Stale Availability / Offer Expired Troubleshooting

An offer expiring between search and reprice is not always a bug, but unclear freshness contracts and missing revalidation quickly create bad UX and conversion loss.

Symptom

A selected search result becomes unavailable at reprice, a supplier token expires, inventory disappears, or cached price/availability is behind the provider.

Possible causes

Long cache TTLs, ignored expiry metadata, long traveler dwell time, volatile inventory, short-lived provider tokens or skipped revalidation.

Diagnosis

Inspect offer observedAt/expiry, measure search-to-reprice delay, compare cache age with provider timestamps, retest provider tokens, separate price freshness from availability freshness and calculate provider-level stale rates.

Recovery

Do not force an expired offer through booking. Re-shop or reprice into a new offer and explicitly present changed price/policy to the traveler.

Prevention

Use explicit offer expiry, provider-specific TTLs, mandatory revalidation, refresh for long-dwell sessions, stale-offer guards and targeted cache invalidation.

Observability

Track offer age, expired-at-reprice rate, unavailable-after-select rate, provider stale rate, search-to-reprice dwell time and refresh success.