I apologize in advance if this ruffles anyone's feathers -- I'm honestly just frustrated.
After constantly getting references on all of the various travel blogs about how useful Expert Flyer is for finding award seats, I finally took the plunge and decided to subscribe to a Premium membership. I was hoping for something like Matrix--a powerful search engine that would allow me to search for exactly the combination of flights/airlines/etc. that I want--only with the added bonus of showing award availability and setting up alerts....except the site is so clunky and has such limited functionality that it's mostly useless.
(1) No multi-city/open jaw search. The first search I tried was for an upcoming trip to Colombia. I want to go from SNA to Bogota and Cartagena for about a week sometime in February. I don't care about the dates, and I don't care which city I visit first; I'll just do an open-jaw--fly into one city, fly out of the other. If I just wanted to price flights, one Matrix search would give me all of that information. Expert Flyer, however, can't even do a multi-city search. I have to first search one-way SNA to Bogota, then one way Cartagena to SNA, then one-way SNA to Cartagena, then one-way Cartagena to SNA....and I can only search for one airline at a time. It's actually EASIER to find award availability on United's or American's or Delta's site than it is through Expert Flyer.
(2) Max of +/- 3 days. On Matrix, and on most of the airlines' websites, you can scan award availability/pricing over the course of a month. Expert Flyer only allows you to search for a max of +/- 3 days....basically a week's worth of flights. For my Colombia trip, that means I not only had to do the four separate searches listed above, I had to multiply that by four -- one for each week in February.
(3) Alerts. The "alert me when award availability opens up" function is so limited it's also laughable. What would be useful is just to be able to give it a city pair, and have it alert you whenever new saver awards open up for that routing. Instead, you have to save an alert for every individual *segment* of every flight, for every day. Another flight I'm looking for is LAX-->JFK in the fall, on either Delta or American. Delta and American each have something like 6-7 non-stops to JFK every day. So, to check award availability for (ex
November, I have to set up (a) a separate alert for each individual Delta LAX->JFK flight on Nov. 1; (b) a separate alert for each individual AA LAX->JFK flight on Nov. 1; (c) a separate alert for each individual Delta LAX->JFK flight on Nov. *2*; (d) a separate alert for each individual AA LAX->JFK flight on Nov. *2*; (e) etc., etc. Even Premium members only get 30 alerts; which means that at best, I could cover the first four days of November.
Am I just trying to use Expert Flyer for the wrong purposes? It seems like it's only really useful to check award availability on a couple of specific flights at a time, and that's just not worth $120/year, it seems.