Originally Posted by jdyorke
Hello all,
I'm looking at an itinery LHR>JFK>LHR early July. I am finding that EF shows O7, Q7, N7 etc availability yet when I look on AA.com I see that the cheapest fare I can book is H and cheaper classes are suddenly unavailable as of today.
Since you didn't mention what your return date is it's hard to say for sure, but those O/Q/N fares require a weekend stay and a round-trip ticket. If you do a Fare Information search on EF you'll see that those fares only show up when you put in a depart and return date that spans a weekend, if they don't, or don't put in any return date, the cheapest fare will be an H fare, which matches what AA.com is telling you.
Originally Posted by hillrider
Yes. They're not displaying tickets, they're displaying inventory. Airline pricing is a very complex subject; I suggest you study EF's FAQs
Exactly. The available inventory is meaningless without a matching, valid, fare to go with it. Also an airline may make inventory in a given fare class available not because there is a valid fare for it on that route, but because it's needed so that that particular segment can be part of a larger trip. You have to look at both.
Originally Posted by JDiver
One scenario I could imagine is the timeline for the advance purchase (or some other condition) came and went, but EF hadn't updated yet. EF data are not in real time, as EF updates periodically.
That's actually not the case. EF gets its information in real time from the airline reservation system, as it's requested from our users. We don't store or cache anything. The airline reservation systems in turn get their information in real time from the AA host (Flight Availability, Awards & Upgrades, Seat Maps). Fares (Fare Information, Fare Rules, and Fare Routing Rules) are published by the airlines to the reservation systems on a fixed schedule 3 times a day. When the reservation systems get the fare updates, so do we.
-EFV