Originally Posted by
azeckel
Basic questions - forgive my naivete. I'm trying to figure out if the value of this tool for my particular needs is greater than the cost (and at what level I would need to "contribute" should I chose to do so).
I used to use EF every couple of weeks to look at fare bucket availability for DL flights in the continental US. Not partner availability, but DL marketed flights. I'm sad that it's gone. Does this tool offer that sort of visibility? Like Y9 B9 M9 Q4 H0.... type of stuff? I would use this info to find SDC opportunities, respond to IROPS, etc.
Probably once or twice a year it might be nice to use a tool like this to look for DL awards (again primarily in the continental US), but I was never able to use EF for that. Is that something that is available in the KVS Tool?
Two parts to this:
Regular availability: KVS will do what you're asking for, with a couple notes. One, availability is currently only available through the mobile companion (and not available on the desktop app), which requires the highest tier of "membership"/"contribution"/whatever. It is unclear why this availability source is not available on the desktop app, nor has there been any info about getting a source in the app.
The second note on regular availability is that for unspecified reasons, flights in the morning (before a certain hour, I forget which) will not be shown.
As for award availability, just to be clear, KVS doesn't provide a new source of data, it just formats it differently, as it scrapes various websites. Any result you get in KVS for an award search, you can get by finding the appropriate airline website. That said, KVS does provide handy tools like saving searches and multi-day searching (although I couldn't ever seem to get that to work).
tl;dr: yes, and kind of (though both answers have caveats)