I'm having troubles with phantom award availability.

Setting E/F to search for DFW-HKG on AA125 with American Airlines in T or U on Dec 31 returns four of each.

These are not available on AA.com.

ExpertFlyer is correct, AA.com uses cached data, EF uses data straight from the AA host that isn't cached. You can call an AAgent and they will see the same data as EF shows.

Thanks ... I'll give it a go ...

I had alerts set and many of them triggered one after the other ...

Other than that, about how long does it take for the AA.com cache to refresh?

Of course, now I go back and look again on E/F, the awards are no longer showing ...

It looks like there was some issue yesterday with AA's system. Please email us directly if you encounter any other issues.

9 Jul 2018 EF 7 notices of "U" availability - NOT! (Follow link)
 

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.