avermat

Hello AY Forum!

It's 2 months until the big leap into world of Avios. Inspired by the discussion in the other thread I started a little weekend project. So far I have working barebones proof of concept for Avios calculator / comparing service. It will accept input from Matrix ITA or AY eticket fare calculation. Then it will calculate miles for each leg and distribute accrued Avios based on the great explanation by @ranskis. In the future there would be calculation for crediting into other Avios FFP's. Manual data input is on the to-do list.

Current test version is available without any warranty here:
https://avios-calculator.copter.fi/

Few things to note:
- so far only AY fares calculate Avios
- non € departure cities use estimated Rate of Exchange to calculate fare in Euros
- Fare calculation will fail if it has components not configured in to the parser (eg. global routing indicators or mileage principle) - these will be fixed as they appear
- distances for legs are calculated using real coordinates and may vary little from credited miles

Is this something this forum needs? What calculations / information should be available? What other input data sources should be configured? Feel free to DM me if you have suggestions or need help using the tool.

avermat

This post is reserved for future update log.

FFlash

Quite ambitious hobbyweekend u have had sir, I bet no lonkero was tapped until u got the first version ready😅

a_k

I recently did an XXX-HEL-LHR-Africa return. 45k AY points. This calculator (which I trust) suggests 3500 Avios. I'm not an expert, but that is grim reading as a comparison.

avermat

There is something I need help with. How would the Avios be calculated in following ticket? How do I know if it's AY ticket or QF ticket? Same goes for fare calculations that combine eg. AY on outbound and AA on inbound.

Thanks to whoever posted it from ITA Matrix. Lots of work to be done to escape the AY only box.

I understand there is a lot of trust involved. Kind of I failed that already as the AY tier multiplier was applied only to the first fare component of a ticket - oops! In your case it is very easy to confirm the calculation: From the Finnair eticket receipt take the line Fare and multiply it by 6 to get AY Basic accrual. Cheapest tickets have very unproportional fare per grand total compared to more expensive tickets. Therefore yield tanks rapidly when moving from corporate priced tickets to something generic traveller thinks of a good deal.

This is what being stuck in Turku for a weekend does.

Clarity_

Nice work! Calculating avios under AYs new earning system is more complicated than I imagined

Jainzar

Looking how LH and BA define the value of the fare, base fare plus airline-levied surcharges (i.e. mainly YQ), I‘d be not surprised to see it calculated the same way at AY. YQ is just an imaginary fee created by the airlines.

intuition

As of now, YQ looks like it is not quailfied for earnings based on this explanation provided by Finnair. However YR would.
Based on example flight HEL-HND where only the YR part is shown as "Extra fee", and YQ is not.

(However, there is an anomaly, because the YQ is not present at all in the Finnair "fare breakdown", and the total price on finnair.com is exactly those 15€ lower than the price matrix sees. finnair.com for some reason misses/removes the YQ from what seems to be a published fare. Bug or feature, it just means this example is inconclusive how YQ is defined in regards to earning )

avermat

None of my recent revenue tickets include YQ or YR in the receipt. It's always just the fare and the various charges, adding up to the grand total. Does anyone have recent tickets with those marked in the receipt and could send me snippets of the fare breakdown? I'd be very grateful if I could get more eticket data to work with.

Calculating fares with YQ and YR included is of course very trivial. What gets tricky is how to guide users to find them and reliably include in their input. Adding a simple manual input might be an option. Forwarding any confirmation emails is totally off the table - I don't want to possess any names, PNR's or ticket numbers.

avermat

Short and dark days left me with some time for further development.

What still does not work:
- Non EUR currencies (as a temporary workaround it is possible to append "?ROE=[rate]" in the ticket url to override the default guesstimate. It's more or less the current USD to EUR ratio. I need to think how to deal with this world with multiple different currencies.)
- Non AY tickets - I didn't load any spend tables for other airlines as AY hasn't published theirs yet
- Non EUR spend based tickets *points at the first point on this list*

What's new:
- Support for other programs (technically could expand beyond Avios)
- More detailed view of imported ticket
- Editing underlaying fare components, fare classes, etc.
- Manual ticket builder - a bit unpolished for now

To do short term:
- Figure out best way to handle currency conversion (problem is it's not only NUC to EUR but also to GBP and in future possibly others)
- Load rest of accrual tables into system
- Possibility to import YQ and YR from AY receipt with copy paste

At this point I want to give many thanks to everyone who tested the calculator so far. I've encountered so many new variations of different fare calculation combinations it's almost overwhelming. I'm sure next we'll dive into the deep end of codeshares and strange ticketing combinations.

Freshest version of the calculator is found at the same address. Please send me DM or email without hesitation. It all helps!
https://avios-calculator.copter.fi/