Originally Posted by
jridge
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.
We are looking into making alerts non-flight specific, however we are waiting for our primary information source to be able to show a full days worth of flights in one result set. Without that it becomes complicated and costly to ensure we can alert on any and all flights for a given day. Unfortunately many of our limitations are due to the limitations of the underlying data sources, this is still 60 year old travel tech we are working with.
