gtu2004

I've never understood the use of these software and hope that someone can help me out.

A lot of award bookings involve using an alliance partner's miles to book on another partner's flight (e.g. using AA miles to book on Cathay). While this can sometimes be done for certain partners' sites for OneWorld and *Alliance, I find it exponentially harder to find this information for Skyteam redemptions.

Can Expertflyer see availability that a partner (i.e. AirFrance) releases to frequent flyers of other partners (i.e. using Delta miles) and not only their own (AirFrance) frequent flyers?

ExpertFlyer Voice

As it so happens the Air France award inventory shown on ExpertFlyer for Air France is bookable by SkyMiles members. The expanded inventory for Air France flyers is only shown on the Air France website.

However that case aside, more often than not, the same award inventory is made available to partner airlines.

gtu2004

Thanks for the response. And your last part on "more often then(sic) not" is exactly what I'm trying to get at. How would we know for sure? In case of "then not", if you call in to redeem Delta miles on say, Korean Air or Tahiti Air, and with Delta agents being often lazy on top of being downright incompetent, they may say that a specific "Korean Air flight is not bookable using Delta miles", but we will have no way to know if it is true. We can HUACA but then that will increase the effort to redeem and sort of reduce the usefulness of the tool.

So my question is still: Can Expertflyer/KMV Tool/any other tools see availability that a partner (i.e. AirFrance) releases to frequent flyers of other partners (i.e. using Delta miles) and not only their own (AirFrance) frequent flyers?

ExpertFlyer Voice

Experience. Your question assumes the partner inventory is always different, which it is usually not. If you know who the exceptions are (such as Flying Blue, Miles & More) which actually make more inventory available to their own flyers then you're ok. Since it appears you fly Skyteam, then you know now that ExpertFlyer shows partner level inventory for AF, which is what you need to look at. If there are caveats for certain airlines, they are labeled at the top of the Award & Upgrade results page.

smilee

I should probably post this with Expertflyer but to lazy to find their thread - and this is possibly just a short glitch.

I noticed that AA's inventory and Expertflyer are not matching.

For example I just looked up JFK-LHR (non-stop availability) Expertflyer was listing R2 J2 and R0 J0 on the non-stop flight. If I go to AA.com, AA is willing to sell (2 seats left) on the R0 J0 flights. It lists the availability as - 2 left even though EF says none, and it also lists the inventory as "R" or "J" respectively.

Also when I put in expertflyer and search for fares, if I put say AA, DL, UA the fares only list for DL and UA --> NO AA fares will show up. If I just put in AA, all of the AA fares show up.

Both odd and I don't see anyone else here mentioning this.

Sixth Freedom

Could it be a point of sale difference?

hillrider

Or the AA board.

I struggle to find anything in your post that relates to BA.

Moderator -- please lock this thread!

Oxon Flyer

I'll move this thread over to AA, where it should be more at home.

O F BA mod

ExpertFlyer Voice

We didn't see any email sent to [email protected] with this issue so you must not be seeing it anymore. You didn't include any specific date, search, or flight information so we can't duplicate what you are seeing.

If you would like us to help you with your search, please send us an email with the specific information about the search, not post on FT, thanks.

JDiver

We have moved your query to the proper Forum - Travel Tools, and the proper / best thread (ExpertFlyer.com Help Desk Thread).

JDiver
senior moderator

SFOPhD

When I search for both AA A and C classes (upgrades), some flights show C even if C=0, but some don't show C at all. In the example below, both AA 78 and 80 are three-class 777s, but C does not show up on 80. Anyone know why this happens? Should I just presume that C=0 in these cases?



Edit: Nevermind, just found the answer to my own question:
"Sometimes American will return just two flights where the requested award seat availability is zero on both flights, even when there are later non-stop/direct flights scheduled. This is American's way of indicating that none of the later flights have available inventory for the request class either."

howtofreetravel

Can you explain how to setup an alert for delta for a low award ticket? (coach or business)

ExpertFlyer Voice

When you do the Award & Upgrade search you'll note that only upgrade classes are listed for Delta. DL award classes are unavailable as they are only found on Delta.com. As such you unfortunately cannot create an alert for them.

steve031372

Hi
Im new to this site and to ExpertFlyer.com so please bear with me.
I need some help understanding how to use Expertflyer.com.
I matched up a flight leaving from Manchester to Chicago with flight availability and fare information. Under the fare bucket NKXUKJB there were 4 available seats. When I phoned American Airlines to enquire about the fare I was told there was non available and the Fare basis code was to long. Am I looking at this the wrong way?

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards Steve

ExpertFlyer Voice

Hi Steve, physical seat availability has nothing to do with specific fare availability, you have to look at the fare class availability for the flight via the Flight Availability search. Please see our EduGuide for help in determining if fares are available on specific flights: http://www.expertflyer.com/edu-guide.pdf