Nearly all airlines publish advance purchase and promotional fares which are very cheap however one also needs to make sure their travel plans are confirmed as most of these fares are very restrictive or non-refundable.

 

 

 

  • Use low-cost carriers: – Low-cost carriers are airlines which have adopted a cost-centric method of operation. Such airlines do not offer facilities of a full-service airline, however, are extremely effective if you are trying to save money. Low-cost carriers primarily operate small fuel-efficient aircraft and provide you options to select services which you want to be included, Most low-cost carriers do not allow free seating, food and charge a fee for every service offered. You can choose to pre-book a seat or you can let the airline allow you to assign a seat upon check-in. Many low-cost carriers even charge fees for checking in at the airport however web check-in is free. Using a low-cost carrier compared to a full-service airline can prove to be cost-effective.

 

Some of the major low-cost carriers.

Southwest Airlines- Within the United States

Jet Blue-Within United States

Westjet-Within US and Canada

Easy jet-Within Europe

Flydubai-Middle East

Air Arabia-Middle East

Ryan Air-UK and Europe

Air Asia-South Asia and South East Asia

Indigo-India and Southeast asia.

Tiger Air-South East Asia

Azul Brazilian Airlines-Brazil

 

 

  • Deal fares: – Deal fares are discounted fares offered by travel agencies to its customers. Nowadays many online travel agents offer deal fares which are relatively cheaper compared to fare offered by airlines it. Deal fares are mostly procured by the travel agency from the airlines on the basis of high sales volume, the agencies receive a discount from the airline on the promise of selling more tickets of a particular airline and out of this discount the agent offers a part discount to the end customer making the fare slightly cheaper than the market fare. However, most of the deal fares come with stringent terms and conditions and have a high penalty in case of changes or cancellations.

 

  • Redeye flights/Odd timings: – Another method to save some money on flight tickets is by opting flights on odd times or red-eye flights; however this concept applies only to places which are well connected and have multiple flights throughout the day. You may have noticed that flights departing in the morning or in the evening are highly priced compared to flights which are at odd hours like a red-eye flight(midnight) or flights which leave in the afternoon. The costs of these flights are always comparatively cheaper compared to flights operating during peak hours.

 

 

  • Weekend flights/weekday flights: – Many of us may not know this but flight tickets on weekends would always cost you more compared to weekdays. All airlines have weekend fares which are always slightly bumped up as all airlines expect high sales volumes during weekends. In case you are planning a weekend trip you need to ensure its planned well in advance to get best fares, the ideal time would be at least 21days before the scheduled date of travel.

 

  • Minimum/Maximum stay :- These is one of the factors that people from non-travel background are completely unaware of. Minimum and maximum stay requirements are fare rules which are levied on most cheap fares. You may notice that fare for a short trip is always a lot expensive than fare for a trip of more than a week. Most of the airlines are aware that most people on business do not stay for long in a particular city and hence need a day or two and hence to benefit from this situation the airlines keep a clause of minimum stay on all cheap fares. If you are planning a trip say for three days try and extend the same by a day earlier or later and see if the fare comes out to be cheaper. You will notice that you will save almost 1/3rd to 1/4th of the cost by just leaving the night earlier or taking a next day flight.

 

 

  • Avoid buying a last minute ticket at the airport: – This is one of the biggest misconceptions that most people have. Most of the airlines throughout the globe follow a first come first serve concept which means earlier book its more than likely you will get a cheaper fare, It was possible earlier to a very small extent that you may end up getting a cheaper flight ticket at the airport due to no-show passengers and some cancellations but this is no longer much of a possibility as most of the airline reservation systems are advanced and determine the fare which would be most profitable for the airlines. For eg :- If Sam purchased a ticket 3 months back for $ 300 however due to some problems he had to cancel his reservations 4hrs before the flight. To fill up the vacant seat the airline will sell this ticket over the counter at the airport but not at the same price as 3months back the system will calculate the highest fare applicable at that time which may be say $ 1500.There are also high chances that a person may not calculate much and would actually purchase the ticket as he is already packed for travel and actually end up paying more.

 

  • Confirm your plans: – Always ensure that you have correct dates and confirm tickets in advance only and only if you have confirmed plans. Most of the tickets on all major airlines are competitively priced however changing a reservation or cancelling a ticket can prove to be a costly affair. For eg :- You have purchased a ticket 100 days before your scheduled plan and suddenly you notice just 10days ahead of your travel the date you booked is incorrect. In such a scenario you will have to amend the ticket for same a penalty would be levied plus there would be an applicable fare difference since the price you paid for 90days before was much lower than the current price as most of the seats would be sold out and the currently applicable fare would apply. Hence if you are trying to take advantage of advance purchase always have confirmed plans.

