arods3

I'm not sure if this is a AA forum question of experflyer.
I searched several dates DFW-NRT and no C class is available for months out. on maybe a rare day you get a C1 or C2 at most.

If you see there are C0, whats the next best thing to look out once they open up withing 24-72hrs out. J7? A? ect...

Another question is, is there a way to search if there is any C class available for the month? I don't care for a date to fly on rather seeing if the seat is available.

slickvik

I got 3 false positives today on Copa. I got another one recently as well.

ExpertFlyer Voice

You're going to have to be a little more specific or email us the details. We know Copa had a problem with their reservation system yesterday/today, I'd try the search again.

slickvik

Basically I got an alert saying three flights opened up but then when I went to book they didn't really exist. Oh well.

TWA884

Posts discussing using AA SWU's on BA flights were moved to the British Airways | Executive Club forum.

TWA884
Travel Tools Moderator

nwflyboy

Sure they do.

I've double-checked and triple-checked all details. They are all correct and they absolutely do match a scheduled flight.

Maybe the error message is poorly written and not technically correct (I suspect that's the case).
Maybe the service does not provide what I'm looking for (I'll be super-disappointed).
Maybe it's user error (could be!).
Maybe it's all of the above (tsk tsk).

I'm trying to set a "Flight Alert" for an American Airlines flight in late September 2017.
My initial goal is to be alerted when any seats for this flight load into the AA system.
My secondary goal is to watch for "U" class (Business Saver) seats when they load.
I'm setting up a "Flight Alert" (well, trying to...) with the correct departing & arriving airports, the departure date, the airline and U class code. I've entered all these values correctly.
Yet when I click "Verify and Create", it coughs up the error: "The flight details provided do not match any scheduled flight."

That is not a true statement.

The flight is indeed scheduled. The details I'm plugging in are correct. AA is selling seats on that flight today, right now - I go to their website, it offers to sell me seats. It is most certainly a "scheduled flight."

Now, admittedly, inventory for seats on this "scheduled" flight (which has been scheduled for months) just loaded today (within the past hour or two). If I try to set up the same search for the same flight tomorrow and the next day (which is what I really want - today was just a test run), that inventory is not yet loaded into AA's system, but the flights tomorrow and the next day are definitely scheduled.

Now, although I think there's something broken about the error message I keep getting, I'm more interested in results, so here's my question:

I'm trying to set an alert (so I can be notified, immediately) when award seats load for flights that are around or just barely beyond the 330-day inventory window. I want to be alerted, immediately, tomorrow and the next day, when EF sees inventory loaded for the flight I'm targeting. How do I accomplish that?

Setting a "flight alert" for the flight seems to be failing (because EF doesn't recognize the flight's date as valid - even though it is).

???

ExpertFlyer Voice

You didn't post any flight information or date so we can't help you. However if that message shows it means that the flight doesn't show up in either the Flight Availability or Flight Details results (that's what verification looks at), which means it is not loaded in the reservation system. Until the flight shows in the reservation system, it is not actually scheduled there and we can't create an alert for a flight that we can't see.

Just because you believe a flight will be scheduled (for a flight greater than 331 days out), doesn't mean it is or will be on the schedule. Until it actually exists in the reservation system, it doesn't exist yet.

Once your flight shows in the reservation system then you can create an alert for it. If the flight does show in the Flight Availability results, you can also just create the Flight Alert from there. If you need further help then email us at customercare@ with the exact flight information, as we see you haven't sent us an email, which you should do first if you think there is a technical issue.

nwflyboy

Thanks for the reply.

Of course, I'm not going to post the details of the flight I'm looking for here. Too few available seats, too much demand, and it's already hard enough getting good seats, the last thing I need is to inspire another dozen FTers to go try and grab the seats I want. I'm happy to send details via email.

Ah, interesting. So it would seem to me that we were working from different definitions of what it means for a flight to be "scheduled". To me, the fact that an airline says "this flight operates every day through <some date>" means that flight is scheduled (until their specified date). That seemed like a reasonable interpretation to me, perhaps to others also. Your interpretation of "scheduled" means something else: it's in the airline's reservation system (presumably with their inventory loaded, and they're selling tickets), so by that definition no flight can ever be considered "scheduled" by EF if it's 331 days out (or some other number, depending on the system used), even if that flight has been going, unchanged, for years. Maybe my expectations are unrealistic, but if other might interpret it the same way, it might be worth clarifying how the term is used by EF in one of your Help or FAQ docs (which I did peruse).

And there's the crux of the matter: what I was hoping for and expecting, was to have EF ping me as soon as the flight inventory loads - which is (I think) EF's definition of "scheduled". That's a limitation I wasn't expecting, but it makes sense (it's not what I want, but I understand the reason behind it).

So I'll add this as a feature request: I'd love to have the ability to create an alert for an existing, "scheduled" flight, but for future dates that are outside the current schedule. I'll leave whether that's easy/hard/impossible/worthwhile up to you, but it seems all that would be required would be some simple date manipulation logic for the query you're running (I know, easy for me to say). I can easily imagine use cases for this (and would share them if needed).

Thanks.

ExpertFlyer Voice

Then in the future please email us first instead of posting to EF so we can help you the best way possible.


Regarding what is "scheduled", you may anticipate what flights may operate on a day not yet scheduled by an airline based on history, but we don't make assumptions like that. We won't schedule an alert for a flight that doesn't yet exist as we don't want someone to be able to inadvertently create an alert for a flight that may never actually exist. We don't want to create the impression that we are checking for inventory on a non-existent flight nor incur the cost of doing so (each search/alert check has a cost to us). This will not change.

Yes we understand you want to create an alert as soon as a flight appears in the schedule, however that would be an entirely different animal than anything we offer today. However since you know when a flight should appear in the schedule, you can create the alert then.

In the future we may introduce non-flight specific alerts, which may allow you to schedule alert checks beyond the published schedule, however until if/when such a feature exists we would will allow creation of alerts for flights that aren't officially scheduled yet.

-EFV

NYEsq

My apologies if this has already been discussed - I tried searching for (what I thought were) key words in this thread, but didn't come up with any hits.

Has anyone had any luck using EF (in some way) to search for "all gateway cities" at once? As in, searching for all possible US gateways from London on AA (i.e. searching JFK, PHL, CLT, RDU, ORD, LAX, DFW) all at once?

chongl

Having issues with Lufthansa award search. I verified via miles and more search that seats are available on a random day 2 weeks in the future. However, EF is not showing that particular flight which is direct.

ExpertFlyer Voice

As is noted at the top of the results page for an Lufthansa award search:

If you have a question about a particular search/flight, then email us directly.

chongl

Sorry...I missed that. User error

Grouchy

Confused why the same Delta coded - KLM operated flight (DL 9489- KL0449) is showing different Z inventory.
Is it because there is no Z inventory on DL 126?

psbaj

I'm experiencing some difficult to use the award search for Alitalia. I'm looking for GRU to LHR on December and I get: One or more of your requests could not be fulfilled. Please see below for details.
Sometimes it work but I get the error most of the time.