IMH

Thank you Zorak and Globaliser.

You're right and I apologise for sowing more unrest than necessary. My troubleshooting was too hurried and I conflated two issues, which made my report less helpful than it might have been. (I use uBlock Origin and Firefox.)

One issue was inappropriate advertising. As of a few minutes ago, that one hasn't been resolved. Many of the ads I see are travel-related, but many are not (I have seen, today, more of the kind of things I posted samples of yesterday).

The other issue is the high number of third-party sites called during a typical visit to EF (around 30, including Twitter and Facebook as well as the usual array of tracking and advertising sites).

Some scripts that EF lets run on third-party servers were incompatible with the JavaScript permissions I had set, which in one case was leading to error messages and/or CAPTCHA chicanery. By relaxing those permissions a little more than I would like, i.e. by allowing EF to 'misbehave' a little, I have been able to stop the error messages.

Globaliser: The MVPS HOSTS list that you linked to is one of the filters available in uBlock Origin. If you choose to use it, as I do, it auto-updates. Easier than the way we used to manage these things, but also easier (see above...) to jump to a slightly wrong conclusion.

Zorak

FWIW I also use Ghostery in addition to ABP, for restricting trackers that aren't strictly ads, might be worth investigating.

Globaliser

I'm seeing EF consistently return "No" to all queries for award space on Comair, BA's franchisee in South Africa. There is space that is not being reported, because the availability is confirmed by the BA website.

EF used to be very accurate in relation to this award space, just like for BA mainline flights. Is there a bug, or has EF's access to this information been cut off for some other reason? There is no difficulty seeing space in cash booking classes, as one would expect.

FWIW, the relevant booking classes are U (business class) and X (economy).

ExpertFlyer Voice

Comair is not listed on the Award & Upgrade search results so it's not clear how you are searching for awards on that airline. If you choose "British Airways" it will only return BA coded flights in the Award search. If you would like us to investigate further please email us the specifics of your search/flight, thanks.

Globaliser

It's a franchisee, so they are all BA-coded flights (and they always have been), and it is the BA search that used to bring up these results. And I'm now getting the same universally negative (including falsely negative) results on every single route and every single day that I've now tested this on across the whole of the next 354 days, particularly on JNB-CPT, JNB-DUR and their reciprocals.

If you need a specific example, try 2 December 2018, CPT-JNB. From ba.com, I know that there are award seats on the following flights:
BA6428 U9 X3
BA6406 U7
BA6409 U9
BA6422 U4

EF is returning nothing on every flight across the entire day.

I've been happily using EF for long enough to recognise that this is a systemic change in behaviour, hence my framing of my question in the way I did. EF used to report availability on these Comair flights with the same excellent accuracy as for BA mainline flights. So any assistance would be welcome; in addition, I hope this post will provide comfort to others who are seeing the same problem that there does seem to be some problem here.

ExpertFlyer Voice

It looks like the issue is with BA publishing the flights, as the QF award search, for example, returns an error for that search. When the publishing of the flights is fixed, then ExpertFlyer will also reflect the fix.

Globaliser

Thank you very much - that's very helpful.

hamburglar

When searching a China Airlines award ticket for 1/1/2019, it returns this error:

There is an error in the information you entered.

Is it too far in the future?

ExpertFlyer Voice

Likely, however if you want to know for sure please email us the specifics.

mrt88

Does expertflyer support married segment logic yet for fare alerts? I wanted to keep an eye out for a specific fare bucket in AAA-BBB-CCC, this bucket is available in AAA-BBB and BBB-CCC, but not when married.

ExpertFlyer Voice

No ExpertFlyer Flight Alerts are per segment at this time.

DragonSoul

Set up my first-ever seat alerts on EF and wanted to confirm that for the Blocked Seats option, I can only select booked blocked seats, not unoccupied blocked seats. Right?

ExpertFlyer Voice

There is no such thing as a "booked blocked seat", that would just be an Occupied seat. Blocked seats are not booked, they are just blocked from assignment by a passenger until a later time.

DragonSoul

Thanks, total n00b and trying to understand this. By "booked blocked seats" I mean they were marked as blocked but have since been booked. Those I can select for a seat alert.

Anyway, is it right that I can't make an alert for selected blocked seats if I check the Include Blocked Seats option? Half the seats are marked as "blocked" on EF (with a few now marked as occupied interspersed among them), and I would like to be alerted when they will possibly be available.

Globaliser

The easiest way to think of it is this: You cannot set an alert for a seat which is currently available, only for seats which are not currently available. Selecting the "Include Blocked seats" option means "Treat blocked seats as already available", so that they are excluded from the seats which you can set for the alert.

The EF wording is confusing, but that is the way that the site seems to work.