 

 

We hope you will like this article and try and implement above measures and save a considerable amount on your flights. We are always looking forward to hearing from you,in case if you have any suggestions you may write to us at admin@talearnings.com, Until then goodbye and happy travels.

 

 

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Ever wondered what are those codes you see at airport ?

 

 

Travel has become an integral part of our lives and we travel for varying reasons from work related to leisure travel. They say travel can be an experience in itself since the amount of things you learn and see by travelling to places and knowing people can never be experienced by simply learning something in theory. We all travel to airports and you may have noticed at airports and while booking for flights most of the cities, airlines and airports are denoted by codes. Ever wondered what these codes are? We will try and explain what these codes exactly are and how they work.

The codes that you see are codes which are designated by ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) to various cities, airport, and airlines to facilitate ease of operations. The frequently used coding system can be divided into two parts airport/city codes and airline codes.

 

City/Airport Codes :- The Coding system can into existence in the 1930’s in the United States, prior to 1930 travel industry employees used two-letter National weather system codes to denote cities, however, this in following years became very difficult to manage and there was a need for a more reliable system hence the 3 letter coding system came into existence. For a normal person, the coding system may seem like a useless hassle, however, the coding system has solved a number of problems for the airline industry and travellers alike. The coding system has become even more relevant in today’s modern world as the airline industry today is completely globalized and we can travel from one corner of the earth to another in a matter of hours. Also, the numbers of cities that are connected by air travel have truly skyrocketed. Imagine if there was no coding system and you had to travel from Houston to Birmingham. Some people may not know this there are two Birmingham’s and both have an airport. The only issue is one is in Alabama, the US and the other is across the Atlantic in the UK. Although we may assume that the traveller may mention the country while booking, however, there is a high chance that something may go wrong like the baggage ending up at the wrong place or the worst scenario would be travelling to an unintentional country. Birmingham was a simple example, imagine if you were travelling to San Jose, there are at least 9 cities with the same name and there is a high possibility that you may book yourself to Bolivia instead of California that would be certainly a different experience. Here is where the coding system becomes significant the code for Birmingham Alabama is BHM whereas for Birmingham UK is BHX so now we can easily decipher where we want to travel and it is easily understood for baggage sorting department to tag your baggage to the correct destination.

Now some of you may be wondering how do they derive at these codes, Well most of the derivation is quite simple like for example the airport code for Atlanta is ATL the first three letters of the city that’s easy right but then why is Minneapolis MSP and not MIN well because there are two reasons, number one MSP stands for Minneapolis and St Paul together and the other being there is a city airport in Australia by that code. Likewise, there are cities with multiple airports like Houston which has two airports Hobby which was built earlier is HOU resembling the first three letters and IAH which stands for Bush Intercontinental airport which was built later. Similarly, there are airport codes which are completely different from their current name as some cities were renamed after the airport codes were implemented and since they could not change the airport code as per the new name the original airport code stayed. One of the prime examples of such a city in St.Petersburg in Russia its airport code is LED which is nowhere close to St.Ptersburg and neither L or D is present in the word Petersburg however since the city earlier was known as Leningrad after Lenin (not john) the city airport code is LED and not PET or something similar.

Likewise below are a few more cities with unusual names.

(extract taken from wikipedia)

 

I hope this has been helpful to you and has simplified your doubts on airport codes. If you want to know more city codes we recommend you go to the source itself https://www.iata.org/publications/Pages/code-search.aspx

Shortly we will be back with another article soon until then goodbye and please keep on commenting and coming back for more information on travel, we will keep on deciphering more interesting things for you as always. If you find time do like us on Facebook if you have information or pictures or want to share something on travel you may write to us at admin@talearnings.com and we will post it on your website if it works.

 

 

 

 

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Ammeding/Reissuing a reservation

In this section, we will see how to make changes to an existing reservation. Making changes to an existing reservation requires a certain level of expertise as one has to take into consideration all the fare rules before making any changes to a reservation. Besides the penalty applicable there are other fare clauses such as minimum and maximum stay, advance purchase, blackout dates, etc this basic fare rules must be taken into consideration before reissuing a ticket. In case an agent by mistake does not apply a certain fare rule he may end up getting a debit meme or ADM from the airline. Hence it is vital that one needs to pay attention to detail while reissuing a ticket.

