· 8 min read
The Cheapest Option That Does Not Work: Gate on the Physical Constraint Before You Rank on Price
When a cheap option carries a risk the user cannot see, ranking it first and warning in the fine print puts the trap exactly where trust is highest. Treat every option as a candidate until it proves executable, gate on the physical constraint, and reject silently. On a self-transfer flight product this caught 76 percent of the combinations that could not actually be made, took false-viable connections from 12.4 to 1.9 percent, and raised the share of searches returning the cheapest valid result from 81 to 95.8 percent.