Six entries go and no more. Two of them are airports, the one you push off from and the one you come down at. Two are days, the outward and, where a return is wanted, the way back. The fifth is the class of travel. The sixth is the party, counted across three age bands. They travel alone. Your name stays put. So does any address for electronic mail, any telephone number, and every character you may have entered elsewhere on these pages. The box holds no field capable of receiving such a thing, and it fabricates nothing once your back is turned.
Whose figure comes back
The six entries reach a *reservations company*, a separate firm from this office, answering to a name this domain is lent for the purpose. Every figure it returns is its own and is live at the instant it appears. A seat it holds is held in its system and not in ours. Where a card is called for it is handed over on its pages, this website having no box anywhere built to receive those digits. The ticket is written under its conditions and under nothing set down here.
If a reservation follows, that company pays this office out of its own share on terms agreed with it long before anybody typed anything on this page. It is not added on top of your figure and does not move when you change the fields, so the number quoted to you would read the same had this office never existed.
The two sums that stay in your browser
The line that appears under the fields is worked out where you sit and is sent nowhere at all.
The *first sum is money*, which is the unit this catalogue is indexed in. Eight rungs carry every departure the office sells, and the line multiplies those eight by the number of travelling people in the fields to say what the whole ladder would come to for exactly that party. Land arrangements only. No flight sits in any of those figures, which is the entire reason the box beside them exists. An infant carried on a lap is not counted as a travelling person and the line says so when there is one.
The *second sum is nights*, which is the unit every departure is described in. Two dates give a count, and the line names the rungs that hold a departure of precisely that length, or, when none does, the nearest length the catalogue actually runs. Both sums read the same file the ladder pages are drawn from, so the box and the ladder cannot come apart.
Neither sum is a quotation, and neither is an offer. They restate what is already published on this site, arranged around the numbers you happen to have typed.
The eleven months, and the wall behind them
The two day fields refuse a date already gone and a date more than *eleven months* ahead. That is how far the reservations company can see: airlines load fares roughly eleven months before departure, so behind a date past that there is nothing at all, and a lookup would come back empty and read as a fault on this page. Refusing the date says the true thing instead.
The request form, which runs the other way
The request form is a different instrument working in the opposite direction. It is addressed to this website alone, it never reaches the reservations company, and it exists so that the office can write back to you about a departure. Whatever you enter in one of the two is never handed across to the other, in either direction.