hhmorgan

I was looking at the Expert Flyer's website. When you review the airlines that you can get reward booking info - it does not include Continental.

United is listed but not Continental.

I was thinking of a trial during my upcoming trip to track how the Businessfirst Upgrade bucket opens and how quickly (or at all) ExpertFlyer would send an email/alert.

My flight awaiting upgrade is 12 Nov TLV-EWR 11:15am

Question - Does Expertflyer allow tracking/notification of this fare basis? What impact will there likely be from the merger into United?

J.Edward

Yes, EF does allow an auto email based on fare basis. The catch is that for awards you must make sure EF works with the airline you want to monitor (in the case of a CO award you'd be out of luck) and this can be quite useful for some partners (i.e. EK.)

Flyer_70

It's been my experience that the notification function is sketchy, at best. Out of 10 alerts, I might have gotten one - and that was way after the fact. I believe EF does periodic sweeps, not a real-time email when the event occurs. So it is possible it could get missed. Nice in theory though...

J.Edward

EF does go in sweeps but FWIW I've found they're EK info to be spot on.

Flyer_70

Don't get me wrong - I love EF in every way except for that (no) Notification feature. It just doesn't work that well. EF is great for everything else though. Saved my butt more than a few times.

ijgordon

Keep in mind that often waitlists are cleared without the relevant inventory ever being publicly released. So there would be no way for ExpertFlyer to find the inventory and send out the notification. Nor would it matter, because any inventory that is made available is immediately assigned to those in the waitlist.

If you can waitlist for a reward, that will always be your best "notification." Unfortunately there are a lot of times you can't waitlist for an award, specifically for partner awards. In this case the EF notification is the next best thing. It's also often useful for monitoring paid inventory class, I've definitely used it to notify me when a cheaper booking class opens and I've saved a lot of money over the years.

For CO, it can be useful to set an alert for Z inventory if you're an elite on a B/M fare and can't confirm the upgrade at ticketing. 95%+ of the time when the Z inventory opens you'll be able to log on and confirm your upgrade. (I've never seen a case where Z>0 and you couldn't do the elite upgrade, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.) Outside of the EUA sweep, this is the ONLY semi-automated way I know of to get those types of upgrades.

Lastly, it's worth noting that while EF's methodology is, in fact, to do periodic sweeps, they do say that the frequency increases the closer to departure you get. They haven't released any more detail about their algorithm though (like the specific frequencies).