Below are steps that you need to take for reissuing a ticket.

Reissues are mainly of two types when a ticket is fully unutilized and when a ticket is partly utilized. Partly used ticket re-issuance requires a fair bit of experience as there are a number of factors that need to be taken into consideration. We will start with the most basic and simplest form of a reissue known as an even exchange of fully unused ticket.

Scenario 1) Fully unused ticket.

This is a reissue scenario where the ticket is fully unutilized by the traveler and traveler decides to change his plan before the scheduled date of departure.

In below image, you will see Mr.Smith is scheduled to travel from Mumbai to Dubai on 15th of October and return a month later on 15th of November. However, due to some personal reasons, he has decided to change his reservation.

Step 1 -Check penalties.

The very first step you need to do before reissuing a ticket is to check for fare rules applicable to changing the ticket. If you notice the ticket was issued on 11th of may 2017 hence we will have to check fare rules as per that date. The command to check fare rules from a pnr for a past date is as below.

FQ.T11MAY17

Fare Quote display as per ticketing date 11th may 17.

Below is the fare that will be displayed as per the  date of issuance.Now you can check for fare rules as per the date of issuance.Below is the command to check for fare rules.

FQN

Fare quote notes.

Upon entering the FQN command you will see two fare components and fare basis of the itinerary booked.

To check for fare rules for a particular component you will need to enter below command.

In this case since we are changing the inbound sector we will enter below command.

FN2/16

Fare notes 2 and rule no 16 (for penalties)

Once you enter this command you will notice fare rule for applicable penalties are displayed.In this case it says changes are permitted.Hence no penalties would be applicable for changes.

Step 2-Make changes to itinerary

Now that you know what are the penalties you will proceed further to make changes to your existing reservation.To make changes you will need to first sell a new seat or hold a new seat for the requested date.In this case since the traveler  wants to travel on 10th of December instead of 15th of November we shall check availability for the 10th of December.

A10DECDXBBOM*EK

Once you check for availability you can now sell a seat on requested flight.In above example traveler would like to travel on the 930 am flight hence we book the 930 am flight and cancel off the flight on 15th of November.

Command for cancelling the unwanted flight is as below.

X2

Cancel line number 2 .

Once you cancel the unwanted segment you will see now there are only two segments instead of 3.

Step 3 -Saving/Modifying Fare for reissue.

Now that you have checked for penalties and cancelled unwanted itinerary further we will save a fare and modify it to reissue the ticket.

Since this is a fully un-utilized ticket we will save a fare as per the current date  hence to price we will do the normal fare quote command FQ and save the fare quote.

Once you save the fare quote you will have to remove the taxes since most of the taxes are already paid in the previous ticket that we purchased.If there are any additional taxes you applied you will need to add them. Since we are modifying the fare by removing taxes now we will enter below command.

*FB1

Display Fare build for fare filed no 1

Once you enter  *FB1 command you will see a mask similar to the contents of a ticket opens up. We can make changes to this mask as per requirement. Since this is a reissue we will first start off with removing taxes that are already paid and later will add the penalty applicable.

The command to Remove the taxes is as below.

FBUTAX1/

Fare build updated tax1 as blank which will remove the taxes.

You can also string these entries together with plus sign in case of multiple taxes.In below example since there are 8 taxes involved you can run the same entry 8 times or you can choose to string FBUTAX1/+TAX2/+TAX3/ ….

Once you enter this command you will notice all the taxes would be removed and only the base fare will be displayed. To check the fare build again you can enter command *FB (display fare build)

If you notice carefully you will see a verify total appears next to TTL figure and all taxes are blank. This is because the total still displays the fare including taxes which you have removed.To tally the fare hence you do a command FBUTTL/,however before you do that you can enter a penalty that needs to be collected in case there is no penalty you can simply do FBUTTL/.

In below example there is a penalty applicable.Hence we will first add the penalty and later on enter the command to tally the total.

FBUTAX1/150OD

Fare build update to tax1  amount 150 as per ticket issuance country and tax code is OD for penalties.(penalty tax code varies from airline to airline and you can check for the penalty code with respective airline).

Once you enter the penalty command you will notice the system replies with a confirmation that data has been accepted.But if you go back to the fare build mask you will notice the verify total exists hence we will need to tally the total figure by entering below command.

FBUTTL/

Once you enter the FBUTTL/ command the system automatically tally’s the fare and taxes and now the verify total won’t be highlighted next to the total.

