Originally Posted by
opus2002
KVS vs Award Nexus vs Expertflyer. Which one is better? I will mainly use it for award tickets. I guess the CO one is good already, so Star Alliance is taken cared of. The Oneworld and Skyteam alliances are where I plan to use this. For example, getting CX flights on AA or BA miles to Asia.
Originally Posted by
sbm12
I'd sign up for a QF account and see if you don't mind just using the interface directly for the award searching. It has some quirks but I find it quite useful and reasonably easy. And it is free.
For Oneworld alliance searches the QF/BA/JL website award searches, all are free, and all are available via AwardNexus which has a free version for FT members. ExpertFlyer has AA/QF award & upgrade searching (full current list of supported award search airlines here:
http://www.expertflyer.com/sessionlessClassList.do) which as you can see includes many SkyTeam airlines as well. ExpertFlyer also has a 5-day free trial so feel free to sign up and see if we can help.
Remember that with KVS and AwardNexus you're paying for the interface, not the data. The data is freely available out there directly if you know where to look.
Are these charts still accurate since the loss of the Sabre/GTC search method?? My recollection is that a number of the award searches were based on that.
Correct. ExpertFlyer has direct access to the airline reservation systems (GDSs) which allows us to show unique data and offer services like Flight Availability and Seat Alerts. It also means that ExpertFlyer isn't subject to the limitations of the sources that other services may screen scrape from. For example "Sabre:FS", which is really FlightStats.com which is free, doesn't show AA availability and doesn't show any flight data beyond 299 days in the future. ExpertFlyer shows both.