rjn21

I had my first schedule change notified by MyFlights today, post the notice its service was ending. Obviously nothing received from the carrier.

fransknorge

This is right. There was a reason why MyFlights was so successful around this part: it filled an empty niche that was in desperate need of filling. Now MyFlights is gone, this niche is empty again.

Calchas

The people who have designed the competing* products do not appear to have ever been on a plane. They seem to think your average business traveller is interested in the current weather at the destination, or what the exchange rate is, when the flight is months away.

Meanwhile if your seat has changed or the airframe has changed, no one tells you.

That I think is part of the problem.



* I use this word entirely incorrectly.

nbevan

I took a quick look at these and Kayak. They can all store itineraries based on analysis of forwarded emails (with varying degrees of accuracy and completeness). And some can monitor flight changes from one to three days before departure.

Tripit should have the capability to monitor flight changes more comprehensively, but it is not clear to me whether and how it does this, and it only seems to hold basic information about the flights.

The most promising (partial) replacement for MyFlights seems to be AwardWallet as you give it your airline login details which (in addition to enabling it to monitor your frequent flyer miles) it uses to download comprehensive flight details. I am not sure how often the flight details are monitored, but I am guessing that for this you probably need AwardWallet Pro ($30 a year)?

fransknorge

The flight details are not monitored properly on AwardWallet, only schedule change will appear when the app auto-update, which those days is not working well. AwardWallet is a tool to gather all FFP info in one place, its itineraries management part are just a toy which does not seriously compete with others.

nbevan

But is there anything better?

fransknorge

As good as MyFlights: nope.
For seat changes and equipment changes, there is not (anymore) a single app that monitors this and inform of changes.
For schedule changes more than 24 hours before travel: CheckMyTrip is OK (but not great, buggy and cluttered layout)
For schedule changes less than 24 hours before travel: TripIt, TripCase are excellent.
As I sais, MyFlights had unique capabilities. We must do like we were doing before Schofs created MyFlights.

nbevan

AwardWallet can retrieve more comprehensive flight information than the other alternatives as (rather than forwarding an email) complete reservation information can be retrieved for each new booking by clicking your frequent flyer account and then “Retrieve reservations via conf #”.

AwardWallet will notify changes to flight reservations. Here is what AwardWallet told me:

1. “We send you trips notifications if we detect significant changes to your reservations (including seat or time changes, flight delays, gate changes, upgrades). This feature is available for all our users, you don't have to be an AwardWallet Plus member to get these notifications.”
2. “Pretty much every time we update your account we will grab the reservations that are in your account, if you have a flight reservation in there and if your seat has changed we will notify you of that.” So anything that changes your frequent flyer account will initiate a check for flight changes.
3. There is also a button for each flight segment to manually update its status.
4. “We check your flights for the updates 2 days, several hours and a couple of hours before the departure.” I assume this is the same as: “We use FlightStats to monitor the whole flight (as opposed to your reservation). FlightStats can tell us if the flight is delayed or if the gate changes or any other changes happen to the flight.”

Although not as convenient for constructing and printing itineraries as Tripit, “Share” gives a link that enables a reservation to be seen in isolation.

golfmad

Awardwallet?

jonnye

So i think ExpertFlyer can do a pretty good job of this ....

Equipment Change:
"The Aircraft Change Alert form allows you to create an Aircraft Change Alert for a particular flight. An Aircraft Change Alert will periodically check the aircraft equipment code returned with the seat map of a flight to see if it has changed since the alert was created. If so, ExpertFlyer will notify you as to what the new aircraft equipment code is."

Seat Alerts:
"The Create Seat Alert form allows you to create a Seat Alert for the particular seat map cabin you are viewing. A Seat Alert will periodically check a seat map to see if the Occupied or Blocked seats you have selected have become available. If so, ExpertFlyer will notify you via email as to which seats have become Available"

Schedule Changes:
The Flight Schedule Alert form allows you to create an Flight Schedule Alert for a particular flight. A Flight Schedule Alert will periodically check the departure and arrival airport codes and departure and arrival times returned with the flight details of a flight to see if they have changed since the alert was created. If so, ExpertFlyer will notify you as to what the new flight schedule is.

As I sais, MyFlights had unique capabilities. We must do like we were doing before Schofs created MyFlights.[/QUOTE] -

Agreed!

nbevan

Thanks: corrected.

nbevan

[/QUOTE]
Agreed!, but for a frequent flyer, quite time consuming to set up (and might exceed the ExpertFlyer limits), but otherwise a foolproof solution.

rossmacd

Exactly this. With 150+ sectors per year, there is no way I'll be inputting each one for multiple alerts in EF!

armouredant

Feeding TripIt into EF would be a nice way to solve this. Also, BA97 while we’re on the subject.

fransknorge

I am a paying customer of AwardWallet for the last 5 years:
- It has never notified me of seat changes
- It has sometimes notified of schedule change, but not always
- It has never notified me of upgrades
- It has never notified me of gate changes
Currently even the FFP account monitoring is dodgy (Hilton barely works, BA not so great) and the auto-updates of account is broken (I have an open support ticket with them on this). When it was working, it was great to garden your FFP account, poor for reservations.