ExpertFlyer Help Desk, Information and Updates Thread

First I commend you for the proactive notification to your users. Thank you.

Second I am pleased and reassured that AA/US are working with you to fix as I strongly suspect that certain other major U.S. carriers would not care less.

I am exec plat on AA (but will drop to plat next year) and the fact that AA have stronger support for expertflyer than DL or UA makes me more loyal to AA. This is a differentiator for AA and you should let them know that their frequent flyers appreciate this.

Thank you
DAK

Why is it that EF is treating one airport as though it were a city code?

I am trying to check availability on BA1, BA3 and codeshares of those two which operate from LCY to JFK. However the results are obscured by several flights from LHR, which are not what I want. (Or I would have written LON).

ExpertFlyer does not determine the results that are returned or the airports considered, the reservation system/airline does that and will include alternative airports if it thinks there aren't enough or any available flights to satisfy your search.

However it doesn't look like there is currently an issue showing those flights when requested for a sample date:

Results from ExpertFlyer.comIf you need help with a specific search then please email us at [email protected]

You're welcome DAK, we will pass along your note of support.

Is it possible to create flight award alert for any date as long as it matches fare class and route? (instead of specific date)

For example, whenever O availability from DEN-FRA on LH is available, I would like an alert. Is that possible?

Each Flight Alert is for a specific day/flight/class so that wouldn't be possible.

OK, thanks. Also, on your list of supported airlines I didn't see Lufthansa. Is that still up to date? Is LH not supported for award availability?

It's up to date, not all airlines share their award data with 3rd parties. In the case of LH it is only available thru an airline.

Just bought one year premium service subscription and overall I am pretty happy with it.

There is one slight disappointment though. I created some flight alerts for upgrade space availability. I found that they seem to be seriously delayed which rather reduces their effectiveness.

As a specific example, I had created one for R space reducing below 4 on AC 8, 9 Jan 2015. At T-15 days (0650am EST, Dec 25th - the point where the upgrade availability window opened) it was still showing R4 and I successfully booked an upgrade, as apparently did a few others. It dropped immediately to R1. I did not get an alert until 1202pm that day - 5 hours and 12 minutes later. If alerts are to be useful they really need to be more timely. I had experienced similar delays with other alerts but did not record the precise details.

I do appreciate that polling the database frequently for data about which alerts are set can be somewhat resource intensive but >5 hours delay is rather too much I feel.

Also, why does point of sale on Flight Availability searches include only US and UK? This seems rather nonsensical for, as an example, Canadian domestic flights.

Thanks for listening.

Hi Geoflying, welcome to ExpertFlyer. Correct the alerts are not constantly checked, as noted up thread and in our FAQ, the alerts are checked several times a day, however they are checked more and more often the closer it gets to the date/time of departure. We have to balance efficacy with cost as each search and alert check in ExpertFlyer has a cost to us. The idea behind the alerts is that we check when you don't have time to. If you are going to constantly check yourself then you could find the inventory before the next scheduled check of the alert.

The POS options are the only ones available to us as we would need a business presence in a different country to get a POS for that country. That being said, a Canada and USA POS are usually identical.

Availability throughout the European Economic Area should also be the same, as per EU law. Whether non-EU airlines abide by that I don't know.

The ITA Matrix is able to query availability from arbitrary cities, so do you really need a business presence?

The airlines give ITA (and the GDSs) the multi-POS availability because of the services that ITA provides to the airlines (such as fare shopping for their respective websites). However that doesn't mean that ITA or the GDSs can sell all POS information to 3rd parties at their discretion, that's not how they are designed to work.

Tried the mobile site on my iphone Safari browser for the first time. Seems pretty good. However I could not find a way to save a flight availability query. What am I missing?

At this time the mobile site can run previously saved queries from the full website but not save any.

Any update on this situation? Trying to plan a trip with some potential US options.