AA Flyer

Your thoughts. This morning, around 2 a.m (EST). I received multiple alerts (7) for Mile saver availability (U - biz class to /from Europe) for multiple flights on AA, on August 9th and August 26th. (my wife and I have flights but we are trying to get, better connections/ itineraries.)

I called American at 5:30 a.m. EST, to try to switch a current reservation, from Anytime to Milesaver (U.) I was told U was not available. I checked with EF, and sure shooting none of the alerts I received had any U availability.

So my question: is it possible that all those flights and all those mile saver award tickets (about 10 "U" were available according to the notices I got) we're taken by customers between 2 a.m. and 5:30 a.m.? I suppose it's possible but since I got alerts, on 7 different flights, and none were available at 5:30 a.m. I thought I put this out there for discussion.

Thanks for any insights you might have.

JJeffrey

Of course not, most likely a glitch of some sort, either on ExpertFlyer's or AA's end. Either the EF search had a glitch that was returning false positives, or AA could have inadvertently released U space on a number of flights during an overnight schedule/fare update that it didn't mean to, which was corrected by the time you called. Who knows.

dkc192

IMHO it's more likely that U got released and then taken away by RM overlords.

daron4000

Interesting. I set up a C alert yesterday for a flight in Sept and got a notification 1 seat was available at 2am. By the time I woke up it was gone. Wonder if a glitch although this flight did have 1 C seat two days ago which disappeared before I was able to ticket so could also just be RM's puppet strings.

beachfan

SeeBuyFly

Same as a mistake fare, quickly fixed but not before EF detected it.

Uncle Nonny

Your 2am-5:30am is someone else's 7am-10:30am.

enpremiere

A wise sensAA once said "one booked U award is better than seven EF alerts."

That sensei probably flys WN.

Ehough EF is real-time, the alerts might have been muddled by married segment restrictions of some sort (speculation) or "templates" being loaded and quickly removed. There is a thread for this too although nothing recently describing that exact behavior.

SeeBuyFly

I've not gotten EF alerts in "real time". Once I found a seat assignment available for which I had an alert set. The alert never came because I took the seat.

golfingboy

My understanding and experience is the same as yours. EF sweeps data at specific intervals (i.e. not every couple of minutes) so its not real time.

Something for all of us to keep in mind to do some random manual spot checks as we get closer to departure date both on AA.com and on EF.

JDiver

@ExpertFlyer Voice to call their attention to this AA related issue.

One can also email: [email protected]

AA Flyer

I just sent an email to EF

JJeffrey

I can pretty much guarantee you that EF will just say "we just report the data given to us from AA's reservations system" be it right, wrong, or indifferent...

aztimm

I had a C alert set up for a few months, for DFW-AMS, for Sep travel. So long that I had forgotten about it, until I got an alert this morning. Of course by the time I looked, the seat was gone.


Similar to SeeBuyFly's experience... when I was actively seeking biz (or F) award space to Australia a few months ago, I had a bunch of awards set. But I was also actively running a bunch of queries. One morning I found 2 biz seats on SFO-MEL, went to the AA site and snagged them. About an hour later I got an alert, but they were gone by then, as I had taken them

Lavezzi

I had an alert come through this morning for two Business AAnytime travel awards next Monday. They are currently showing J0 for all four direct flights out next week so I find it hard to believe this was a genuine alert.