The one form
What the Fare Lookup Is
One form on this whole site goes anywhere outside it. It stands on the front page and nowhere else. This page is the long version of what it does: who runs it, what leaves the browser when it is submitted, what it refuses, and what Tallyhouse earns.
Why it stands on the front page and nowhere else
A catalogue of walls with a fare form stapled to every page would be a shop that had hired a writer. The arrangement here runs the other way: one form, on the page a reader arrives at, and none at all on the pages that do the work of the publication.
Open any of the eight entries or any of the four articles: no form, no figure, no button, nothing to press. That takes a reader about ten seconds to confirm and it is the only assurance worth anything.
Whose form this is
The booking service's. It runs on a subdomain, and submitting the fields hands a reader over to it: after that moment its own terms and its own notice about data are the ones that apply, not the ones on this domain.
Seats, tickets, payments, changes, cancellations and refunds all sit on that side of the line. Tallyhouse LLC holds none of them, receives no money from a reader for any of them, and has no standing to alter one. No page of this site contains a field for a card, and no reader has ever paid Tallyhouse anything.
What leaves the browser when the form is submitted
Exactly what was typed into it, and nothing else:
| Field | Goes to the service |
|---|---|
| Departure and destination | Yes, as three letter codes chosen from the list the field offers |
| Outbound date, and return if there is one | Yes |
| Class of service | Yes |
| Adults, children in a seat, infants held | Yes |
| Anything else at all | No |
Nothing else can go with it, for a dull reason: none of it exists. There is no reader identity kept here, no record of which pages were opened, and no path at all between the letter form on contact and this one. The two never meet, in the browser or afterwards.
What the form refuses
A date that has gone by is refused. Not because of a technical limit, but because a fare cannot be looked up backwards and this publication has no interest in a journey somebody has already taken.
A place typed but not chosen is refused. The departure and destination have to be picked from the list the field offers, so that a real code goes to the service rather than a spelling. A field that quietly guessed would be worse than one that says no.
It also checks the two dates against each other and refuses a return that falls before the departure, refuses a date further ahead than the packed query can express, refuses a departure and a destination that name the same place, and refuses passenger counts it cannot carry: more than nine in seats, or an infant held with no adult to hold it.
Every one of those happens in the browser, with a plain message beside the button, on the front page where the form stands.
What is not claimed here
That the fares shown are the lowest available anywhere. This publication has no way to know that and does not check.
That every airline or every agency is included. Neither is true of any lookup of this kind.
That any carrier is recommended. None is named on this site, here or anywhere else in it.
The one arrangement
A booking made after using this form may earn Tallyhouse LLC a commission. It is paid by the booking service and not by the reader, at no extra cost to the reader, whose fare is the same either way. One arrangement, and the only one. How this is paid for goes through it slowly, names the temptation it creates, and shows the four structural things that hold that temptation off.