Originally Posted by
Geoflying
Just bought one year premium service subscription and overall I am pretty happy with it.
There is one slight disappointment though. I created some flight alerts for upgrade space availability. I found that they seem to be seriously delayed which rather reduces their effectiveness.
As a specific example, I had created one for R space reducing below 4 on AC 8, 9 Jan 2015. At T-15 days (0650am EST, Dec 25th - the point where the upgrade availability window opened) it was still showing R4 and I successfully booked an upgrade, as apparently did a few others. It dropped immediately to R1. I did not get an alert until 1202pm that day - 5 hours and 12 minutes later. If alerts are to be useful they really need to be more timely. I had experienced similar delays with other alerts but did not record the precise details.
I do appreciate that polling the database frequently for data about which alerts are set can be somewhat resource intensive but >5 hours delay is rather too much I feel.
Also, why does point of sale on Flight Availability searches include only US and UK? This seems rather nonsensical for, as an example, Canadian domestic flights.
Thanks for listening.
Hi
Geoflying, welcome to ExpertFlyer. Correct the alerts are not constantly checked, as noted up thread and in our FAQ, the alerts are checked several times a day, however they are checked more and more often the closer it gets to the date/time of departure. We have to balance efficacy with cost as each search and alert check in ExpertFlyer has a cost to us. The idea behind the alerts is that we check when you don't have time to. If you are going to constantly check yourself then you could find the inventory before the next scheduled check of the alert.
The POS options are the only ones available to us as we would need a business presence in a different country to get a POS for that country. That being said, a Canada and USA POS are usually identical.