Expert Flyer vs Air NZ availability
 

Out of interest has anybody ever come across a scenario where Expert Flyer is showing A class availability but Air NZ call centre insist there is none?

Found KMS to be accurate previously (then I stopped and just booked R), never tried Expert Flyer buy maybe the subforum can help?

There can be many factors, including Point of Sale, married segments, and most importantly making sure there is a valid published A fare to go with the A inventory. If you need more help post here or email us with the details.

Long time subsciber to ExpertFlyer.

recently looking to change flight dates for one segment of ICN-BKK-AKL. I noted that the revised date BKK-AKL was showing C2D2J0 and the (now) same date ICN-BKK was wide open.

However, ICN-BKK-AKL showed C2D1 which I thought was odd, but was reflected on THAI's website.

This is normal - there is no guarantee than A-B-C inventory is simply the set intersection of A-B and B-C.

I know. I was amplifying ExpertFlyer Voice with an example.

I understand all of those reasons.

To add some more information to this - A class is both a revenue class for Premium Economy and also used as upgrade class to Premium Economy.

Being able to book an A class ticket from the NZ website is a guaranteed way of seeing whether there is A class. If so upgrades for Airpoints Elite customers upgrades to Premium Economy can clear immediately.

When sold as a paid fare class A is a promo class for Premium Economy and is not sold during the peak Xmas period as you can see from the NZ fare schedule -

07OCT - 15DEC ALSVAM 2000 A
20JAN - 06OCT AHSVAM 2050 A
01JAN-31DEC OHSVAM 2250 O
EHSVAM 2550 E
UHFXAM 2950 U

When I look at a specific flight on EF however I see A7 availability for a flight during this period yet the NZ call centre insists there is no availability in their system.

I booked flights to the US a few months ago and cleared my upgrade using EF and seeing A availability during this period. A friend has now booked the same flights and I have lodged an APD upgrade for him. I rang to link the bookings so I could get his upgrade cleared immediately on the return flight (which is something NZ will do) but was told there is no availability.

I'm really just wondering if it's a case of NZ telling me a lie about availability or if there is something to do with availability that I don't understand.

Class availability can change day to day or even during the day.

It's shown A7 for weeks and was still showing it yesterday.

Like you said above, my experience has been to only rely on A class being available when doing a dummy booking from the New Zealand website.

Expert flyer or other booking search engines have routinely shown A class and upon ringing, up, there were none available. I managed to "find" these A class fares by dummy booking on the same flight I was looking at, but originating in the US.