legalalien

I've been unable to search for United award space over the last few days. Queries return with an error message:

I: An error has occurred while communicating with the airline reservation system. The support team has been notified of this problem. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Known issue?

ExpertFlyer Voice

Not at all, we just tried and it works fine. You should email us directly with your specific example.

linglingfool

Is that documented anywhere?

ExpertFlyer Voice

It is shown in response to a search in that window.

altalk08

Hi, until yesterday Expertflyer showed some availability of 9 nearly across the board in a few AC flights departing this Thursday, 21 February. Today many of these 9s have changed to 3s or 4s. How is this possible? Surely there weren't that many bookings within the last 12 hours or so?

Globaliser

Availability isn't linear; availability displays don't represent the equivalent of how many tins of baked beans of various flavours are sitting on the supermarket shelf.

You could in theory book one seat in the lowest available class and immediately see availability numbers plummet across many different booking classes, depending on the airline's algorithms and revenue management strategies, and how your one single booking has changed the actual commercial performance of that flight to date when compared to the predicted / theoretical commercial performance.

SouthernCross

ExpertFlyer Voice

You're going to wait for the query to run no matter what, as we don't know what the results are until we actually see the results. But we will consider that option for a future improvement. The reason we do that is so that you can then create Flight Alerts for the flights that currently don't have inventory.

pilot007

Is it possible to search for availability on long connections in EF? I'm searching for SFO-LHR via YYZ, and looking for a 23h connection. It seems that most of the results show flights only for a connection on the same date. I can't manage to bring up AC 756 (SFO-YYZ, arriving 19:58) followed by a departure on AC 856 (YYZ-LHR, departing +1 at 19:35). I can easily find this on ITA Matrix and also book with my TA, but I can't seem to pull up availability in EF with long connections and married segments.

Stryker1112

How good is Expert Flyer in finding chap fares? I've been diligently working with the program, and feel like I am soaking a lot up. I was searching for low cost fares DFW-CDG, saw the list and confirmed it was active, but when I called the airline and gave them that particular code, they said their system wasn't showing it. Is there a good tutorial for fare searches as opposed to award searches?

Thanks

Globaliser

Have you tried looking for flights on which the relevant booking class is available, and pricing the itinerary to see whether not the fare is valid for the itinerary? There are many reasons why a fare that is published and visible on EF cannot be used for a specific trip.

ExpertFlyer Voice

The reservation systems will return the best flight options first. You may try to force a particular connection to show by specifying connection citie(s), an airline, or a departure time of day.

pilot007

I've tried this, but I cannot for the life of me get it to show the itinerary that I described above. Would it be possible to add a bit more control over the flight options returned?

Stryker1112

Yes, unless I am doing this wrong which is a real possibility. I see this:QHN5T1B5AAB Round-Trip529.00(USD)E12/13/1912/23/19V / 6M50




And on flights that day:


AA 480DFW
12/20/19 5:00 PMCDG
12/21/19 9:05 AM788
Daily
85% / 29mJ7 R7 D7 I0 W7 P0 Y7 B7 H7 K7 M7 L7
G0 V7 S7 N7 Q0 O0



So there are B tickets available, correct?

Globaliser

A quick play on ITA suggests that it is not enough for that fare to be valid for there to be availability in B class. There must also be availability in (presumably) Q class, and there isn't. But there is availability in N class. That seems to be why, when I price a trip with that as the outbound flight and a randomly picked flight back on 27 December, ITA uses NHN5T1B5 to price that part of the itinerary. If you switch off the ITA availability checker, you will indeed see NHN5T1B5 being used ot price the outbound half of the trip.

I haven't read all of the rules published on ITA, but dual inventory fares like this often don't make it clear which other classes need to be available. However, I think that in this case the above behaviour, taken together with the first letter of each fare basis, gives a reasonable basis for thinking that QHN5T1B5 requires availability in both B class and Q class, and NHN5T1B5 requires availability in both B class and N class.