Now that you have entered the penalty and tallied the fare now we need to file it. Command to file a modified fare is as below.

FBF

Fare build filed

In case there are multiple passengers you can enter FBFALL, this command copies same build fare for all the passengers if priced in one fare file.

Fare build for all. (make it a practice to enter FBFALL//not applicable in case there is a child or an infant in the reservation.)

Now that you have checked for rules, changed itinerary and modified fare the final step is to reissue the ticket.

Step 4-Exchanging Ticket.

The fourth and final step in the process of amendment is exchanging the ticket. This is the final step in which the fare and taxes from earlier ticket along with applicable penalty will be applied to purchase a new ticket hence the form of payment will be as an exchange.

Below is the command to exchange a ticket.

TMU1FEX1765316395573

Ticket modifiers update for filed fare 1 form of payment as exchange and ticket number.

On entering the above command a mask will open up as below in image 1, this mask is the first step in exchanging the ticket. If you observe the mask it is similar to a ticket. Details of previous ticketed fare filed and current reissued fare filed is compared in this mask. In this example, you will notice  New fare is displayed on this very first line and the fare of new fare filed is displayed next to the total value. In this case, the new fare and old fare is the same, next you need to enter the form of payment that was used for the previous ticket in below example we have entered “s” which stands for cash. It can be a credit card or invoice or anything else. After you have entered all the details you can press enter to go to next screen. To go to next screen there is a small dot that we have pointed out next to the arrow. Get the cursor to the tab and hit enter.(please note this is all cryptic hence you can use the mouse and keep the insert key off at all times). Once you hit enter the system will take you to the next screen for taxes.

Exchange image 1 and 2In this screen you will see all the taxes that were paid for the earlier ticket, there is nothing much to do on this mask screen. (Unless its a second reissued where some taxes may be merged as XT. In case XT appears as one of the tax you will need to provide bifurcation of the tax as per original ticket issued) In this example, this is the first reissue of the ticket hence all the taxes are auto picked up by the system itself. You can verify all the taxes on the previous ticket and click on the dot at the end of the mask to move to the next screen.

Below the screen is the final step in the process of reissue. In this screen, you will notice at the top the total amount that you will need to pay to the airline for amending the ticket. (this excludes your mark up if any), In this particular example, we have collected a penalty of AED 150 for reissuing the ticket and form of payment as an invoice. On this page, you will see three blank lines tab to the first line and enter your desired form of payment. In case its cash type cash or invoice type invoice or for card type credit card number in credit card format.

Once you enter the desired form of payment and press enter you will see above message as ticket modifiers updated. Now save all the entries and modification you have done to the reissue mask.

Once you have saved all your modifications just cross verify once and enter the final command. (same command for issuing the ticket )

TKPDTDAD or TKP or TKPDTD

Once you enter the above command you will notice a new document is generated.

If you observe the second image you will notice the first ticket was issued for the total cost of 4655 and the reissued ticket at 150. The reissue is complete and you can email the ticket to the traveller.

Below are a few more commands and steps for reissue which will help you to reissue a ticket better.

We will soon be updating our modules with various other methods and scenarios of reissuing the ticket. If you have any queries or suggestions do let us know.We Hope all this information will prove useful in your pursuit oa f successful career in the travel industry. Till then goodbye and happy learning.

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Replicate PNR

Replicating PNR is a functionality which allows the user to copy details of a reservation. This functionality is useful when making reservations for the same traveller on a different date of travel. This command saves a considerable amount of time hence is one of the most useful commands.

Below are various commands which you can use to replicate a reservation.

Command to copy all the details.

R.R 

REALLSALL

To copy a reservation first enter the received from command followed by the REALLY ALL command to copy all details.

If you observe the second screen all the details including name contact field and itinerary are copied however a pnr number is not generated and reservation is not saved. Hence one needs to update ticketing time limit which is absent and end the reservation.

T.T*

ER

Once you add ticketing time limit and end the reservation you will see a PNR is generated.

Now in a scenario when you only need to copy the itinerary details you can enter RESALL command instead of using the above REALLSALL command.

The RESALL command will only copy the itinerary of the reservation.

In above example, you will see only the itinerary (flight information) is copied.

Similarly, in case you need to copy the all the details except for flight information, we can enter a command as below and then sell a new itinerary as per requirement.

R.R

REALL

If you see above example you will notice on entering the REALL command,  Only Name field, Received from and phone field has been copied.

This covers this module and we hope you have found this module useful.