How to book this complex multi carrier roundtrip flight I found on ITA?

Question

I am trying to book a roundtrip ticket from Chicago O'hare (ORD) to Mumbai, India (BOM). Traveling on Aug 9th and returning on Aug 24th. Now, I've been looking for several days (almost 10days!) for ways to book this itinerary I found on ITA. All other websites like Expedia, Kayak, Travelocity, Momondo, RouteHappy, and even google flights are quoting around $1200 roundtrip cost, sometimes as low as $1150. But the ITA Matrix website shows me several options, the lowest is $916 roundtrip.

You can see there are several flights in the $900 range.

For the return trip there is only one option to get the low price.

Selecting the flights this is what I get:

I'm not sure how to use the fare codes the ITA website provides to purchase this itinerary.

These are some of the things I have tried to book the complex multi-carrier flight from ITA:

My first method was to try coding into HIPMUNK, using the multi-city option, my departure, connections, airlines flights number and dates. Following this method: http://maphappy.org/2013/10/book-google-ita-matrix-flights-using-hipmunk/

And the results page:

Here's what my code into HIPMUNK looks like:

ORD::LH9151 FRA LH756 for the first journey and

BOM::LX155 ZRH SN5104 BRU SN8803 for the return trip.

Don't think I'm making any mistakes in coding it, but there are two adjustments I also made which failed:

1. I used the dates of the first leg of the flight then tried using the other dates as well. So for example Aug 9th and Aug 10th.

2. I used the codes for the operating carriers and when it didn't work, the marketing carrier leaving the flight number unchanged.

This always returned no results. Breaking up the itinerary to just the oneway from ORD to BOM worked but gave me a price of $624. For some reason the second return trip was creating problems. I tried breaking he return trip down into different segments but no luck. Anyone knows why the return trip is creating difficulties? Coding issues/ hipmunk doesn't have such a large database?

Then I tried method 2: Calling up the airlines

United was able to find all the segments, even price it correctly sometimes (sometimes not) and gave me a confirmation number. I was to call them in 12hrs to check if they were able to procure the seats but when I did call they were not able to get the seats for the SWISS flight from BOM to ZRH and/or from ZRH to BRU. I've tried this at least 5 times changing small things everytime, but the same result. It seems Lufthansa waits for SWISS to confirm the seats but SWISS doesn't respond in time and I'm not able to book.

I tried calling Lufthansa but they were not even able to find the segments and instead told me to look at booking online where I will be able to find it cheaper.

Any insights into the methods that failed or suggestions on how to book this itinerary at the $900 price will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I was able to take to the booking stage that exact route at the time on Orbitz for just about the same price ($7 more only).

Answer 2

The easiest way to do is -- and has been for a few years now -- is the bookwithmatrix service, independent of ITA Matrix/Google. You just "select all" the text on the last page of ITA Matrix and copy-paste the whole thing into this site, it'll do the rest.

Simplifying the process, there's a chrome extension and a firefox extension.