Hi. I'm using the trial version of EF and I'm having a problem with DL info.

I'm searching for award availability ATL-BOS during the months of December and January. On the DL site award calendar, almost the both months are entirely green with low award of 25K points seats. When I use sample dates of 12/17 with return 1/15, I have a wide choice of flights options.

However when I input this information to EF, and in the Fare Class "N", and hit Search, EF comes back telling me there is no availability. But there is, and plenty of it--I see it staring back at me from the DL site.

Am I doing something wrong? Is DL opaque with info? Or are there limitations with EF and/or DL?

Just curious: did you get the alerts via email or SMS? If email, can you do a 'view full headers' and see the timestamp of the lowest-down 'Received:' header field in each of the two alerts? I'm wondering if the three-hour delay was because each of your two alerts checked at different times, or if they checked together but there was a delay in getting the notice to you.

If you look on the Award & Upgrade search tool you'll see that we don't support DL award inventory, just upgrade inventory.

All alerts operate on their own schedule, so most likely the former.

Thanks--both the spouse and I are becoming familiar and neither of us noticed that. Guess we need to clean our glasses.

Interesting implementation choice. Given that each query presumably costs you something, I'd have guessed that you'd have a table of flights to query (generated from the table of individual queries), so you'd only need to query each flight once no matter how many queries were set for it. (Just another example of how easy it is to be quite wrong when making guesses about things from the outside :))

Help! Expertflyer is inaccurate?
 

I just paid for a pro expert flyer subscription and is in the process of testing it out. I encountered the following problem. I'm trying to book a flight from EWR-PEK roundtrip and EF showed availability in K class for both outbound and return flights. When I go to ITA the cheapest tickets it could find for the exact same flight is in W class, which is 150% more expensive. How could EF show K9 (meaning more than 9 seats available in K class) and ITA not find any of them? I have attached the screenshots, check out UA 88 on 2/2.


https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-img-88/ExpertFlyer.png
https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-img-88/ITA-Matrix.png

[Deleted as moot after thread moved to this forum. O V 1K.]

Is there a valid fare in K class for 2/2/13?

A quick look at the UA fares for EWR-PEK (in Expertflyer) seems to indicate that all K fares require midweek travel.

So there is availability in K class, but no fare that is valid.

When searching for availability in a particular award class (T on AA, for example) some flights don't even appear, whereas others appear with an inventory of 0. Adding more classes, I get stuff like this for one flight:

F7 Z1 Y7 T0

And this for others:

F7 Z2 Y7

What's the difference between T0 and T not appear at all?

Assuming you are using the Award and Upgrade tool and not the the Flight Availability tool, when a route for a given date has no availability for a given class later than two flights that are zero then the GDS will no longer return any availability for that route for the requested class.

For instance, take a route with many flights on a given day, say DFW-LGA on AA. Maybe the first two flights have T availability and that inventory will be shown. If all remaining flights for that day have no T inventory then the GDS will show the next two flights as T0 and show nothing for T for the remaining flights that day.

Yes, i am referring to the Award and Upgrade tool.

I'm curious why they would do it that way. What if I want to see later flights and set an alert for one of them?

Hi djibouti, as noted on the Help for the Award & Upgrade results page under the AA section:


So the later flights are T0 and you can see that for yourself by advancing the time of day of the search. You can easily create alerts for later flights by either a) creating the alert via the Flight Availability results, b) adding an "Other" fare class to the Award search, such as Y, that will always be returned for a flight, thereby making the later flights show in the results, or c) using the Create New Flight Alert page if you know the flight number.

Why do they do it that way? The host systems are designed to return results that are useful and you can't sell tickets with no inventory available, so if there are too many 0 inventory flights in a row they are skipped.

Thank you for the explanation and the work-around suggestion.

I believe "R" is the class code for coach-business class upgrades on a domestic 3-class flights. That code doesn't appear at all for tonight's flights--for example, AA 18 SFO-JFK, 11/29/12 10:30 PM.

Does that mean that there's no availability for coach to business upgrades, or am I misunderstanding something?

Thanks!