Bogeygolfer2000

Hi AAers,

I know that we can look up the seat availability for any flight using https://www.aa.com/seatmap/viewSeatsAccess.do. However (I'm lazy ) , so is there away that I can link to seat availability for a certain flight?

Something like:

So if I'm flying on April 15 on flight 12 from BOS to LAX, the url would be like:

http://<<somurl.com>>,151,apr,15,bos,lax

I want to bookmark my future flights so that I can quickly check seat availability.

Thanks,
JR

ckpeter

Since the AA site uses form-based submission, I don't think there is any way to do a URL-based bookmark.

What I usually do is to use either kayak.com and ITA to do a search. Once I have a search in the history, it's an easy matter of clicking that to re-search for all flights for that day. For specificity, I sometimes put in advanced routing code and departure time restriction to narrow the flight results.

Also, if you are looking for a specific flight pair, YAPTA has a price tracking feature that you can use to track price changes on a flight pair. In particular, this also gives you the ability to click on that flight and launch a search quickly.

beerup

Also, if you subscribe to ExpertFlyer, you can save seatmap searches for easy access in the future.

paulmcgrath

I quickly coded this up - http://thisispaul.com/aaseats/

Fill out the form, submit it and links to the seat map are generated.

Hotel_junkie

That's impressive! ^

Bogeygolfer2000

This is perfect!

paulmcgrath

Glad it's useful! Would it be better to just put in the flight number, origin and destination and be displayed with a calendar style results page allowing you to look at seat maps for different dates instead of submitting the form for a different date?

dayone

For my purposes, yes.

JDiver

Nice, Paul!^

Thanks for sharing!

bedelman

Paul: very clever!

But is there actually a need for an intermediate page? I think the links can be customized directly in the URL. Example:

http://www.aa.com/seatmap/viewSeatsS...ngPathStateId=

Full URL modified so FT doesn't truncate the display: If you want to change to a different date, just replace the departureMonth=05 and departureDay=02 parameters accordingly. Same for varying flight number, cities, and cabin. Of course Paul puts a nice user interface on this, but I think JR's basic request doesn't require an intermediate page.

sdsearch

Also, assuming you're elite, you need to be logged in, or else a whole bunch seats that are available to you will show up as unavailable, at least at aa.com. (Sites like ExpertFlyer will make clear which Premium Seats are available but Preimium and which seats are occupied versus blocked, but aa.com won't, which is why you won't see an accurate/useful seat map for an elite without being logged in.)

"At any time" means you might not be logged in when you go to pull it up (unless you have some other automated tool keeping you logged in "all the time"), which means you might need to have this automated look-up gizmo first log you in, and only then do the lookup. (Which means it's not as simple as just one URL necessarily.)

kvez

This is great. Thanks for sharing.

dmsdfw

Actually, you don't need to be logged in but the site must know who you are. You can easily tell from the home page since it should show your name and status at the top.

mvoight

What is the benefit of using that link instead of simply going to: http://www.aa.com/seatmap/viewSeatsAccess.do?from=Nav

paulmcgrath

It's only a small script guys. No need to use it if you don't see it beneficial! Looking at the query stats it appears to be popular.

A frame to AA.com could be used on the results page to allow you to log in before clicking the links to the map and seeing the available elite-only seats.

The specific seat map page can be bookmarked for future reference.