Dynamic Travel Policies

Dynamic travel policies, such as allowing bookings at a price 5% above the median, are not applicable in Lanes & Planes.

Many traditional booking platforms cannot handle multimodal (i.e., fully integrated door-to-door travel chains, including taxi and/or public transportation) or intermodal (i.e., comparing train, bus, and flight options in one search) capabilities. However, Lanes & Planes can provide this information and make these comparisons.

If, for example, only flights are offered, dynamic rules (e.g., based on the median) can be used. However, due to the combinatorial complexity, even here rigid rules (even if labeled "dynamic") can have the opposite effect.

In other words, which employer would want their employees to take short or medium-haul flights with two layovers just because it falls within a cheaper median/quantile, or similar? Consequently, one would need to query multidimensional factors (e.g., including duration), and the rule would once again result in the opposite effect due to increased complexity.

Even train searches on traditional booking platforms cannot display complete search results since they (unlike Lanes & Planes) only query specific time intervals rather than the entire day. This often leads to receiving results only from 6:00 am to 10:00 am, for example, and then applying the "dynamic rule" to those results. However, if a cheaper train departs at 10:01 am, which Lanes & Planes considers but traditional providers do not due to the dynamic rate, it becomes a limitation.

Lanes & Planes always displays the full range of travel options and current prices at the moment of the search request. That's why we do not apply dynamic policies.