Travel cost estimator

Produce a defensible trip estimate from live fares and rates, not guesses, and present it so the user can forward or approve it in seconds.

The estimate has two halves. Flights and hotels come from the corporate booking tool. Ground transport, meals, and parking are not in the booking tool, so they get benchmarked against what the user has actually been reimbursed before.

HARD GUARDRAIL — read this first

The corporate booking tool is a live booking system. Real money, real tickets, real change fees, real non-refundable segments.

You are here to search and price only.

Never click: Continue past fare selection · Select hotel into a booking funnel · Book · Reserve · Hold · Confirm · anything on a traveller-details or payment page.

Reading fares off a results page is safe — results and the booking funnel are separate pages, and the results page is where you stop. That line is the whole guardrail.

If a flow ever lands on a page showing traveller details, payment fields, or a confirm button: stop immediately, do not click anything, and tell the user where you are. Do not try to navigate back out by clicking through.

Every estimate you produce must state "Nothing booked." explicitly.

Step 0 — establish the traveller's preferences

Before the first search, confirm (or reuse from a previous run):

Do not assume a home airport from the user's city — many metros have several, and the wrong one silently produces a plausible, useless number.

Record these preferences so later runs skip this step, but re-confirm the dates every time.

Step 1 — reach the booking tool

Use the company's SSO entry point for the booking tool (commonly a corporate shortlink or an intranet tile) so the existing session is reused.

Two failure modes worth knowing:

1. Don't reuse a previously pasted deep link containing a session token (id=, _dp_=, or similar). These are session-scoped and expire, and the symptom is misleading — you land on a generic "Cookies are disabled" error rather than a session-expired message. Go back to the clean entry point.
2. Don't use the vendor's direct login URL. It presents a username/password form with no SSO path. Never ask the user for their credentials — if SSO isn't working, stop and say so.

Step 2 — price the flight

Navigate to the flight search. The DOM patterns below are typical of enterprise booking portals (Cytric/Amadeus, and similar Concur/Egencia-family tools) and will save a lot of wasted time:

1. Origin and destination are comboboxes, not text inputs.

await page.getByRole('combobox', { name: /arrival location/i }).click();
await page.keyboard.type('Orlando');
await page.waitForTimeout(3500);           // suggestion lookup is server-side and slow
await page.getByRole('option', { name: /Orlando International \(MCO\)/i }).click();

Pick the airport option, not the city option. Metro-area city entries (e.g. a city code covering several fields) resolve to a different, less useful inventory set for air search.

2. Airline filter is another combobox — type the carrier, click the option, then press Escape to close the dropdown. Leaving it open blocks the search button.

3. Date fields are hidden inputs behind a calendar widget. Clicking the visible date label opens a date picker that is awkward and flaky to drive. Set the hidden inputs directly with the native setter and dispatch the events the framework listens for:

await page.evaluate(({ depart, ret }) => {
  function setVal(name, value) {
    const el = document.querySelector(`input[name="${name}"]`);
    if (!el) return;
    const setter = Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(

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