Need help on new seat availability tool
 

Hi. We are in the process of trying to develop a better useful replacement for all of the disappeared seat availability tools (Galileo, etc.). I'd like to get a comprehensive set of features that would be important to make the tool the most useful it could be. Please let me know what features you found the most important, and ones that you wish were included.

Thanks!

Being able to see award fare classes in Galileo for American Airlines was extremely valuable (Z, U, T).

Thanks for your efforts, flyaow! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/thumbsup.gif

For me, Galileo was almost perfect, so try to replicate it as much as possible. When I used your seat availablity interface earlier today, it worked fairly well, except that it refused to display any flights that were ostensibly sold out (e.g. AA's OGG-LAX redeye on 1/3/04), much less show the fare buckets for those flights. Personally, I'd still like to see those flights and their information even if is a bunch of zeros across the board. Also, if possible, it would be neat to allow specific searches by particular fare bucket availability. For example, if I could queue up all the flights between IAH and SFO with T fare seat availability on CO on a specific day, that would be excellent. So keep up the good work, and thanks for entertaining our suggestions!

[This message has been edited by cAAl (edited Nov 24, 2003).]

The two suggestions already cover what I'd like to see. Thanks!

The seat maps (e.g., of the type that used to be available on www.airtravel.tk from www.checkmytrip.com) were also extremely useful.

And thanks for your help in trying to fill this "void."

I completely agree with cAAl here. The one thing I didn't like about Aeroplan's Galileo access was that it seemed to display a limited number of non-stop flights only. So if I was looking at a city-pair with a lot of non-stops flights I sometimes couldn't see the late-afternoon or evening nonstops.

Maybe this could be fixed by adding the possibility to check not only for the date but for a specific time?

andy

Thank you very much for your efford!

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif

I liked the www.aeroplan.de tool exept it would have been usefull to really see ALL flights.

Other have already mentioned the importent facts.

------------------
Viele Grüße

Oliver

Thanks indeed for your efforts http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif I miss Galileo terribly http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/frown.gif

I'd like to see the segment and total distances displayed - always useful for mileage runs, or planning how best to requalify.

Also (and this is probably pushing it) I'd love to see alternative codes for the metal - a list of all the code shares on a given flight? Probably not easy, as this is a reservations based tool. But we can dream...

Best of luck with this project.

Hi all. Thanks for your comments so far!

Regarding davidl's comment about seatmaps, the amex tool ( flyaow.com/class.htm ) already can display seatmaps (although it is a pain to get them). You have to select the actual flight you want, and pretend you are going to book a ticket. At the final confirmation screen it gives you the option to "select seats" and that pulls up a seat map for the class of service you were "booking." It is definitely not a good method, but it does work for many flights.

I will take all of your comments, and any others that come and try to get this project completed. (In the process of securing data right now.) http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Cheers!


[This message has been edited by flyaow (edited Nov 25, 2003).]

Thanks. I hadn't known that.

I don't think it matters whether Galileo or Sabre is the source. What matters is ability to request specific fare classes... in particular those used for award classes (which may require "direct connect" feature).

On AA we want to see A, C, T, U, X, Z
On UA we want to see R, X, O, I, N, E
Don't know about DL, CO, NW or others.

UA never worked on aeroplan's Galileo tool, but is visible through UA web site if you try and book an award ticket in expert mode (only if availability for the award you want is not zero)

Thanks, DAK

One possible source of data is Sabre Web Services. see http://webservices.sabre.com
There would presumably be a charge to access the information.

DAK

Thanks for the tips on the various fare buckets that are important. I will feed that into the process. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Regarding the UAL availabilities we do have an "expert mode" United tool that doesn't require logging in or a password and is basically a front end to the UA ITN system. It is available at: flyaow.com/class.htm

Cheers!

More specifically (all flights to be available) - is there any way you can make it return BA flights (within the AMEX tool)?

Hi. Can you be a bit more specific about which flights are not being returned on BA?

Thanks!

Good luck with this great task. To add some more complication to the matter, it would also be great to see both I and X class on NZ and OS (which was possible with the aeroplan tool) and maybe also U and X on QF (where U is still possible on AMEX ITN but X was never an option AFAIK). Thanks for all the effort you put into this...

Same seatmap functions on ANA website, but you only need the cities and dates...no need to make up a booking, so it saves a little time...

Deleted

Galileo previously only seemed to show a limited number of fare classes (starting from most expensive) and would only show additional fare classes if one specified the fare bucket they wanted to look at. It would be nice to see *all* fare buckets, no matter how many there are, without specifying them.

Here is a feature for noobies like me: A list that defines what each fare bucket means/represents. I've yet to find a list that defines what each of the codes represent on each of the airlines. It would be nice to have some sort of guide to go along with it, it would make a tool like this much more accessible to the less-informed.

If you do a search on the particular airline forum you should be able to find what you are looking for. Here is a thread by 777Brit that pertains to the award codes in the AAdvantage program:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum71/HTML/017604.html

Also, this site contains some links to further explanations as well (check the bottom of the page):

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/...ravel/galileo/


[This message has been edited by eagle92 (edited Nov 25, 2003).]

Well the Amex ITN tool will never return BA flights between two points (eg JFK-LHR) (not even if you select the airline in the list). Something to do with BA and AMEX animosity....

Keep in mind that several people (myself included) have reported on this forum that AA's T class (PlanAAhead coach awards) was not displayed correctly by Galileo. In other words, AA reservations would say the flight is unavailable for coach award, but Galileo would show T availability for several days or weeks. It would be great if your new tool showed correct availability for award classes.

Anyway, can't wait for you to finish, thanks!

Interesting. I wasn't aware of this. I played around with it a bit and confirmed that I can't get the AMEX tool to display any BA flights. But there is some short term good news on this one - the United Tool ( flyaow.com/classual.htm ) seems to work to display most BA flights correctly. If you select 20 flights to be returned on a BA route (I just tried JFK-LHR per your suggestion) you get some united flights returned first, but further down the list all of the BA flights seem to be there. If you narrow down the time to more specific flights you should be able to get whichever one you want.

Again, not a perfect solution, but a good temporary work-around at least. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Cheers!

Well my suggestion is keep it simple.

I would ideally like my old EaasySabre back. Nothing fancy, just a text display of the flights and fare buckets. If a flight is sold out then blanks will do. Sometimes knowing flights are sold out is valuable in planning. All the fancy fare finders and graphics just get in the way to me.

BTW, flyaow, thanks for having something we can currently use. It's appreciated http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/thumbsup.gif

Great to know - thanks flyaow.

And all power to you for coming up with something even better.

Unless you tap into all three of the major CRS systems, you will not get 100% up to date information. You will only get up to date information on the airlines that use the host CRS system as their primary source.

Hear hear! For me, the single biggest need is to be able to see all the flights on a single day on a single route on all the airlines that fly it directly. The old Galileo interface sometimes struggled with really busy routes (something like JFK - LAX iirc).

Seatmap.com was merely an interface into www.checkmytrip.com I'm sure it's possible for someone else to do the same ..

Have you tried www.itasoftware.com ? It doesn't give the fare buckets, but it does show (all?) the flights and fares.

Simon

Edited to fix URL

[This message has been edited by Live2Fly (edited Nov 28, 2003).]

[This message has been edited by Live2Fly (edited Nov 28, 2003).]

[This message has been edited by Live2Fly (edited Nov 28, 2003).]

For an example of how flight schedules should be displayed, be sure to select "advanced options" and "flight chooser (java)" on itasoftware's trip planner.

A truely amazing user interface. Note... only works with Microsoft's Java, not with newer Sun Java's.

DAK