Originally Posted by
linglingfool
Awardnexus does this. I find it easy enough to do on EF -- copy+paste "yyymmdd AAABBB AA", and type in the flight number you searched for into the description box for the query on the results page for that day's flights. Takes 5 seconds a flight.
I've had an EF subscription for a number of years, and I can understand where the OP is coming from.
When you do a seat alert, in a single alert you can nominate any number of specific seats to be notified about, and it is a single alert. It would be great if a similar approach could be used for fare buckets across flights. You're right that it doesn't take *that* long to set up for AA flights (but QF flights using AA miles is not as easy). The biggest impact is that it chews through the number of alerts - looking for a business SAAver award JFK-LHR I'm using 4 alerts per direction per day (and that's excluding BA options). I'm almost always at "zero remaining".
I've assumed this is because the seat info is one query transaction for EF whereas at least on the backend they need to do multiple queries per flight for fare buckets. Obviously they need to manage their infrastructure cost - fair enough. I'm not complaining about the definition of "an alert" as it stands, just saying I can definitely see where OP is coming from.